I got a phone call from Irina late in the morning, and she told me to meet her in the main lobby of the main building. When I got there, she told me that my passport was ready to be picked up! Getting my passport was the crucial piece to leaving Russia early...
(When you arrive in Russia, you have to register your visa and passport for you to be in the country legally. As we had just gotten our visas extended, we had to re-register them. The first time we registered our passports, they were gone for 4 weeks. This time, Irina had to intercept my passport somewhere in the middle of this process, and have it sped up, just so I could leave.)
She took me down in the bowels of the main building, to the police office that I didn't even know existed (although it makes sense when you think about how everything a person needed was in that building), and they gave it back. I'm pretty sure she had to bribe someone or grease the wheels of bureaucracy. I knew I ought to buy her some flowers or candy for all her trouble.
The one unfortunate thing about such a fortunate surprise is that I had no time to fulfill my last wish in Russia: to see Lenin's dead body. But now I have a great excuse to return.
After the excitement at getting my passport back, we had to make a plan for the day. I went off to start packing, and we agreed to meet at 4pm to buy my plane tickets. So at 4pm, as night was falling, Irina and I went off to the travel agency to get my tickets. My flight left from DME at 5am, so I was going to have to leave at 3am... no sleep for me! I met Alissa at the cafe for one more meal of kotlety po-kievsky (chicken kiev), french fries, and ketchup. During the half hour we were eating, it had snowed, and there was already an inch on the ground. I decided that it was a good time to go buy some vodka (it's always a good time to buy some vodka!). Although I had my wallet and purse with me, I was only wearing tennis shoes with a mesh top, and I briefly thought about running upstairs to put some boots on, but since there was only an inch of snow, I decided against it. But in the 15 minutes I was riding the bus, it snowed another inch, and as I was stepping off the bus, I put my foot into a puddle of slush. (By the time I got back to the dorm, my feet were soaked anyway. Sigh)
Inside the liquor store I was standing in front of a shelf of Russkiy Standart vodka, trying to remember how much alcohol I was allowed to bring back to America, when I had the following conversation with a Russian man:
Russian man, indicating the shelf next to me: (this vodka here is cheaper...)
Me, nodding: (yes yes I know, but it's for my family)
Russian man: (oh, yeah, of course Russian Standard is better)
But thanks anyway, Russian man, for thinking I wanted the most vodka bang for my buck. You were looking out for me, and I thought that was sweet.
After I trudged home with soaking, frozen feet, Alissa came by my room and told me that there was a snowball fight going on outside. So we pulled on our boots (I wised up) and ran out into the courtyard to have a snowball fight. When the fight broke up, she and I and our Bavarian friend Christian made a snowman. After that, we decided my last night in Russia deserved to go out with a very Russian bang. We were trying to figure out the best way to achieve this goal, and it dawned on us that we had not yet taken advantage of Russia's lack of open container law. The only way we could do that was by walking to the beer kiosk at the rinok, buying some beer, and walking home in the snow drinking them.
Walking through the football fields of MGU was eerie, with the snow on the ground, and the snow falling, and the main building all lit up inside a cloud. We stopped by an eternal flame and warmed ourselves up, then Christian and I threw our bottles into an empty swimming pool (when in Russia...) but Alissa was still drinking hers when we passed through the guardhouse into one of the courtyards of the main building.This is where the story gets much more exciting and scary. We were walking into the building (at the opposite end of our sector) when two guys stopped us and started talking to Alissa. My first reaction (and hers too) was that they were hitting on her, so we told them to leave us alone. Then Alissa actually started listening to what they were saying.... They told her they were student police, and that they were going to arrest her for possession of alcohol on the campus. Apparently MGU is a dry campus, something nobody seemed to know until then. The irony of being stopped by these student police was that they were obviously drunk. They were stumbling, slurring their words, and reeked of alcohol. And they were up to no good: they wanted to escort Alissa to the nearest militsya post. Alone. No way in hell that was happening.
We (Alissa and Christian) started arguing with them, telling them it was my last day in Russia and they were ruining it and I would tell everyone how awful Russia was. Christian called some of our Uzbek friends, who were apparently considered the campus mafia. They came by and started talking smack, but ultimately failed to convince the student police to leave us alone. Then I called Irina, and she was there in less than a minute. She talked to them for a few minutes, then they ran away. Apparently she told the student police that she was going to call their supervisor and have him sort this mess out. They skipped out because they didn't want the supervisor to find them drunk.
I finished packing and distributed my chainik, pots, and dishes among my friends as we sat and drank and ate cake together. They were fighting over who would get to go to the airport with me...
and then the world's smalled cab pulled up. It became pretty clear that the only person going with me to the airport would be Irina. So I said goodbye to my friends, and set off on the next part of this adventure...
