25.01.10
I probably spent almost as much time travelling over the holidays as I did home with my family. I traveled from Rostov to Moscow knowing that Aeroflot had cancelled my flight to Washington, not knowing if there was a substitute route available. That's a little nerve-racking. I had contacted Aeroflot a few days before leaving Rostov. They told me to contact my travel agency. I bought an international phone card, which luckily functioned probably, and contacted the travel agency in America. I was calling Maryland, but for some reason a person with a strong Indian accent picked up. I struggled to clarify my problem for him. He said he'd get back to me via email. He never did.
I emailed the agency just before leaving. I heard from them again after arriving home. They told me that Aeroflot was obligated by some airline law to get me to Washington. This they had done as best they could: they gave me a first class seat from Moscow to Amsterdam, and an exit row seat on the long flight from Amtsterdam to Washington. And I had been thinking as I approached the Aeroflot desk at two in the morning amongst a crowd of angry Russians, all of whom had had flights cancelled, that Aeroflot would give me their sincerest apologies and wish me better luck next time. It would have been another 'welcome to Russia' moment. But no, Aeroflot did their job in first-class fashion. To be fair, I think any airline would've cancelled a flight with so few passengers on board - at least I presume that's why the flight was cancelled; how many people want to fly to Washington on New Year's Eve; any sane American is already home by the twenty fifth!
They couldn't help it that the flight from Amsterdam to Washington was delayed. It was a KLM flight. We had gone through gratuitous security, probably because someone had tried to blow up a plane in Detroit on Chrismtas a few days before, and had taken our seats on the plane when the captain announced that there was a small technical matter that would require an additional halfhour before takeoff. A halfhour later he said it would be another ninety minutes. An hour after that he announced that we would switch planes. I arrived in Washington on the evening of New Year's Eve several hours after my connecting flight left for Oakland. Fortunately, there was a very helpful man at the Jetblue desk who arranged for a discount hotel room at a local Sheraton, and let me make a phone call home to announce the delay.
I was pretty happy in the hotel room in Washington. It was nice to have a bed. I was exhausted. In preparation for the time change, I deprived myself of normal sleep the night before my trip, and had gotten by on cat naps through one night at the airport and on my flights. I slept well on New Years Eve and flew home the next morning without a problem.
I wasn't home for long before it felt like I had never left. That's good because without such a feeling I don't think I could ever bring myself to leave that place.
Flying back to Moscow was fun. I flew San Francisco to Denver and Denver to Houston on United, and then Houston to Moscow on Singapore Airlines, which I highly recommend. I was on a plane where each passenger has a computer in front of them on which they can watch a variety of movies, or play logic games. I watched Ratatoullie, The Golden Compass, and a German movie about a guy who loses his memory in an accident, and slowly remembers that he took part in a cyber crime. I also played a game called Caveman, where you, the caveman, have to push rocks in the right places in order to escape a cave before it's filled with lava. Because of this variety of entertainment, and intermittent naps, I hardly felt the eleven hours it took to get to Moscow.

I was in Vladimir for a few days. I saw some old colleagues, students and friends. I met a few of the new teachers at the AH too. One of them is G, who I found similar to myself in a way. When discussing why someone would do such a thing as come to Russia to teach English, we simultaneously declared that there was nothing in America to keep us there. It was a bit frightening for me, since G is much older than me and I didn't think there were middle-aged men who reasoned like I do. He's actually on the other side of a long career, was married and has children who have grown up. Perhaps it means that I could potentially feel some sort of longing for living abroad throughout my entire life. It doesn't go away. It hasn't yet, and I was kind of hoping it would. It would make things simpler for me.
I was thinking about math recently. I was trying to evoke any and every feeling I've ever felt about math. There was the enthusiasm I felt up through my first year in Bloomington, and then there were the long days of despair I experienced toward the end of my studies. Those times are almost two years past. It's long enough ago that it's not easy to remember how I got along with math. Maybe I could say that any psychological wounds have healed, or maybe the day I go back to a math program is the day I want to start learning another language instead of math. In any case, on that recent day I came to the conclusion that it would not be a bad idea to study math seriously again. But that was just one day's conclusion. On another day the conclusion may have been different.

My grandfather passed away over the Christmas holiday. He was one hundred years old, and ready to move on with his life. I didn't always appreciate what he brought when he came to visit, be it obligatory prayer before dinner or a reminder of starving children in China when I didn't eat my asparagus. I'll remember him because he really helped me learn how to play chess. Were it not for him, I may never have come to appreciate the game as I do today. Maybe it was no coincidence that I played so well the other day at the chess club. Grandpa was with me in spirit.
So many people had come that the tournament was structured not so that everyone plays everyone else, but so that winners play winners and losers play losers. I played well enough to be eventually slotted against Gilbert Godfrey, who checkmated me in a few moves, followed by Stoneface, who, after a big exchange, somehow ended up a bishop up. For the exception of those two and a few others, I held my own that day. I'll have to remember Grandpa more often when I visit the chessclub on Sundays.