Moscow

What can I say about Moscow.
Can I say how beautiful it is here? Can I say how it is a huge fairy tale city? Can I say that the towers of the Kremlin melt perfectly with the huge skyscraper of the Samsung building?
The city merges old buildings with new. It merges new money with old babushkas.
I fall in love with this city. I fall in love with Cortney and Adam, the other two volunteers. I want to touch them and I do. I touch them on their shoulders - they bring me to tears.
We sneak bottles of vodka and paper cups of coffee on to Red Square and toast. To the city. And to us.
We throw pennies, kopyeks, over our shoulders in front of the gates, as we've seen the others do.
We take each others pictures.
I forgot how nice it is to travel with friends, and the three of us have spilled our guts to each other the way people who are thrown together do. We tell each other intimate secrets. We hold each other and choke up when we speak of the children, and what they did to make us happy or so sad.
I feel especially close to Adam and this thrills me and excites me and makes me hopeful. Adam is much older than I am. And since Cortney goes to sleep early, the two of us go out for beers or coffee and we tell each other our stories and we make each other laugh. And when we walk down the street and our arms or shoulders touch .. or when he leans over my shoulder into my ear to point out a landmark ... I feel so hopeful. Adam is going through a breakup with his wife; he is older than me and is not really "available," but I feel so much hope. That some day, I will be loved.

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.
**********
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.
**********
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.
**********
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."
**********
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.
**********
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.
**********
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.

KOPE-IN

The thing I have to remember about the Russian language is this:
1. Things that are prounounced similar in both languages (toilet, restaurant, nose) are written entirely differently.
2. Even though some words are written in the same alphabetical letters as English, they are pronounced entirely differently.
**********
Things are perfect for me, but for the personal matters of the other two volunteers. Thursday night, Adam got distressing news from a wife that apparantly wants to leave him, and Cortney spilled her guts and said her husband is divorcing her and has a 28-year old girlfriend.
What happens in situations like this is that I absorb the situation and it becomes my own. Until I forced myself to stop later that night, I found myself pacing my room and very anxious. I had to actually sit myself down and tell myself I was being incredibly selfish - to myself! - by making their problems my own. I read before bed and in the morning, we all woke up better. Adam has decided to stay in Russia anyways - after talking to his wife, he has decided she is confused. Cortney honestly has not broken down at all. Her strength is really incredible and Russians keep mistaking her for a movie star. **********
Today is a special day in the Russian Orthodox Church (what it is, I do not remember, except people get "baptized" by jumping into the river), and so one of the translators took us to the main Yaroslavl church and we stood through the latter part of the service.
How it works is this: You cross yourself with either two or three fingers, right shoulder first, before you enter the church, when you enter the church, and every time the priest says "Amen," which here, sounds like "Ah-mun." You also buy a thin stick of a candle, cross yourself and light it, cross yourself again. You may also kiss the glass of the picture of your favorite icon (Mary and Jesus are very big), but this I did not do because I could think only of the germs and bacteria on that glass. When I lit my candle, I said a prayer for the young boy outside the gate of the church who was begging. That is when I felt an overwhelming sense of my own atheism - I did not believe for a minute that the world, the universe, god, whatever, was going to do a fucking thing for him. I knew this in my bones. My soul, though I don't believe in "soul."
It came to me (an American thought), that I could simply give him money, a large sum, and that would ensure many things - 1. that the prayer that I said was not in vain and 2. here is the hard part, that I only realized afterwards, a thought so shameful, it hurts me to write it.
So that I would not feel so helpless, so that I would feel better about things, so that I would feel better about myself.
I looked over my shoulder, as though I was a criminal. What I was about to do was strictly against the rules of the organization I am with. I walked towards the boy, and with one last furtive glance, dropped the note in the outstretched bowl. His hands were red. He did not look up. I hated myself truly at that point, because what is the fucking point of any of this?
Am I like the Americans I hated last time? The awful rich women who liked to drop money on developing countries because it made them look good?
Am I like the women I hate, the ones who pose for pictures with AIDS babies and orphans because I like the way I look in those pictures, like someone holy, like Princess Diana?
I was struck by a choking lightening flash of terrible guilt and impotence. I pretty much reeled away from the boy as though he had actually struck me, and stumbled through the snow, up the icy ledge and I hid behind the church for several minutes until I pulled myself together.
I've had these thoughts before. But only now, writing it, does the entirety of the shame seem so fucking gross and true.
In order to come here to work with kids, I had to take some blood tests. I went to my doctor and handed her the paperwork, and she asked what I was going to Russia for, and when I told her, she said, "You're so good, you're making me cry."
"I'm not good," I said with meaning. "It's fun for me, I like doing it."
Well - I do like doing it. I like Maxim, the bad teenage boy who always hits this little girl. She cries, I hold her. But I hold him, too. It's not his fault he grew up badly. He's likely only re-enacting what he's seen for years at home.
I like Kola, and was kinda sad that Thursday was his last day at the hospital. I liked him because he offered me his gloves on the same day that he picked up big sticks and made awful, machine gun sounds with them.
Right now, though, do you know what I am remembering? I am remembering having pity for the little boy this morning, and I feel a kind of rage against myself now, because I am afraid that my "kindness," my "good deeds," are really nothing very much more than ego boosts.
And if this is true, then I do not know myself as well as I thought, and I don't know if I really like myself all that much either.

