But I'm getting ahead of myself. We had a great trip to Moscow. We narrowly missed missing the train on the way there, and sat up late playing "Durak," which seems to be the national card game of Russia. We arrived in Moscow, the city that supposedly never sleeps, when it was still dark. Luckily, we discovered that the Produkti Store on the Corner, at least, never sleeps, and got some stuff for breakfast.
We stayed in the Godzilla Hostel, a clean, comfortable place full of English-speaking travelers from around the world. We walked around the Red Square and inside the Kremlin, saw the Tretyakov Gallery, Arbat Street, GUM, and a smaller wooden Kremlin/souvenier market. Many of these excursions were led by our friend Anna, who spent a year in the states and now lives in Moscow.
On the way home on the train, we feasted on chocolate and debated several of the world's problems and their solutions, and it began to dawn on us that this is the end of the Old Testament of the Kazan Collective.
The next day I woke up in time to see the sun rising over the villages, which turned into dachas, which gradually turned into Kazan. It was stunning. I didn't get a decent picture. And when we arrived, it felt like coming home.
It's hard to say good-bye to people, especially in a language with such different and specific kinds of good-byes. I don't want to say "Proshai," because I hope to come back here someday, but "Do svidanye" doesn't feel right.
It's hard to say good-bye to people, in any language, who have taught me so much. Some of what I've learned here, in retrospect, is pretty basic, but important nonetheless. Whatever I might say about the ludicrous bureaucracy, the corruption, the Soviet gaudiness and bombasticism, I think Russia has most of the important things figured out. Things like drinking tea together and being kind to strangers and telling stories. Things like shauma and spontaneity and hospitality and goat-hair products in general. You know, stuff like that. Russia has taught me a very different kind of happiness, which comes not from "success" or "ambition" in the American sense, political victories, musical accomplishment, or academic success, but from what I just mentioned: spontaneity and adventurousness, the kindness of strangers, good company and friends, and a level of sincerity unbeknownst to me before but knownst to me now.
Shauma and goat-hair are up there, too.
My host family, my professors, my Russian and American friends, thank you. You guys have taught me patience and trust and a sense of humor, you've taught me to be honest and to push for change, you've taught me to break into song in the hallways and understand participles and throw people in sambo and stay cool even in the nuttiest of circumstances. And I'm sure this will be only the beginning of our many adventures, not the least of which will be our horseback voyage across Eurasia.
Sadness isn't the right word for what I'm feeling right now. It's more like a sense of vastness, a realization that my world, the general orbit I call my home, has grown exponentially to encompass not only my Деревня in the Pioneer Valley, but this incredible city on the Volga and all that it holds. And I'll miss this place and these people, but there's nothing lost, only experience and wisdom gained.
And with that I'll conclude with four lines from one of my favorite poems:
"I am a part of all that I have met;
And all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move."
-Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ulysses
