Privet from Sir Novgorod the Great-- Russia

Pobloguju... I'm writing a little blog entry from Novgorod, Russia - Velikii Novgorod now. I have just reviewed with my good friend Sergei two years of his finds on the local WW2 battlefields with his friends, shovels, and GPS. Of late he's been researching the wartime aerodromes and airplane wrecks through interviews and photography around the area in the small ... I mean extinct... little villages around the battlefields. It is just amazing what he's found... including a German pilot, complete with rosary and glasses. The stories of the non-heroic behavior by Soviet soldiers, and the crazy methods they used to operate in the battlefields, as retold by old men who were 12 years old, hiding in the bushes around the aerodromes. He's been researching and digging up tanks and things since 1989, and boy does he have a collection...

Anyway, the jet lag and ongoing marathon of chai and blinni and vino and balzam and on top of that catching up with everyone has gotten me hollow-eyed and slightly dizzy with overwhelm. I haven't even made it to the local kremlin, for the full nostalgaic effect. My English is also slipping, but never mind, I had a double degree, I don't need that English degree... the Russian degree is serving me very well.

What's amazing besides what changes in 10 years since I lived here is what doesn't change. Someone puts on a little weight, but the personality stays the same. Someone else breaks his leg and turns into a person with a handicap (an "invalid" here) but he still has the same old drinking problem. Another gets uterine cancer and lives with a colostomy bag but she still works through all my grammatical errors and makes sure I understand why I need to correct that accent...

And the konjushnja, the horse stable where I rode here, has moved so that it is right next to where I'm staying... and the young people there are still jumping huge fences on huge gorgeous horses...

Don't worry, those of you who still read this and wonder where I am and if I'm coming home, I still have a return ticket and I intend to use it. I'm just very, very, very far away from San Francisco.

Poka,
SS