Privet rebyata! [Hello y'all!].

This is an old post that I wrote on my laptop a few days ago. I have since arrived in Ekaterinburg and I promise a real update in the next few days. For now, these adventures from the provinces will have to suffice :)

This weekend I took a trip to towns around Moscow with the community service grantees, the English teaching assistants (ETAs) and Ed, the director of the Russian Fulbright program, and his wife. We started in Yaroslavl’ and continued on to Kastruma (or something like that) and a tiny little village called Plus. I had always wanted to travel around the Golden Ring of Moscow, so I was excited about the opportunity to knock a few cities off of the list. In each town we had a tour guide that took us around to the main sights in each city (generally speaking, we saw a church or two, icon paintings, and a few monuments). There were, however, a few moments that stood out:
• Yaroslavl’ has a monument in the center of the town to Yaroslavl’ (a Russian prince who founded the town in 1010) and the bear that he supposedly fought and killed back in the day—apparently the Russians do (did?) fight bears!
• We arrived in Kastruma on the city’s den’ goroda (literally “day of the city”). It is basically a citywide holiday that every city has in Russia, in which it celebrates its history with parades, concerts, fireworks, and lots of beer. Our group was lucky enough to catch the tail end of the outdoor concert, which we discovered was a performance by the contestants of Fabrika Zvyezd (Russian American Idol)—It was pretty awesome and especially entertaining to watch the preteen girls go crazy over the hunky males, just like they do in the states.
• Driving back to Moscow on a Sunday evening is a little like driving back to the cities on Sunday night after a summer weekend at a cabin—it takes forever. We were on our [thankfully comfortable] bus for 7.5 hours!
• Our faithful bus driver, Vladmir Nikolaevich, enlightened me through example to the fact that buses can, in fact, weave traffic just like little sports cars and can also pass 4 cars at a time. Our tank of a bus (named the Sputnik) and Vladmir cruised over those lovely Russian potholes at quite an impressive pace.

It was a fun weekend, but nevertheless exhausting. I am glad that I had to time to bond with the other Fulbrighters, but am also very happy that this weekend is the last time this year that I will have to take tours with a large group of Americans. I am excited to slip into the center of Russian culture and also foolishly excited to remove myself from a community of English speakers. I can feel the Russian “muscles” in my brain starting to get back into shape and am excited to get back into classroom in order to really get them working again.

I’ll send out the report from Ekaterinburg once I arrive—assuming I survive the 26 hour train ride that begins at 4:30 pm today…