i dont' really have any great new news to report, or deep thoughts and insightful insights. but i am stuck in teh office, waiting for sex workers. technically, i'm not stuck, but in teh 3 hours we have before we depart again, across town, it is really not worth going anywhere. yesterday, we ended up with a day off. jonbek was supposed to call us around 6 so until then we went to a museum. Pushkin museum in moscow boasts 19-20th century european art collections. i was so jealous. there original matisse, monet, degas, gaugin, with interspersed rodin sculptures in every room. i was sad such a collection gets to stay in stupid moscow. i lied to the cashier lady, well, didn't lie, but concealed my foreign-ness: they charge double price for non-russian federation citizens, so i speak russian to them and hand them however money they are charging russians. usually it works, unless adrianna then ruins it all by showing them her very american UIC student id. she gets a student price, double the russian student price. it worked yesterday and we wondered through the halls marveling at impressionists and fauvists. then we walked through i swear half the city, visited the white house and then traveled for a very long time to find a subway. came home exhausted. and i passed out at like 9:30.
jonbek just offered me a pastry, it has a hot dog in it. moscow is full of pastries adn it is impossible to walk anywhere because the smell of fresh baked dough is killer. i am fighting the urge, it is hard not to just eat pastries, all the time. the men here are interesting, tajik men i mean. jonbek stares with typically tajik unibrow stare and makes jokes, which are not funny adn at times somewhat inappropriate. not likely sexually inappropriate, but it is not necessary to joke about running away from pimps when we are going to see pimps. his english is incomprehensible, at least to me. he never asnwers questions of where and when we are going unless i press him, again adn again. the taxi driver that was working with us, does not drive a car. this we learned as we had to hitch hike our way through the city. it turns out his license was revoked, 'for bad driving?', i asked. 'no i am a good driver!" "was your license revoked? cause maybe not so much". i think he likes me because he was sort of trying to court me, trying to ask questions and carry on a conversation. it was very awkward adn i felt bad for his failed attempts. at teh market, he offered to buy me a watermelon. 'but then i'll ahve to carry it home' 'no we'll help you' 'my mom told me not to eat watermelons' (this is actually true, my mom randomly out of the blue told me to stay away from watermelons because they are poisonous, citing some news of poison outbreaks in moscow)..so he bought us bread instead. warm tajik flatbread that adrianna and i ate in the car, while driving home and while the taxi driver (through conversation turned out he is an engineer) was attempting to invite me for coffee. he called the next day asking to 'walk around somewhere', i ignored his later call. oops. tohir, whom i've met in chicago before, drives like my mother, slamming on the break so hard i have bruises from the seat belt. he makes inappropriate comments too, but in front of sex workers, about sexual epxerimentaion, which vaguely make me think he is talking to me.. weird. in general, these interactions make me think these people operate as if they were back home: disorganized, unplanned, poor communication, always late. you can take a boy out of tajikistan, but you cannot take tajikistan out of a boy.
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