MOSCOW!!!!

Just had an awesome two days in Moscow.

I flew out of New York on Tuesday ad nine uneventful hours later landed in Moscow. During that time I:
-Chose lasagna over chicken for dinner
-Watched Harry Potter 6
-slept for about a half-hour
-stared blankly at the seatback in front of me

I was one of the first people in line for passport control but it didn't matter so much because I then had to wait forty minutes for my checked bag. After avoding eye contact and quickening my pace while walking by the customs officials, I met up with my friend Kamil at the airport and then we got on a bus for an hour to get into Moscow. I had forgotten that every woman in Russia covers from head to foot in fur during the winter time.

The first evening there Kamil and Olya (friends from Moscow) gave me an extra ticket to a DIMA BILAN concert. For all of you who don't know about DIMA BILAN, he's basically the Russian version of Justin Timberlake. He's HUGE here. And I got a free ticket. This was a big deal. Oh, and the emcee for the night was Oksana Fedorova AKA Russia's very own Miss Universe. It was pretty crazy and I was definitely the only American there. To fully appreciate the superstar who is DIMA BILAN, here's one of his videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9L0fvNkoL00

He sure can rock a mullet, huh?

Yesterday I finally got to catch up on A LOT of sleep. (Stayed with some friends in Moscow. Five people share two bedrooms in their apartment. With me there were six. It's always a party there.) Last night after having a bit too much fun hanging out in the center of Moscow we might have arrived at the train station a couple of minutes too late to catch my 10:20 PM train to St. Petersburg and might have had to buy another ticket on a train about two hours later. Oops. :) Moscow is great though so I didn't mind one bit having to stay there another couple of hours.

The train ride was tedious. Usually you just fall asleep on the train and wake up in St. Petersburg in the morning but the train was ridiculously hot (about 80 degrees inside the train) and I was put on a top bunk with about 14 inches between me and the shelf above my head. Didn't get any sleep at all. Instead I spent my time listening to NPR podcasts I downloaded before I left and watching movies. My iPod Touch and I have never been closer. On the train there were also these two older women on the bunks below me and once they heard me speak they were all like, "You're from the Baltics?" I then smiled and told them I was American and that set them off on a shower of compliments--"You speak Russian so well!" "Your pronunciation is perfect!" "You're so handsome!" "Do you have a beautiful Russian girlfriend" "etc." And people wonder why I come over here so often...

Now I'm in St. Petes. It's great. Duh.

I'll put up pics from Moscow soon.

Poka!