Day 2

I woke up in the fancy apartments of the Institute of Environmental Engineering and Anya and I immediately went to meet our Moscow guide Maria (an acquaintance of mine from Barnaul who moved to Moscow to study). The first 2 hours of our trip were spent looking for the Work and Travel office. We approached a security guard with a map and asked where the office was because we couldn't find it; he turned the map around and showed us where to go—aha! That was the reason.

We went into the office to pick up our T-shirts. They asked us, "Where are you from?" "From Barnaul." "From where??" "Altai Krai." "Damn, let me see what we have." He gave us the T-shirts and we continued our journey. After that, we walked along Arbat, collected a bunch of flyers, and threw them away. I saw Tsoi's wall and mentally sang Kino's song "Stuk". We went to Alexander Garden and sat on the lawn, not waiting for the mounted police to kick us out. We went to Red Square where a "Rock Against Cancer" concert was happening, hosted by Malakhov—not the one who heals fractures with plantains, but the one who would have made a decent career as a telephone operator. When we walked past this "rock concert," they were announcing the group Tutsi. We went to the bridge and saw a pink pile of people (because the concert T-shirts were pink) moshing like crazy. We walked through GUM and went to MSU, sat at the bus stop in front of the building, and walked to Sparrow Hills. We looked at Moscow and decided to go down to the embankment. We walked along the Moskva River embankment; it's a pity I didn't see any three-eyed fish. We got on the metro; how that phrase in the carriage ate my brain: "Dear passengers, please be mutually polite, give up your seats to the disabled, the elderly, and passengers with children." We went to VDNKh to see the Museum of Cosmonautics, sat in front of the monument, and saw a balloon tethered to the ground. Masha said if you pay them a certain amount—I don't remember exactly how much—they will let it go into the air. I am an aristocrat from Sitnikov, but not that much. We walked around VDNKh. My legs were already like cotton, so we said goodbye to Masha and decided to take the monorail home. We bought some poison at the market, like pies and other junk, and went to our suite.