A Good Day

Despite a sub-par show tonight, today was a good day. I’ve been thinking some of you would probably like some sort of a day-in-the-life account (hi Mom), and today seems like a day worthy of chronicling. Nothing epic or especially eventful happened, but today was a day that reminds me why I love living abroad.

Sunday is our day off here, so I got to sleep in, which bring us to our first good thing: my room no longer gets freakishly hot!! I’ve had three blissful nights of sleep in a row. At 1pm I met my friend Erica’s friends for brunch. Erica spent last year here in Moscow on a Fulbright, and introduced me via email to her amazing friends. Even through email I felt wonderfully welcomed by them, and was excited to finally meet them. We met at an ex-pat place not too far from where I live called Correa’s. It was kind of surreal because it felt a lot like a NYC brunch joint, complete with English menus. I met Abbey, Laura, and Sophie (who didn’t know Erica because she only arrived six months ago) and I really liked all of them. I think/hope we’ll have brunch again next weekend at another place nearby they know about.

Laura (my classmate, not Erica’s friend) met me there and we set off to the Pushkin Fine Art Museum. There’s a huge Picasso exhibit there at the moment, which we’ll get to, but today we had hoped to visit their Impressionist wing. The Pushkin has four different buildings, and we thought we had figured out which one housed the Impressionists, but it had a long line that wasn’t moving. Given our limited Russian language skills, we weren’t really able to ask anyone what was going on or where to go. It was very clear what the line was for the Picasso exhibit (longest line I’ve ever seen, so not going there on a weekend!), but we couldn’t imagine that the main part of the museum just houses that exhibit. We were about to give up and wander to find something else to do (correction: we had just given up and were wandering) when we found another part of the Pushkin, their Private Collections museum. We happily went in from the wet drizzle, and got a 60 rouble ($2) ticket with our student IDs. There we saw a wide variety of art (as they put it, from icons to avant-garde), glass works, and an interesting photography exhibit on Moscow in 1957.

We walked back to Kamergersky (the street where MXAT is) to have dinner at a sushi place I’ve been meaning to check out, and it was pretty good. We then parted ways as I was going to see the show that the other three dramaturgs saw last night: Lermontov’s Masquerade at the Vakhtangov Theatre. I was very glad they were willing to go on Saturday night because I loved having another night at home to tend to my wounds, and today was the first day I was able to wear make-up. This is actually another happy thing: unless you’re like 2 feet from my face, I’m told you can’t really tell anymore!

So I met an angel who took me to the theater. Who is an angel, you might ask? The angels are the producing students at MXAT who take us poor non-Russian speaking dramaturgs to the theater, since we can’t find either the location or our seats on our own. Tonight it was just me with Marina, a first year student who spoke wonderful English. That’s because she’s also in her 5th year at Moscow State University, studying foreign languages. I had a great time talking with her, and really hope that we’ll hang out sometime or I’ll see her again. The show itself wasn’t fantastic. I don’t know the play very well, but Marina said she didn’t like it because it’s supposed to be a tragedy and they played it more as a farce. I didn’t like it because while they had some wonderful moments, these were basically the same moments over and over again. A swelling of music and the falling of snow. Over and over.

When I got back to the dorm, the babushka downstairs was the same one who had called the ambulance for me. I had a huge change of heart for her actions when I heard how concerned she was—she even called Adam to tell him what had happened. She gave me some chocolate when came in tonight. I feel loved.