Loitering by the Corner Store

I went running one evening last week. Very few people around here go running, so I felt a little conspicuous as I jogged along the main road and out to the vineyards and back. Sure enough, two guys hanging out at the magazine (corner store) took note of my strange activity and stopped me to talk on the way back into town. They wanted to know how long I'd been running and where I'd gone to. Both seemed pretty impressed that I was actually running. Both guys were pretty friendly, they shared their sunflower seeds with me. One was Georgian and the other Armenian. We had a friendly chat for about 30 minutes. The Georgian guy (Artur) has family living in Los Angeles. He went to visit them, once, and wanted to talk with me about America. He wanted to see some photos of America, so I agreed to come back to the store the following evening and show him. This conversation was almost exclusively in Russian. I was able to follow about 80% of it, which made me pretty happy.

I returned to the store the following evening at 6 pm. Well, 6:10 pm, to be honest. I was preparing for English Club and was running a little behind. There was nobody else standing outside the store, so I stood and waited a little while. I had been waiting 10 minutes or so when an older fellow walked up to me and started talking to me. He looked familiar, I think i had been introduced to him the night before at the store. This guy was very friendly, really wanted to talk to me, and had exactly 0 teeth (I checked when he wasn't looking). He spoke in all vowels and I could hardly understand anything he said. Nice guy, though. He kept shaking my hand a lot. He offered me his hankie, since I'd been standing in the warm sun and was sweating a bit. He also went in the store and bought me a beer. Drinking in public seems to be legal in Russia, or at least completely un-enforced, but I felt a little strange strange standing on the sidewalk knocking back a beer. I drank a little and gave the rest back to my new friend, since I was going to be teaching in 30 minutes. We "talked" for about 20 minutes. Or rather, he kept talking, I kept saying "Sorry, I don't understand", and he kept shaking my hand. In our entire conversation, all I got was that he was Tatarstani, something about "women and children", and "America" and "good" were also mentioned in the same sentence. After 20 minutes I decided it was time to go. Artur was a no-show (or i'd missed him), the current conversation wasn't really going anywhere, and I had to get to English Club, anyways. Good times. Meeting new people is always fun, and sometimes you get free beer.

Return to Russia

I flew out of Boston Thursday evening and got maybe 4 hours sleep on the way to Munich. I was feeling a little rugged when I arrived but decided to keep with my plan to not stay at the airport for the next 14 hours. I ditched my backpack at storage and then hopped on the S-bahn into the city, armed with a list of places in the old city. I arrived at the Marienplatz, site of the famed Glockenspiel, shortly before noon. The Marienplatz is beautiful. You walk up the steps out of the S-bahn into the middle of a stone plaza, surrounded by gothic buildings and clocktowers. The Glockenspiel is pretty cool. It's a big mechanical clock with a bunch of mideviel wooden figures that dance and march around, accompanied by bells and chimes. The show lasts almost 10 minutes.

After the Glockenspiel I caught lunch at a German restaurant. I had pork medallions and mashed potatoes with a really good German beer. Yum. It was a beautiful sunny day, so I grabbed a latte at Starbucks and walked around for a while. Near the Residenz (former home of the Wittleberg princes) is Englischer park, a gorgeous area. While walking around, I noticed several people sleeping on benches in the sun. I took the hint and claimed a bench for myself and slept for 30 min next to a fountain while a man was playing a cello nearby. It was nice. After my nap, I got another latte and walked around some more. I dropped into an Ancient Egypt exibit for a little while. Most of the plaques were in German, but it was still interesting. In the early evening I passed by a biergarten near a market and dropped in to investigate. I grabbed a whopper on the way out and made my way back to the airport.

When I checked in at the Aeroflot desk, I learned that when Luftansa transferred my baggage to Aeroflot they had written down the wrong flight number on the baggage tags. Fortunately, my bags ended up being loaded on the same flight as me to Moscow. That would have been a real mess to sort out in Moscow... God was looking out for me there. I think I got 3 hours sleep on the overnight flight to Moscow and was feeling even more rugged when I landed at 4:30 am. I made the transfer to Sheremetevo terminal 1 OK and caught the 9:05 am flight to Anapa. My friend Roman from church picked me up at the airport. ~36 hours later, I made it back to the house in Anapa and finally got some sleep.

Last day of work at MSFT

I dropped in to the office for a few hours today. I was hoping that last Wednesday would have been the last day, but I needed to wrap up a few odds and ends. It's a little strange to be finishing at MSFT after 8.5 years. Cleaning out my office was a trip down memory lane, I'd been lugging a bunch of old paperwork around for years and had to clean it all out. Documentation plans from Sep 2000, specs for features/products that never went any where, "moral" gifts (how many clocks and thermometers does a person need), etc... It's been a great time here at MSFT. Working with motivated intelligent people who really get excited about technology has been awesome, playing with multi-billion dollar toys has been a blast. I won't miss the late nights and firedrills, though, and too bad the stock options never really panned out. I'm enjoying my time off before I head to NH and then Russia. Loafing on the couch in my underwear at 11am on a weekday, reading comics, and drinking beer is quite nice. A guy could get used to that. I've still got quite a few things to do in the next week and a half. Anyone want to buy my car?