I wrote this a VERY long time ago....

Various items of note of varying levels of interest:

I went and played hockey at a special “training session” on Saturday. Except it was at a different rink than normal which I hadn’t played at since the beginning of September. So I forgot where to get off the bus and so I got lost and wandered around for an hour with my bag and hockey stick, increasingly getting more and more frustrated. But I finally found the rink, like 45 minutes after I was supposed to have been there. Also hug boy was not invited to the special practice session, so my count of “sketchy hugs received by large Russian hockey players” is sadly 0 this week. I was also promoted to the first line of players. (*This is a side note that will probably only interest Stonewall, but in hockey in Russia, they divide the team into groups of 5 which always play together instead of lines of 3 forwards and 2 defense-although it is still set up with 3 forwards and 2 defense.*) But this only meant I had to play against people who were actually sort of good instead of the normal loons on the fifth line. This also resulted in this sort of large collision with some guy in which I bit my lip really hard and resulted in a large swollen lip that is only finally disappearing. And then the whole rest of the game he would just apologize to me at every possible moment. Also one of the goalies kissed my hand and told me I was the best player on the ice. Just the general insanity.

On Sunday I took the train to Kostroma which is another of the cities in Russia’s Golden Ring (historical cities surrounding Moscow). The point of this trip was not to actually do a lot of sightseeing in Kostroma which was good because I spent much more time on the train going and returning than I spent in the actual city. Mostly the point was to not sit in the apartment all day increasingly being in a bad mood about my lack of activities. The trip included 3 hours on the train there, 4 hours of wandering about, and 3 hours back. My favorite part of the trip was all of the completely random stops the train made. They kept making announcements about the stops which I didn’t bother to listen to that much, because Kostroma was the last stop so they would just kick me off when we finally arrived. Then I realized that they kept announcing various numbers regarding different stops. At first I thought they were saying “This is blah blah blah stop. The next stop is in 32 kilometers.” Then I realized the name of the next stop was actually “32 kilometers.” So this insanity continued for 3 hours as we went from stop 32 kilometers to stop 39 kilometers to stop 47 kilometers. Also most of these stops were in the middle of nowhere with only the concrete platform to show it was a “stop.” I suppose most of the passengers were going to their dachas which are apparently required to be in the middle of nowhere. Also I remembered during summer school when I had to explain what I was doing for the magical weekend and I just kept trying to explain we were going to Kurt’s “dacha.” Which is just amazingly hysterical now.

Also I think this is amazing, but I think the funniness will be lost in translation if you don’t speak Russian. I had an exam on verbs of motion (глаголы движения!!!) on Monday. So I went to bed on Sunday night with my head stuffed full of various prefixes and conjugations and such. And then I woke up Monday morning and I had this segment of this dream stuck in my head. And all I remember is that it was my бабшука telling me that “Туалет ушёл домой.” …which I guess in translation would be “The toilet left for a long time to go home.” But it loses all its funniness if you don’t understand the hellacious-ness of Russian verbs of motions. Anyways, it was SO strange.

Also on Monday I called the hotel in Archangelsk to reserve a room for the 3 nights I will be there. Which turned out to be less than hellacious than expected, although the spelling of my name was extremely difficult. Hopefully the general sense of “Abigail Mayer” was not lost in my mangled attempt to spell out my name in Cyrillic letters.

I also had this other really strange dream. I’m sorry that this has absolutely nothing to do with actual Russia. Anyways, it is very interesting and sort of displays the crazy mess of English and Russian, America and Russia that is currently occurring in my head. So I was back at Midd and just kept thinking “Thank goodness I made it through all of that Russian-speaking time.” And I was going to water polo practice which for some reason was being conducted at this pool which was a strange mix of the Grizzly Pool and the Midd pool. And Alex Machi (Midd crew coach) was the head coach and he just kept yelling at me that I was doing everything wrong. Which was true. I am bad at water polo in real life and also in my dream. And then this man approached our practice and asked if we were the КПРФ meeting. Which is the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. And we said no but then I got so distracted thinking about how he was looking for the Communist Party meeting that I started playing even worse and Machi just kept yelling at me. And then I woke up.

Looking forward, I am leaving Yaroslavl next Wednesday on our second fall break for the 20 hour train ride to Archangelsk. It never seemed that long until I realized that the flights from the U.S. to Europe are only like 9 hours.