When you say “I’m moving to Russia for six months,” no one ever says “Well, don’t fall in love.”

Mainly people say things like “Don’t die,” “It’ll definitely be interesting,” “You can always come home early, if it turns out to be that awful.” Mainly, they say “Don’t die.” I think if you were to look back at facebook wall posts written amongst the Midd kids setting off for Russia at the end of August, the verb умирать (to die- as in “don’t die”) would appear often. If you don’t know what facebook is, you’re clearly not that hip. But that’s not important.

Also before I go on for too long, I would like to clarify that I have not fallen in love with some Russian man named Sergei, Igor, Dima, or Alexander. I predict one person finds that sentence funny. Moving on. I fell in love with just…Russia. Also if you would like to continue to respect me, perhaps you should stop reading before I go into more of my “how awesome Russia is…” and you become more and more convinced that I have lost my mind.

Perhaps I had a more pessimistic view of my time in Russia, than other people do approaching their time in Russia. Like, I was scared. Crazy scared. I thought I was actually going to die. This is not a realistic fear. Realistic fears would be: I won’t have any friends, I won’t ever understand what is occurring, I will be really lonely and bored and unhappy… I think those are realistic fears when leaving for Russia. Fear of death is not a realistic fear. However, I really thought I was going to die. I don’t know why. At any point, I could have said “enough” and flown back to the U.S. I still just thought I was going to die. I definitely didn’t think I would be sitting here, a little over 3 months after my arrival, talking about how much I like this country.

Also, writing this is fairly scary. I feel like I’m going to make a huge fool of myself. Any sane person would look at the choice of America and Russia and well, pick America. Any American would make this choice, any Russian would definitely make this choice. And I feel like maybe when I get back to the U.S., I will realize how much of a fool I was. How much better life in the U.S. is. And then I will have to look back and remember how I went about proclaiming how awesome Russia was.

That’s not going to happen.

(At this point I gave up on this entry...it was too "I love Russia so much.")