Russia Redux – What on earth am I doing here *again*?

For those of my readers with whom I’ve been shamefully inconsistent in staying in touch, an update is in order. In June I graduated from Swarthmore with honors, majoring in Russian language and literature and minoring in political science. Yes, it used to be other way around. But I got back from Russia senior fall refreshed and with an updated outlook on life, and midway through fall semester decided to switch majors. Yes, that produced exactly as much a pain in the buns for me and my professors and advisors and the registrar’s office as you’re thinking it did. But I had a wonderful senior year, in which I made some very close new friends and got closer to the old ones, and generally enjoyed my last year at Swat. Somewhere in all of the confusion of growing up to the point where I am no longer covered by my parents’ health insurance, and my friends have jobs and pay rent, and people I knew from high school get married, and generally the walls of delusion about adulthood that I had so artfully constructed for myself begin to crumble, I decided that my most logical post-college move would be to return to Russia. I spent the summer at the Middlebury Russian school trying to get my Russian up to snuff, and on Friday evening finally arrived in Russia, again in St. Petersburg, with a group called the Russian Flagship.