Last night started out normally. I went to dinner for a friend's birthday at a hopping yet expensive Russian restaurant called Cafe Mayak, where the $8 bowl of minestrone soup I ordered was really nothing but "water with things in it" (i.e. a thin broth with mixed vegetables floating around in it)--at least that's how the fascist, white supremacist German sitting to my left referred to it. I had a beer and a couple of glasses of wine, which when taken in combination with my head cold made me feel sort of floaty and surreal. After dinner our interesting group of Europeans, Russians, Vietnamese, and Americans made our way to a bar called Gogol, where I ate some unidentifiable yet delicious Russian dessert and saw the largest cockroach in the Northern Hemisphere crawling across the floor. Said cockroach (what I prefer to refer to as an evolutionary abomination in serious need of annihilation) and the caterpillar I found earlier that day in my cabbage soup really made for a critter-filled day.
After some interesting conversation at Gogol I finally decided to call it a night, since I was quickly losing my voice from my cold. My room mate and a Russian friend helped me find a taxi (well, not really a taxi, but an unmarked car claiming to be a taxi) back to the university. I must say that the taxi ride back to MGU was pretty amazing. I'm not very accustomed to living in a big city, and living in such an old and history-rich city as Moscow is quite a transition from Ark City or Stanford life. It was around 4:00 in the morning and the streets were practically empty, but all the amazing land marks were all lit up and looking majestic: the Kremlin, St. Basil's Cathedral, the Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer, the giant old buildings commissioned by Stalin, MGU. As we drove by all of these amazing architectural wonders all lit up in the silent night, I was pretty excited. But anyway, enough of that corny shit.
Once I got back to MGU, the real fun started. Keep in mind that it was around 4:00 in the morning, and technically the university shuts down around midnight. But there are still security guards there to check your documents and let you in, so I figured I wouldn't have any problems. What a silly assumption to make. When I took the elevator up to the fourth floor (that's where my room is), I ran into some real problems. Every night the "dorm mother", whose sole purpose seems to be to nag us since our parents aren't here to do so, closes these iron gates right at the entrance to the elevator, so that anyone trying to leave the elevator can't get out. Well, as I attempted to exit the elevator, there was the iron gate, right smack in my face and padlocked shut. Before I could turn back around and take the elevator back down to the first floor, the elevator doors closed, and I was stuck between the closed elevator and the gate. There was literally a half foot of space between the elevator doors and the gate. I was stuck like a rat in a tiny cage. At first I tried to remain calm and tested my key to see if it would unlock the padlock. That didn't work. Then I stood there for a second doing absolutely nothing. Then I started pathetically calling "Hello? Hello?" in my awful Russian, hoping that the dorm mother sleeping in the other room would hear me and have mercy. Then I started shaking the iron gate, hoping that would get her attention. When nothing happened, I tried to call my room mate, only to discover that I had no credit on my phone. Then I started panicking. Holy shit, I was going to be stuck between the elevator and the little f@#$ing gate for the entire night. I couldn't even reach the elevator button to open the elevator back up. So I resigned myself to squeezing myself into a sitting position in my little rat cage, feeling like an idiot, all dressed up in clubbing clothes and heels, a 23-year-old adult stuck in the limbo of elevator-gate exile.
Finally, the dorm mother emerged from her hibernation, grumbling at me in Russian. From her diatribe I caught "do you see what time it is?" and "how long have you been stuck here?" and "the dorm closes at midnight, you should know that" and "you should have taken the stairs" and "my God". Who knows what else she said, since I have the Russian level of a five-year-old. All I know is, I felt like a blooming idiot. She pushed the elevator button for me, I took the elevator back down to the first floor, and I took the stairs to my room.
God I'm an idiot.
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