Or, you know, not so much. Now that I'm rapidly approaching the halfway point of this semester, it's getting harder to find things to post about, because it's all so routine now. The most productive thing I've done in the past week is go to the grocery store/make a metric [swear word]-ton of vinigret, and that was today. This should change soon enough, though; a week from Thursday, Corinne, the Elizabeths and I leave for Estonia, and then I will have nine days' worth of thrill-a-minute adventures (if the four of us can ever get around to doing some dang research and deciding what we want to do in Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius).
In my last post, I talked about visiting with Tamara, and said I was eager to go back. The second visit was even better than the first; this time she fed us, setting out chocolates, fruit, and little cakes as well as giving us tea. We all ate far too much (as is customary) and spent a solid three hours just listening to Tamara talk about Russian history as she experienced it. I love this woman so much. I just want to bring her home with me. She is the sweetest lady in the world, and tomorrow night when we go back over there, she said she'd make us dinner. The sweets were delicious, but we all kind of waddled back to the metro station afterward. It wasn't too cold that night, anyway, and we decided we all could use the exercise after gorging ourselves at Tamara's apartment. Among the spread were these candies that consisted of a walnut stuffed inside a prune, coated in dark chocolate. Probably shouldn't eat too many of those, given the prune, but they were just so good and not in the least bit difficult to make, according to Brenda.
I'm not exactly proud to admit that, as I'm typing this, 6 PM on Tuesday, I have not yet been to my language class this week. I've managed to oversleep two days in a row. Yesterday, I woke up about three minutes before my class started and decided the weather was just too crappy to endure the 40-minute commute to the faculty. Today, I forgot my Tuesday class was shifted up about an hour and a half...and just didn't want to go. I needed to go to the grocery, anyway, which is how I justified skipping again to myself. I know it's not good, and I'm gonna make it there every day until next Thursday to make up for it. Not to excuse my behavior, but most of my roommates haven't made it to class, either. Jorge has also skipped this week, and so has Corinne; their excuses aren't any better than mine. Liz hasn't gone, but she's got a more legitimate reason because she's not feeling well. This atmosphere of lethargy is just permeating the apartment and killing everyone's productivity. Maybe we all partied too hard over the weekend, who knows.
We did go out for St. Patrick's Day. First, Corinne, Brenda, Liz and I went to this Frida Kahlo-themed flamenco show, which was neat. I fell asleep for about ten minutes, but that happens to me in auditoriums. I don't know why, but I blame high school. What I could see of it was really cool; I was behind tall people so I couldn't really see the dancers' feet, but it certainly sounded impressive. Flamenco is like extreme Spanish tapdancing, equal parts performance and percussion. There were two dancers, about four musicians and a singer who sang in Spanish. One dancer portrayed Frida, the other various other people (husband Diego Rivera, the personification of Death); the show was based around Frida Kahlo's life, and her paintings were projected on a screen behind the dancers as they moved through vignettes. I thought the medium to be rather ironic; why tell this particular woman's story through flamenco dance, of all media? See, Frida Kahlo's art career began after she was involved in a serious tram accident that crippled her, so of all distinctly Spanish art forms, this is one that she would never have been able to do. But, okay. That may have been the point. It was staged at a very avant-garde sort of theater, so that irony/disconnect probably was the point.
After the flamenco show, we (minus Brenda) went back to our apartment, where a few of Jorge's friends had come over, and they decided to wait for us before hitting the clubs. Dasha and Maksim were there, as was Holly (finally! she couldn't find our apartment last time we invited her over, and her host family is a bit leery of her going out anywhere very often, because the metro closes at midnight). Those were the only guests I knew. There was also an Italian woman whose name escapes me right now, and another Maxim, this one Danish (we'll call him Max for simplicity). They were all pregaming (i.e., drinking before going out to a bar or club) when we arrived, and Alex decided we would leave for the clubs in an hour. So we chilled, made introductions, started planning the evening's activities, and generally were just killing time for a while. The smokers in the group went out to smoke, and we prepared to leave; with so many people in attendance, it should come as no surprise that we split into two groups.