A Little Boy With Gloves - Children's Hospital

Today, at the Children's Hospital, we went outside. I didn't bring my gloves because I didn't know we were going outside. A little boy pointed to my hands and pretended to be shivering. "I forgot them," I said, pointing away, and stuffing my hands in my pockets. It's amazing how much one can communicate without understanding each other's language. The little boy took off his left glove and handed it to me, and I almost died. "Nyet, nyet, spasiba!" I said, giving it back to him. It was one of the sweetest things I've ever been offered. This little kid has nothing and yet he offers me the glove off his hand. It sounds like a story one reads. It seems like something that happens to other people. It seems like a fairy story, maybe, a folk tale. But it happened to me this morning, at about 11 am. Even now, writing it, I am overcome with a feeling I can't identify, but feels like joy, sorrow, aching, love, all at once.
The three of us have a great thing going here, me and the other volunteers. We took a walk to a local grocery store today after our afternoon placement, and, only sweating a little bit, I was actually able to purchase bread and cheese.
The old Russian groceries are stuck in time, in a fabulous way. There are four windows/counters - one for meat, one for produce, one for cheese and one for bread.
First you go the window where the stuff is you want, wait in line, and you tell the lady what you want. She writes something down on a little piece of paper. Then you go to the fifth window, which is the cashier. You wait in line, then pay her, and then you take the receipt back to the window, and then you wait in line again, and give her the receipt and then you are allowed to collect your goods.
This process took only a few minutes to understand. At first, the three of us just stood by the door, trying to figure out what was going on by watching other people. But people kept knocking into us coming and going, so we finally were fairly pushed fully inside the store, and after pointing and saying "Pazshalsta," (please) and then the one good phrase in Russian I know how to say perfectly (I do not understand Russian, I'm sorry!") we were somehow spit back out onto the slushy sidewalk with a loaf of bread, wheel of cheese and two pastries that turned out to have a yogurt topping.
Yesterday, while we were waiting for the tram, I told Cortney that maybe people couldn't believe we wanted to go to Russia because in America, we still think of Russia as this big, dark, scary place. And then it kinda struck me as we were standing there in the near-deserted tram stop, with all the dead trees and shut-up kiosks, that it is big dark and scary. Cortney quipped, "You're really not that far off," and we all laughed like crazy, because it is totally true and yet still much much more than that otherwise we wouldn't be here.
It's cold and big and dark and scary. And it's also where, if you forget your gloves, a little boy will offer you his.

Back in Yaroslavl

There is no snow...
The Russians are pretty pissed about it, too. They are used to having great snow during their New Year and everyone is worried about global warming. Forget about what it's doing to the environment – it is messing with my banya. For the real banya includes
not diving into cold water, I learned, but actually diving into heaps of powdery, fluffy snow.

