Ending Things in Yaroslavl

I have only two more days here. Tomorrow is my last day at Children's Hospital. It will be a special day for me. I'm going to repeat the project that Richard and I did so successfully last time - paper picture frames and a photo session of each of them with a Poloroid camera. They're going to love it.
The way the organization works is this: We go to a placement (hospital, boarding school, shelter, elderly home, disabled center) with a translator, and first off we do a craft. The Russians believe in "labor therapy," and so we have them do a project. At the hotel, one of the office rooms is our Craft Room, and there are shelves of paper, tissue paper, ribbons, sequins, glue. We make mouses out of pipe cleaners, greeting cards out of construction paper. On Friday, I'm going to help the women at the mental hospital make felt purses with ribbon and fabric. They're not allowed to have scissors, so everything will be pre-cut, and we'll use pipe cleaners as a needle with yarn.
After the craft, then it's play time. Uno is very big here. The women at the hospital like cards and dominos. Today at the children's hospital, we played a game similar to Chutes and Ladders.
If the kids don't want to play games, we always bring crayons and coloring books and plain paper. Also Barbies and little toy cars for the boys.
We play for about an hour, and then it's time to leave.
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Last night, Nadia, the director, took us to a banya. A real banya, not the scandalous one I visited last year in St. Petersburg. Adam was the only man, and Cortney and I have body issues, and Adam does too (he says he thinks he's part Neanderthal on account of his body hair) and we were all pretty nervous and freaked out. We women stripped in one room; Adam was lucky and had a room to ourselves. Then we all emerged wearing only thin sheets.
Yes. That's it.
Now, Cortney and I were freaked out. Nadia and one of the translators have done this a bazillion times and guided us through the process. All of us hopped into the banya, which is a small wooden room with rocks in a corner. We sat there for several minutes until we began to sweat profusely. And then, we came outside. Outside meaning into the snow.
We were all very shy at first. We didn't look at eachother, and fiddled with our sheets.
But by our second round, we were throwing snow at eachother.
God, the exhileration! The beauty of the forest! There was fresh snow everywhere, and I understood why they said banya was best with fresh snow - after leaving the banya, your body retains the heat for several minutes. You can walk around outside, pulling up handfuls of fresh snow and rubbing it on yourself (or getting a snowball thrown at you) or you can throw it up in the air and it sprinkles down on you and feels amazing. Like you want to cry, it feels so good.
We steamed like dumplings outside, and we took pictures of each other. I never thought I'd allow someone to take a picture of me half naked in the snow, but I did.
Back inside the banya, the beating with birch leaves commences. And that feels good, but it also feels hot. It is the heat of like nothing imagined. The leaves of the birch tree are very wet and very limp, and they smack against your skin, but just whipping it up and down creates a tremendous heat that is nearly unbearable. When it does become unbearable, that is when it's time to leave and go back out into the snow.
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I feel a great connection with Adam and Cortney. We quickly bonded, having similar senses of humor and irony. We laugh like crazy, and we've cried together, though we've only known each other for 11 days. Every night we go out together, we have a great time. We have a great time getting lost. We have a great time humiliating ourselves in front of Russians who don't understand us. We have a great time gossiping about our translators, bitching about the high strung ones, praising our favorites.
We talk about our placements - Adam and Cortney have spent most of their time at a children's shelter and a boarding school and at an elderly home. I've spent most of time with the Children's Hospital and the disabled.
Adam and Cortney don't love the Children's Hospital as I do, mostly because, as Adam describes it, it's pretty "grim." It is probably 200 years old. The kids are messed up and some of them like Maxim, my favorite, are pretty bad. Adam and Cortney love working with the little ones at the shelter - some of them are as young as two - and I understand it. Toddlers are easy to love.
On Friday, my last day here in Yaroslavl, Adam and Cortney are going to accompany me to Moscow, and the three of us will spend the weekend there before I go back home on Sunday.
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On the way to the internet cafe tonight, Cortney said, "When you leave, what do you miss the most? The kids?"
"The kids," I said. "Yes, the kids. But also - at home in L.A., I don't feel like I fit in. Here, even though I look different and I don't know the language - for some strange reason, I feel like I fit in. I don't know what it is. I feel comfortable."
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Everything has been wonderful, everything. The kids, yes. But the food, my god the food. Cortney and I can't stop eating cheese. Every day at lunch, we are served strange salads and steaming pots of every kind of soup - cabbage soup, chicken noodle soup, potato soup, pea soup. They're fucking amazing. We get chicken Kiev, potatoes, steaks dipped in egg, kabobs, green beans floating in garlic butter. Homemade brown bread. Special Russian ice cream, thick and not too sweet.
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We spent the morning in Rostov, a neighboring city, famous for its enamal factory. We ate lunch in a monastery. We visited cathedrals. Cortney and I had to wear skirts and scarves over our heads. Adam said I look Muslim.
We climbed to the top of the monastery, overlooking Lake Nero. A car drove on the frozen lake. Even here in Yaroslavl, the rivers are frozen over and men sit out there ice fishing.
Russia is beautiful right now - it is covered in snow and the buildings rise majestically with the church towers bright against the white sky. The women all look like supermodels, wearing stiletto boots and fur coats. The men smell like cigarettes and something else that I can't put my finger on, but something that makes my heart beat a little quicker when I'm close to one.
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Today at lunch in the monastery, Nadia told one of the monks that I had been proposed to several times. This is an exaggeration - two men last week tried to pick me up, but I use the word "men" very loosely because one of them didn't look older than 18, and Cortney joked that he probably remembered me from last year because he was at one of the orphanages.
The monk gave me some advice. He said that 20 percent of Russian men are very good, and the other 80 percent are alcoholics. But 100 percent of Russian men have very big hearts.
I am so moving here.