leaving moscow

So I was sitting in a coffee-house named ‘coffee-house’ having breakfast, which should really be lunch since I’ve been up since 3 am. Yesterday I finished my last interview (yay!) and tohir decided that we needed to celebrate. First, I spent about an hour sitting in his office in the company of tajik men, eating cake. The cake was weird, reminding me of carrot cake with honey between the layers, but generously lathered in strange butter cream, and the men spent the whole time conversing in tajik (or pamiri, I cannot tell) so I was also utterly bored. After that we went to a small restaurant called ‘the bear den’ which I thought was cute, at first, because it was in the basement. Turned out it wasn’t so cute when I discovered animal heads and bear hides, claws intact, on the wall. For some reason we ended up sitting in an isolated ‘private’ table which suddenly felt oddly ‘romantic’. That’s when the drinking began. It turns out 100g of vodka is a lot of vodka. The Russians are known for drinking ‘100 grams’ almost every day as a normal thing, so I, foolishly, was expecting something equaling 2 shots. It took a really long time to figure out what kind of mixing combination I was going to get, since I was not about to start taking shots with an older man in a privacy of a restaurant booth, but then the waitress brought out what looked like a small carafe, half full of vodka. Damnit! I guess, it was still better than that bottle of cognac tohir was trying to order for us to share (I told him I was not an old man to drink cognac, especially, without ice).we talked about tajik politics and extreme islamist movement in that region, and then I weaseled my way home. I think that’s why I woke up at 3 am, completely dehydrated, my belly churning from consumed strange cake.
The cleaning lady burst in through the door at 10:30 (I was leaving at 11:15) apologizing for being late. She started talking immediately nonstop, and when the car called from downstairs (at 10:40), she wouldn’t let me leave for like 15 minutes. Turned out everyone thought I was leaving at 10:15, so the cabby apologized profusely, and then called the company to yell at them for mixing up the times. Needless to say, I arrived at the airport, like my mother, way early. I checked in and then proceeded to the security check. This is where the fun began. There were tajiks, many tajiks, and all late for a flight leaving for samarkand. So they jumped lines, were told to hurry up, and got mixed up with passports (I swear sometimes I think this is the first time they’ve flown anywhere, which is impossible because they have to have gotten here somehow). At the xray machine, I was told that nothing needed to come out of my bag (laptop included), but a family of 3 late for samarkand rushed ahead of me. That’s fine, except that the rolling thing was full so they started shoving their stuff in, pushing everyone’s else’s neat gray box off the wrong end of rolling thing. It took them 5 minutes of getting situated. I walked through some magical glass box that may have scanned me with uranium, may have analyzed my dna in the process, who knows, but the family of three was told to open their bags after the scanner. The mother of the family, elderly lady in a potato sack dress, opened her purse and pulled out a bundle wrapped in cloth. Inside the bundle was silverware—that is spoons, forks, and KNIVES. The security lady took out knives from every single set (there must have been like 5) to the loud complains of mother-lady about ‘these are just knives, what am I going to kill someone?”. This would never have worked in the US.Walking around the duty free shops and searching for edibles, I came across a café that served ‘vegetable tartilas” (that would be tortillas for you all). It’s a good thing few Mexicans make it to Moscow, otherwise, there might be political crisis over tortillas in the making. I have to say, overall, Russians do a very poor job of translating, missing prepositions and sending people to places they shouldn’t go. Because everyone appears to be a loser like me and arrived at the airport 5 hours before their flight, there is nowhere to sit. So I weaseled my way to a far table in a café. There is a man sitting next to me, who uselessly attempted to get me to share his table, even moved his spread of personal belongings. No thanks, besides, this way I have a great view of a couple in a café next to this one, taking turns taking shots from a bottle of whiskey…it is 2 in the afternoon.