...me again! :)
Well, now. It's amazing what a hot shower and a few hours of sleep can do for the weary (and I mean WEARY) traveller. We got into Vladimir at about 5:30pm yesterday, at which point I had been up for +/- 30 hours. We were all dragging... I have tried to upload a picture of our Russian hosts waiting for us in front of the American Home when the bus pulled up (I felt like a GI returning home from war), but the cell service here isn't cooperating (I can text and call, but can't send an email). It worked fine from Moscow (different provider there, though). So you'll have to wait on pictures until I can find a computer that I can hook up a digital camera to... Here at the AH, the Internet service is metered, so sending pictures would be costly. Perhaps I can find an Internet cafe...
We left Champaign, Illinois, at 3:30am on Monday (most of us were up around 2) for the Bloomington airport on a bus and hit fog that delayed our take-off 45 minutes. Then, in Atlanta, we arrived late, so there wasn't an available gate-- we sat on the tarmac for 30 more minutes. After the 5-hour layover in Atlanta, we had to sit on the runway for 30 minutes because of bad weather. The 11-hour flight to Moscow wasn't too bad... As you can see by the picture below, Mike (teacher from Maine) and I made friends with Katya the Russian-speaking stewardess. Let's just say that SOME folks may have gotten a little free wine on the trip. ;)
It was noon when we arrived in Moscow, and by 1pm we were on the way to Vladimir by bus. The traffic getting out of Moscow was horrible, so it took us 2 hours to get to our lunch place, a very Russian-y (in the traditional sense) restaurant named Сказка (Skazka, which means "fairy tale"). The food was good, but the ambience was a little tarnished by the American rap blaring as our meal began (imagine hearing the N-word over and over as you try to eat your first meal in a foreign country). I think the restaurant folks thought we would appreciate it...
My host's name is Katya. She lives within a 15-minute walk of the AH (I walked here this morning), in a typical Russian apartment (on the fourth floor of a typical Russian apartment building-- if I can negotiate the technolgy here, I'll show you pictures). We took a taxi back to her apartment and I lugged my 60-lb. suitcase up 8 flights of stairs. She gave me a cold beer and I took a hot shower (thankfully, she has her own hot water heater and even a small washing machine), then we chatted some (in Russian-- she knows 5 words of English) and I crashed about 9pm. I felt bad because a couple showed up right about then and I think she thought I might be eating; I was just too tired. Anyway, Katya is very nice. And she mothers an energetic year-old cat named Stefan and a 4-year old Dachsund mix named Mike. I think my accomodations for the next couple of weeks will be okay. (Assuming nothing gets lost in the translation!)
As it is summer here, the sun doesn't set until late in the evening-- it was still light when I went to bed and when I woke up around 3am, it was starting to get light again. There's not much to do in a stranger's apartment that early in the morning... So I exchanged a couple of text messages with my wife, took another shower, then watched tv for a bit. She has cable, which is a far cry from the 6-channel Soviet-era set the lady I lived with in Moscow in 2004 had!
So, here I am at the AH waiting for today's activities to begin. So far, so good. (However, I discovered a major urban difference between Vladimir and Moscow or St. Pete-- you can't break a 500 ruble note early in the morning here...and I only wanted a bottle of water.)
Oh, yeah. There is a group picture of us taken the day before we left the U. of Illinois posted to the REEEC site at http://www.reec.uiuc.edu/outreach/fulbright07/photo_diary.htm .
That's it for now. Пока!