Alexandra, Holly, Max, and I left together, with the others leaving and going somewhere else later. We tried to go to RadioBaby, a place I blogged about waaaay back in February. Apparently the bouncer thought Max was too drunk to be let into the club (not surprising, as by the time we left the apartment he had nearly polished off a 2-liter of Oxota, which is a brand of beer with 8% abv, all by himself), and the fact that he proceeded to argue with said bouncer (and then stumble down the stairs) didn't help. Alexandra thought the bouncer was just giving us a hard time and pulled me and Holly inside, then went back for Max, at which point he pushed her out. So, Holly went and tracked down another friend of ours, Kurt, and tried to get everything sorted. We ended up leaving and going somewhere else, because I wasn't sure I knew how to get home from RadioBaby. We went to another club a few blocks away; Kurt actually had to go back to RadioBaby to meet a friend who was running late, but he caught up with us later. I can't seem to remember the name of this club no matter how hard I try, but it's not important.
The Nameless Club is more like three clubs in one; it's got 4 stories, with the coat check on the top floor (such a cruel design, because the stairs are steep and tall, and also concrete). On each of the lower floors is a bar and a dance area; on the first floor, the dancefloor is replaced by bathrooms. And every floor of the place was absolutely packed with fellow young adults looking for a good time on a Saturday night.
The layout of the club actually turned out to be a boon. See, Max has a crush on Holly and was hitting on her relentlessly all night. The problem is that Max is also an asshole. Normally I'd censor myself, but there really is no polite term for him. He's European, and believes that this makes him somehow special, and his idea of courtship involves making fun of America and trying to jam his tongue down Holly's throat. She turned away quickly enough that he only managed to kiss her cheek, but he kept trying. Not only does Holly have a guy back home waiting for her, Max also smokes, and Holly doesn't like that. So even if she didn't have someone in mind already, she still wouldn't be interested in him. I had to rescue Holly a couple of times, with the old "come to the bathroom with me" line. We hid in the stairwell until a bouncer told us to pick a floor or get out.
After another hour or so of dealing with Max (and another "bathroom run"), we decided to just leave and go somewhere else. We found Alexandra and told her, and she tried to unload Max onto us. No, the point was to get Holly away from him because he's being rude and creepy. So, the five of us (at some point one of their classmates joined us) just all left together. We stopped for burgers at this restaurant I'll probably never manage to find again, then went home because everyone was getting tired and no one wanted to deal with Max anymore. Alexandra didn't want to keep dragging him around, we didn't want him to come with us, so we just decided we were done for the night. The original plan had been to stay out all night, i.e. until the public transportation system reopens at 6:30, but we called it quits around 3:30.
On the way home we actually ran into Jorge, Maksim and Liz; Dasha and the Italian girl had gone home because they had work in the morning, and Corinne wasn't feeling well so she didn't come out at all. Liz came with us because she never really wanted to go out anyway; she was convinced by promises of shawarma, and we caught them just as they were leaving the shawarma place, so she just walked home with us.
Annoying boys aside, it was actually a pretty fun night. I got to hang out with Holly, which was cool. I don't get to see her as often as I'd like because she's in a different class, lives way far away from us, and doesn't find out about plans far enough in advance to let her host mom know. We bonded, and that was nice, because as different as we are, I feel like I have more in common with her than I do with most of the SRAS people here. Holly is my age, a junior in college, in her university's honors program, unlike the others here through the SRAS. All my roommates are older than me; some are looking at grad schools, others are non-traditional students, and the others (Brenda and Elizabeth) aren't students at all. We're going to try to get together over the summer; she lives in North Carolina, but her family's going to Disney near the end of July. I'm pretty sure she said it was around the 21st, which is before Otakon, so we should be able to figure something out.
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