Meanwhile in the Rest of my Life...

So it has come abundantly clear that I am not going to finish telling you about my Volga trip anytime soon. And since life has all of a sudden decided to get busy for me, I have had very little time to update my blog. As such, I am going to devote this entry to trying to briefly sum up what has happened in the past month of my life. I've actually done quite a bit surprisingly, so I'm going to try and hit the main highlights. The first week we got back from our cruise our RD managed to arrange a basketball game at a gym against some local Russians. As most of you know, I am perhaps the whitest white boy on the face of the planet, and despite my height, any sort of skill in basketball is completely beyond me. Thinking however that this was going to be a friendly game among the members of our group, I gladly signed on. It was not. After having arrived at a gym that probably fulfills every expectation you could have for a soviet era gym (if you have expectations for soviet era gyms...), we were met by a group of Russian men who clearly spent too much time playing basketball, and not enough time doing other things like holding jobs. Led by "Shirtless sweaty man", "Guy who looks like the guy on our team" and "the Leviathan" (I got to cover him), team Russia thoroughly trounced team America plus Nathan's friend and "Really Really Old Guy" 100-82. We had a lot of fun nevertheless, I scored my share of points and even stuffed a guy on the other team, "Really Really Old Guy" showed that he could still run with the young guns (until he got knocked to the floor one too many times), and we all learned that we don't have much skill at basketball. The only downsides were that I had to cover "The Leviathan", who was approximately nine feet tall and twice as heavy as me, "Shirtless sweaty man" elbowed me in the face and gave me a bloody nose, and the bathroom didn't have any toilet paper (thank god for newspaper). That Wednesday we went to a CKA hockey game. Tickets that would cost $90+ in America cost approximately $6 in Russia, so needless to say I have been to, and plan on attending more games in the future. The next week we went to the Michailovsky Theater and watched their production of "The Nutcracker". I love "The Nutcracker", I took ballet and then modern dance for many years (until I was about 18) and have been in many productions of "the Nutcracker", so the ballet is quite near and dear to my heart. The performance was absolutely amazing, and the theater was beautiful. I'm going to end this entry here, since I don't want it to be too long, but I promise I'll write another one soon!