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[slutmuphin]

memory: mid-july 2001.

i was on the train in st. petersburg, headed back home from the market just off of the primorskaya station. i remember looking through the window and seeing my own reflection, somehow stronger than i'd felt in weeks. we'd been talking in class about the concept of muzhestvo, which means both courageousness and manliness.

Comments

[miep]

i was in moscow that summer, in the cramped and cockroach filled student dorms at IIP. there was a storm so fierce the sky was green. they called it urigan, a hurricane, but it was in the middle of the continent.

[slutmuphin]

i visited moscow that summer but didn't care for it. everyone seemed mean in moscow...there's more striking anti-foreigner (not that i wholly blame them) sentiment in moscow, and despite that i spoke excellent russian and was not a typical annoying touristy-type, people were just pretty nasty.

there was something strangely comforting about the soviet-style architecture, though. i can't name what it was...

the craziest storm i experienced while in russia occurred when we were on a little rickety boat traveling back from the solovetsky islands, through the white sea back to the port at kem. it was a huge thunderstorm, so violent that the boat was rocking, the railings grazing the surface of the water as waves crashed over onto the boat. i truly thought that we might die on that trip, lost at sea. it was frightening, utterly, but also thrilling.