Friday

 A busy day.  I got up relatively early after sleeping for 3 hours or so – shouldn’t have had that second espresso…and boy is it LOUD outside the hotel.  There was a live band playing till about 10:30, then the sound of happy Russians and traffic were heard all night.  And I mean ALL night.  No air-conditioning in my room, so you have to keep the widow open.  Oh well, I’ll adjust.  So, I hit the breakfast buffet.  Buffet in any language is rarely a good thing.  I always find it interesting what other countries consider to be “breakfast”.  There was a vegetable salad that was kind of like cole slaw with oil instead of mayo – pretty good; fried eggs (over hard, really); hard boiled eggs, halved then tossed with mayo – that’s just weird; some sort of cold cuts; bread; cereal (for the Americans, no doubt; and I can’t remember the rest (see – I told you).  There was GOOD coffee, tea, and something that was either pear juice or apple juice.  A little expensive for 270 rubles, I thought.  Oh well. 

The day was full of work and shopping.  Not fun shopping.  I met my translator, Sergei, and the girl who will be my assistant, Anna Belova.  She’s a cute little 15 year old organists/pianist who speaks some English.  Se, we went shopping.  I had to buy a Russian cell phone because the competition people wanted to be able to get a hold of me.  I had tried to by a Russian sim card for my Iphone on Thursday, but it turned out to be the wrong one.  We attempted to do this again at a better store – they ended up having to cut the sim card to fit, and it didn’t work anyway.  Whatever.  I ended buying a cheapo cell phone, had to pay for the new sim card anyway (useless), but got to use the card I bought yesterday for the new phone.  What a chore.  Did I mention that I had to hand over my passport so he could take down all my information again???  They also wanted to know who issued the passport.  The government, I said.  That got funny looks.  Apparently there are agencies over here that do that for you.  Interesting.  So, Russian Cell Phone – check.

This took longer than one might have expected, and it was pouring rain outside.  So I went back to the hotel to veg for a few minutes and took a nap I was EXHAUSTED.  The I hit the mall for – you guessed it – free wifi.  And lunch.  I found a place where I could point to something that looked like a quiche and ate a quick bite while connecting with the rest of the world.  I love to travel, but when you are by yourself most of the time it does get lonely – it’s amazing what a little Facebooking can do to make it feel like you’ve got company.  I trekked back to the hotel to get my books and go practice.  The first round of the competition is at the philharmonia hall where the orchestra plays – it’s about a 25 minute walk from the hotel.  A nice walk, though.  I love getting to know cities that way.

I put on my competition badge I received earlier that day and went into the building.

The organ is a 3 manual Rieger-Kloss with extremely heavy action.  For all you non-organists this means that the keys feel heavy and are hard to push down.  This does not bode well for anything that must be played fast.  I had a good practice session, but barely got everything registered in time (this means picking all the stops I’ll use).  And the Russian music is useless on this instrument – just not enough color to pick from.  The organists who plays there was extremely polite and showed me how to work their “pistons” – much like a setter board (not worth explaining – if your organ has, then you desperately need to join the 21^st century).  Why, I ask, why.  Some strange qualities to the instrument, but I can handle it.  The only question I have – what’s the paintbrush for??? 

Practice – Check.

After a nice walk back to the hotel to drop off my stuff I went across the street to the mall to the little grocery store inside.  Did I mention that I breath in enough exhaust fumes walking around town everyday to be perpetually high?  The EPA would have a field day with all the black smoke belching out of all these old cars.  Anyhoo, back to shopping…shopping for food is not easy when you have to see pictures of what’s inside the bags so you know what they are.  It’s much like any other grocery store, but wow, the Russians love their sweets.  Lots of chocolate, cookies, cakes…surprisingly more than there would be in a small American store.  Found some good stuff for snacks, thank you Jesus, because if I eat one more bag of these Planters Peanuts I brought with me I’ll go crazy.  And I just HAD to try the smokey bacon potato chips – yum.

Food for hotel room – check.

Then I went back to the mall to see if I could Skype with the hubby.  No dice.  Said hi to pictures of my friends on Facebook and walked back to the hotel for dinner.  I decided to try the hotel restaurant tonight – Sushi and More.  Sounds like a strange marriage of Japanese and Russian…lucky me, there were no table available.  So I went to First Coffee again, where I ate the night before, pointed to something that looked somewhat attractive on the menu and was surprised, yet again, that it was not potatoes but some sort of meat (chicken???) in a yummy sauce. 

Came back to the room and collapsed.  What a long day.  Thankfully, no band tonight.  Turned on the German TV channel and watched Law and Order SVU in German and fell asleep. 

More work tomorrow!

I confess, I took this picture not only so I would know what “toilet” looked like in Russian, but also so that the phone, while connected to wifi, would register where the picture what taken on the little map of pictures on the phone.  Geeky, I know…