Benedicto:

May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets’ towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkey’s howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches where storms come and go as lightening clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you---beyond that next turning of the canyon walls. ---Edward Abbey (thanks Trudy Hall)

Thursday, June 30, 2011

First Days Arriving in Moscow

Andy brought us to the airport, and for days we slept and wandered in airports.
We met our first Russian on the plane who sells equipment that prints 3 dimensional objects.  Veronica is holding some things she printed out.
What would you order off this menu? 
Our guidebook helped; there's something very humbling about not knowing the language.  There's something wrong about going to Russia without much to go on except, "Thank you, excuse me, please and sorry." But people have been either understandably irritated with us, or immensely patient.
I'm happy to be in a foreign place, uncomfortable with holding out money for berry sellers to take what they need and give me the rest back, or for cashiers to  run me back to the produce area to show me how to weigh a banana for a price sticker.  Les and I got better at getting help with getting to where we wanted to go without speaking, and learning how everyone waits, and waits....   The residents in the hostel are very nice, outgoing and helpful.  With one, we communicate in Spanish!  Tomorrow, a walking tour!

1 comment:

  1. hey, I'm soo happy to hear from you!!! I love the pics and the comments. I drive by Emma so often and think sadly that you are not there and happily that you are off on this great adventure!! I love the berth story! I took the Oriental Express from Vienna to Budapest in '65. The train was filled with old women in black babushkas who we were sure were smuggling something into their countries. And then the Hungarian communist guards outside in the hallway with their very big, very intimidating rifles! A scene I will never forget! But for today, I am in Vermont...tame, familiar Vermont getting ready to plunge into my favorite lake Caspian in Greensboro. Where are you today I wonder, July 10??? did you cry when you finally got on the plane? Are you good travellers. Yes, travelling on the train, watching the landscape fly by, whew, what an adventure you are/will have!! Keep us posted and much love to you, Michelle in NY

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