didja miss me?

bookends to my trip a la russe: arriving after 30 hrs travel at 1 am in st pete's, the guy who's sposed to meet me ain't there. i stoopid american girl. speak no russian. read no russian. taxi driver wants to take me for a ride. 'we go to econo hotel' and all i think is this is how people get into trouble. do i trust? have i choice? i go. it's fine. much relief. and sleep.

way home: on aeroflot (they showed da vinci code and when tom hanks proclaims at the end, 'god speed' well, in that brief but interminable utterance is all the cause you need to loathe his actorly bits). i fall asleep at the end of the long journey, before we descend, a russian lady feels the urge to get her rolling suitcase, is heavy, so are bricks, out of the overhead. slips, whacks me on the head, like a bat, it was the wheel part. i yelled out 'oh!' was i concussed? no sais.

other stuff: twas awesome in various ways, saw lots, ate lots—cheese, pickled yumminess of various sort (garlic cloves! cabbage! peppers! i think pickled things have now exceeded chocolate in terms of desirability). moscow was huge and makes nyc seem tiny...but also that's because of course the language is unintelligible to me and ignorant american like me did not learn alphabet before arriving. and the buildings—stalin's monuments are straight out of a batman gotham scary comic book—huge, muscular, formidable, forbidding, speckled around the city's ring road like mythic beasts scaring off the unhardy. the smaller streets have that mittel-europe look of budapest, prague—all emulating paris and versailles. i don't know how there aren't fewer broken legs because the women teeter on these spiky heels, and i was walking around like some american slouch in sneaks because the blisters on my pinkie toes made walking a true challenge (ask not about the pain when i punctured said blisters). everything was costly. really out of site or sight. i did not meet my oligarch mobster boyfriend who was supposed to suit me up and treat me right, whatever that means—cocaine, a firm arm on ass but all in the name of sexy! sexy! posh! that may not be my scene, as much as i will it to be.

glad to be home, mostly.