Missing Home

Monday February 21 was a day of, unfortunately, more paperwork.  Tara and I met Chris, Rachel, and Trevor nearby Dom Studenta at 10am.  Marina was there and took from us those little gray slips of paper that we picked up last Friday.  We looked out into the corridor and there was a very long line of students.  Marina told us to go get breakfast and that she should be done in about an hour.  Every month, we need to renew our housing.  We are given a Пропуск (propoosk), which I explained in an earlier post, is an addition to our Student IDs which clarifies with a stamp of approval, that we live here. The пропуск expires every month, so that means we need to miss class once a month and miss class to take care of it.  The idea of this upset me, and put me off on a tangent of missing how American universities work where we simply make a payment on housing once, and we are good for a full semester, or in some cases the entire academic year.  Then I went on about how I missed just being able to swipe my student ID through the door to get into my building.  Here, it's 2 security checkpoints and the one on your floor.  I understand the risk, considering there are 40,000 people who are enrolled at МГУ, but I just felt that everything was so horribly complicated.

For the first time in two weeks, I had a delicious breakfast at the cafe consisting of two fried eggs, sunny side up, a freshly cut tomato, bacon, and kidney beans.  It made me miss home where I'd have a bagel and eggs in the morning with a bowl of fresh strawberries.  I can't get that here, at least not to the same affect.  Then came the pangs of missing my grilled turkey and cheese wraps with onions, lettuce, tomato, and honey mustard.  Turkey isn't really all that popular here.  It's either pork, beef, fish, or chicken.  I miss my turkey.

Marina had our new Пропуск waiting for us.  Marcus and my parents were ready to send me out packages, and considering that I had no idea as to how the package would get to me, I thought I'd ask Marina. She said Russian mail is very slow and inefficient.  It could take 1-2 months to get here. And even then, I may not get it.  It's really hard to get into this building without special permission, and the mailmen, evidently don't have special permission.  They have no way of getting in contact with me once the package arrives, and then they just take it back to the post office or the embassy, it sits there, and eventually it's either stolen or "lost." 
I asked her about tracking numbers, but she said that doesn't always help, because they sometimes play dumb, or if I can't speak fluent Russian to them, they won't even listen.  She said that she'd be able to help me, but it's a lot of work, and mostly not worth the hassle.

At this point, I was feeling pretty depressed.  I missed the non-complicated life of living in American universities, food, and now I couldn't get Marcus's belated V-Day present or any Reeses peanut butter cups.  Peanut butter is more or less nonexistent in Europe.  Rachel tried explaining what peanut butter was to some native Russians, then described a PB & J sandwich, and they thought it sounded absolutely disgusting.  These poor Europeans, they don't know what they are missing out on.

Today was actually the day I started this blog, and when I began writing about my grandmother, it made me even more depressed.  Later, I worked on doing laundry, and once again, one of the most complicated things - ever. Dealing with the laundry ladies is stressful, and once again, I missed the simplicity of being able to just take an empty machine, throw my stuff in with soap, leave and come back.  Here, you have to wait for them to do everything for you, but on their time.  I can't just pay them, leave my stuff with them and go.  No, I need to wait for a machine to be open, pay them, then I can leave.  I know it doesn't sound that bad, but if you ever have to attempt communicating with these grumpy women, then we'll see what you think after that.

At this point, I was missing Marcus horribly, and couldn't wait for him to get online.  He made me feel a little better by being his goofy self, but it was a really stressful and depressing day for me, and all I really wanted was to cuddle up with him.  Of course, there was no way that could happen, so I had to settle with hearing his voice and seeing him on Skype.