Nadia, the director, is loathe to take us because she says that diving into slush is not "as nice" as diving into snow. She wants to wait...

I really hope it snows.
Everything here is exactly as I remember it. One of the hotel staff recognized me. The volunteer program staff are all very happy to see me, and I actually find myself a bit shy, really. I wasn't the greatest volunteer by far. I got flustered and made a ton of mistakes and everything. However, I am considered a seasoned pro here, although there are only 2 people to whom I can show off – Adam, a 40-ish dad from England, and Cortney, in her 30s, from Ventura County.
My biggest feat so far – I was able to guide us all, myself included, to and on the tram, and through the square, past the kremlin, down the slushy street to the 24-hour internet café.
I consulted the handbook, and was still somewhat stunned that I actually kinda remembered how to get here.
I requested and received placement back at the Children's Hospital. I was sad to see that 2 of the kids I saw last March are either still at the hospital, or have been sent back there. I don't think they recognized me, though it's hard to tell. One of the girls I hugged tightly, and she rolled back her head and smiled, and I realize that she must be really, really sick, and that made me want to cry.
Adam and Cortney are great. We are all on the same page, and Cortney and I took a scary trip to the market across the street to buy yogurt for her and sodas for me.

God I missed this damn place! I missed the smells and the market with all kinds of goods and meats and breads, and I missed the rickety old tram, and the drafty gloomy hospital and the rough children, all of it.
I am here for two whole weeks.

Bolshoi Ballet

I wondery why I go to the ballet when I actually don't like the ballet. Although if I did care for it, I can see why Giselle might become a favorite of mine. It was beautiful and I could tell there was a compelling love story going on, but I began to fall asleep and left the theater during intermission.
The proprieter of the hostel I am at near Red Square gave me an excellent recommendation for dinner - a cheap, authentically Russian cafeteria-style restaurant where I ate beef stroganaff, boiled potatoes and borchst with sour cream. Really when I was sitting in the first balcony at the theater, I was thinking not of getting roaring drunk like I thought I might on cheap vodka, but was craving instead hearty, salty, hot Russian food.
Moscow is as I remember -- busy, cold, neon lights of the Samsung building across the street in sweet contrast with the lights of the Kremlin just a few blocks away.
The streets are icy and the fountain outside the Bolshoi Theater was dusted with a great layer of powder snow.
Things come back to me; I'm delighted. For instance, I know that a sign that looks like PECTOPAH means "restaurant." BAP mean bar. CTON means it's a stop sign.
I remember without even looking at my book how to say Good evening, Thank you.
OK, I'm not a rocket scientist - even my 6-year-old can memorize a few words of Spanish. My vocabulary is only about a dozen words and I cannot read a word of Russian.
I fell very easily into the tourist trap of getting ripped off. My cab to the city center cost close to $150. About three times what it should cost.
But I'm pleased to see the woman at the cafeteria wihp out a pen to write on a piece of paper how much I owe - the universal language of numbers, thank god. My dinner cost a 312 rubles.
And how well I remember the obsession over small change. She was unhappy with my $1000 ruble note and actually fingered through my outstretched wallet to try to find a bill that better suited her.
Frankly, it's too fucking cold to go out exploring tonight. Full from a good dinner, thousands of miles from family trauma and work stress, I try to stay in the moment (how many times in your life can you actually be immersed and fulfilled in the moment you are in?) by looking down at my thighs. Yes, my thighs, to bring me back from brooding over the glare my boss gave me on Thursday, or the amusing IM I sent to one of my coworkers.
Tomorrow, I will go out and secure a breakfast somewhere and some coffee. I will try to buy some cigarettes without humilating myself (this though is really a lofty goal - it is impossible to not embarass yourself as a foreigner in a different country).
I'm going to take a long and hopefully hot shower in this cute Soviet-era apartment-building-turned-hostel on Tverskaya Street. I'm going to sleep long and hard and when I wake up, I hope there is more snow on the ground.