*Jim Morrison and the Doors -Soft parade I think
Oh shut the %@c& up! God I have not wanted someone to kill more than I ever have on that almost eight hour plane trip. And we are only half way home. It didn’t seem this long when we were going in the other direction. To make matters worse again I don’t know what time it is. My body told me it was two in the morning and I was starting to see double, but the sun was still up in the air. We tried to get the girls to go to bed and they didn’t want to. They finally crashed at about 3am Sunday Birobidzan time (I found out Birobidzan is spelt that way. I was spelling it wrong.) Moscow time 7pm Saturday, New York time 11am Saturday.
I don’t want to be too harsh on my observations of the girls it was an eight hour trip that needed a three hour car ride to get started, oh and there was an hour and a half sitting in the airport, so it was a long day and they really didn’t act that bad when you take it all in perspective.
We got up about 7am in Birobidzan. Our car was coming at 9am. I dressed and took the girls to the market to buy something to eat and maybe get them a jacket or two if I could find them. The market was just opening and people were just putting out their wares. It was cold and none of the jacket places open so I bought some bananas and some grapes for the girls. We went to the bakery to get something more to eat and they didn’t have anything that looked tasty. Russian’s are not into very sweet pastries like Americans. On the way to the room the girls ate two bananas and started on the grapes. In the room they ate the other two bananas. I took the girls back down with the luggage while Teri finished up her makeup. Our car and Yulila arrived on time and shortly after that Teri came down stairs and into the Mitsubishi something or other (an interesting 4wheel drive van type vehicle with folding seats. It’s not sold in America as far as I know and I also didn’t get pictures.) for our trip.
Pass some places that had become familiar landmarks and then a left out of town and nothing but trees and farms.
After an hour or so we stopped in front of a house and were asked if we wanted potato croquette like things about four or so inches long and still warm. They were pretty good. After this the girls asked how much longer, Teri caught it without a translator. A little while later it was time to take a pee break. We pulled off the road in front of a building that looked closed. Our driver told us we could go here so the girls and I get out and walk toward the building. Our Driver says something and points toward the side of the building and we walk ( I carried Nastia, suddenly she was too girlie to walk through weeds) toward it and from around the corner I see a small wooden building and except for lacking the quarter moons in the doors I was sure what was coming. It was a two door model and it was in need of some repair. The doors either didn’t stay closed (the left) or didn’t want to open (the right). I would like to call this outhouse a two seat model but there were no seats, just a rectangle in each floor with metal rails running parallel to the hole. I was scared someone would fall in. Teri didn’t even get out of the car. When I got back I told her she would have not survived the experience. Fate had a trick up her sleeve for Teri later. I didn’t know at the time but this was the end of the really great behavior by the girls. The girls started to get more restless. We had expected them to start acting up as the trip progressed either from stress of leaving or from boredom. At the airport our first support left us, our driver who had been very patient with the girls and friendly. When we went through the metal detectors our final support left when Yulila said good bye.
Inside the airport the girls were antsy and we tried to distract them with gum, then coloring books, then blank sheets of paper to write on and finally we gave in and let them eat the crab potato chips Teri was saving for her father. They were being pigs and were getting carried away with eating the chips when Nastia pulled away from Elena and the bag ripped already down the side sprayed the remaining contents across the floor towards me sitting across from them. Nastia went down on her knees; I thought to clean up the mess. Elena joined her. While Elena helped me clean it up, Nastia continued to eat the chips. She had to be pulled away from the chips. She thought it was funny to continue eating the chips. Blessedly the plane was called not long after that I thought. It was not a blessing really.
Have you ever watched the horror film the evil dead? Doesn’t matter, in it our hero has to battle the forces of evil until the sun comes up. When he succeeds and the sun comes up, you think it is over and there is a short period of calm, then suddenly everything changes when the evil spirits speed up time and make it sun down again and it all starts again. Well that describes or day to a tee. The evil spirits take a break until the plane is in the air and there is no going back. One has to go to the bathroom, so does the other. I don’t trust them in the bathroom together, so they have to go separately. They are not interested in coloring books, blank sheets of paper, their magna-doodle and to top it off the headphone jack doesn’t work well for Nastia and mine not at all. Teri’s worked and I think Elena’s was ok. The first feature is some Russian cartoons that the girls know well and watch for several seconds. After that it’s koopotza time (bathroom). They went about a dozen times during the flight and it was only an eight hour flight. I know I fed them grapes and maybe that got things going inside, but I also gave them bananas and that should have counteracted the grapes and on the car ride they had cheese. I know some of the trips to the bathroom at the end of the flight were bogus, but I’ll get into that in a minute. At one point early in the flight Nastia makes friends with the two women behind her and tell them she is going to America and has been adopted by the Americans and they don’t understand us too well. She makes friends with someone across the aisle who was reading a magazine about airplanes through history, it looked interesting. And finally she made friends with the stewardesses, all of them. She would call them by name and she even hung out with them in the back of the plane, which by this point was a blessing. She stayed with them for about half an hour and only came back when they started serving food again. I didn’t not let her go back with them because they were working, so she said she had to go to the bathroom and I’d been accompanying her there, this time I let her go ahead of me and she heads for the bathroom, hangs a turn at them, goes around and down the other aisle to the back of the plane. I follow her there and I am fuming. I don’t like being lied to like that. I grab her arm and take her back to her seat and she is stuck there for the rest of the flight. I’d like to think I’d let her go back to the end of the plane after the stewardesses had finished working, I’d know. When the plane landed both Teri and I were on the verge of killing something. So we bit into each other, or at least I did. I don’t remember what it was about or if I gave the first snotty remark or the second or even just imagined the tone. It was like a nuclear war, just quiet. It was quick like a summer rain and when the sun came back out you had two grumpy people instead of a bunch of flowers reaching for the sun.
We are met at the gate by Anatoly, which was god sent. We divide up the bags and head for the car. Now the girls are wired still and Teri and I are still pissed at each other, but we’re trying to work it out. Repeatedly the girls are warned about consequence for acting up in the car. I swat Elena and tell her spot, which is bed. We get to the hotel and have to fill out papers for embassy. The first thing we do is put Elena to bed, the second thing we do is start to work on the paperwork. It is five or six at night in Moscow and I may have said this before, I’m writing this over three days, it is 2am in the morning in Birobidzan. Elena is fighting every inch of the way to get out of bed. Nastia is on her bed it is relaxing and quiet. Elena is on my bed and inching off it, rolling over toward Nastia to tell her a joke. I tell her to be quiet, to turn over and face away for Nastia. Finally I turn her over and swat her on the backside. She gets angry, turns over, if only for a moment, pulls the cover over her head and for a little while we have silence to finish the paperwork, which is good, because letters and numbers are starting not to make much sense and I need sleep. Which I get soon afterwards, we decide to be bad parents or maybe its smart parents and not wake the girls to go to dinner and we all go to bed.
Next morning I wake up at 3am, Moscow time, 11am Birobidzan time.
