23 hours in Moscow

Hi, all. Melissa, Jenn and I took an overnight train from St. Petersburg to Moscow. We arrived here at around 5 in the morning (Saturday), and we will meet the guy with our plane tickets to Egypt at 4am (Sunday). I got zero sleep on the train. Damn overheated tube-of-death. Right now, I'm running on sugar, caffeine, and fumes.We did have a pretty cool day, though. We met up with Carrie (she left Petersburg a day early) at her boyfriend Ivan's apartment in the outskirts of Moscow-- a classic (by "classic" I mean "endearingly janky") Brezhnev era apartment building. We met his brother Petya and his friend Nikolai-- nice enough guys. They invited us to have vodka (at 10am, mind you) and buterbrody (Russian open-faced sandwiches) of butter and caviar with them. Sooooo Russian! I'm actually developing an affinity for red caviar now. Thanks to childhood memories of camping trips and fishing in the Idaho wilderness, I never thought I'd be able to see that stuff as anything other than bait-- goopy red stuff in little jars in my dad's tackle box. Anyway, it was really cool to be socializing with folks here in such a Russian way. I was jazzed. Of course, that could have just been the vodka.Melissa, Jenn and I then spent most of the day strolling around the center of the city, including a visit to the Tretiakov gallery (free admission with our student IDs! Woot!). Now we're killing time at the airport. Egypt or bust!Poka!