Where the Bands Are

I’ll write all about my weekend, but I’m sleepy so I can’t promise it’ll all come out in complete sentences.  Pretty exciting Friday night: I went down to the train station and finally bought my tickets to St. Petersburg.  It turned out to be much easier and even cheaper to do it in person, rather than online.  Now I just have to figure out how I’m getting from Prague to Moscow and from Moscow back here at the end of the month.  But, you know, baby steps...

Saturday I went with my new friend Irina to temple.  She’s Christian but studies Hebrew (at the synagogue in fact) and is very interested in Judaism.  She was lucky to have come on that day because we had special guest singers at the service, but more on them later.  That afternoon I went to see 4 Christmases, a totally generic, predictable holiday movie with one redeeming feature: a scene of Reese Witherspoon beating the shit out of a roomful of kids.  I sure do like to see those youngsters spill.  Then at night I went with a couple students to an arthouse/bar called 2KY (KY is pronounced “coo” in Russian, although to me it looks like KY Jelly).  It was really hip yet comfortable there, more Columbus than Cleveland if that helps, and the band was great.  Unfortunately, we stayed there way too long.  I didn’t want to get wasted, but everyone else did, especially the girls’ 15-year old friend.  (On the one hand, I was very annoyed by the young girl’s inability to hold her liquor.  I’m 23 and have no business with a drunk-ass 15 year-old.  On the other hand, I remembered going out with Alyse Shafran when I was, indeed, even younger than that...)  Luckily, since we arrived 8, I had time to get drunk, get bored, get annoyed and still get home by midnight.

Today I went to work with the high schoolers who are preparing for their college entrance exam.  For me it’s terribly uninteresting, but they really appreciate the chance to practice the spoken English component with a native speaker.  Strangely, today they practiced doing monologues, which they could’ve done with anyone.  Then in the afternoon I went with three friends, including the aforementioned Irina, to a local Chanukah concert.  It took place at a huge stadium, curiously named the Palace of Youth.  The bill included the Israeli two singers who wowed me at the synagogue last week, a couple dance groups from the JCC and Klara Novosomethingkina, a singing Russian comedy legend.  Because I couldn’t understand any of her jokes, although I did know when she was making fun of Bush, I didn’t get much out of Klara’s performance.  Actually, all I got was low self-esteem, because everybody except me was laughing hysterically.  The two Israeli singers were wonderful and I teared up when they sang a medley of songs from Fiddler on the Roof.  Lucky they didn’t do Hatikvah or I’d have been a wreck.  But what stole the show for me was a steadily growing group of bored little children in front of the stage.  At first it was one curly headed girl, dancing and reminding me of my younger self.  Then she was joined by another, then many more, until the kids were literally running all over the stage.  Klara had a lot to say to and about children, so nobody stopped them when they went as far as sitting in a clump center-stage.  Adorable.

About my low self-esteem: it’s not as bad as all that.  A couple days ago a shopgirl who’d overheard me conversing with someone else about my origins came up to express her shock that I was a foreigner.  Speaking with me, she said, she thought I was “one of our girls.”  Also at the concert I ran into a few people I met when I first arrived.  I said two or three words to them tonight before they said my accent was much better.  So, I’m improving, despite all the time I spend watching American tv. 

Now I’ll go take a bath because I smell like the roasted chicken I ate with my bare hands.  Merry Christmas or Happy Jewish Christmas (eat an extra eggroll for me).