November 22 – Day 66

Holidays tend to bring out the anxiety and drama of the simplest situations so much so that it wouldn’t seem normal to me to sail through the day without any eventful happenings, so spending my day without any recognition that it was special, let alone THANKSGIVING was strange and ultimately depressing. I actually made it through my entire morning and first class before I even realized what day it was and even then it barely warranted as a mention as there were too many ballet routines to learn, songs to sing and scenes to perform for the faculty. It wasn’t until near the end of my acting class, after I had finished performing my scene, when Jenna mentioned that it was almost 6 pm on Thanksgiving and we were still working that I began to realize the reality of the situation. In some ways today was the beginning of the end of a phase of my life. It is the first Thanksgiving I have spent away from my family and most likely it will be the first of many holidays to come that will be spent in untraditional situations. For that reason I jumped at the opportunity to forgo another night at the theatre in lieu of the closest thing we could think of to Thanksgiving dinner at home with the family – TGI Friday’s with the group from NIU. In many ways they have become my Russian family. Here we cling to any resemblance of home and today it felt important to be with them. Maybe that is why the course of the evening upset me so. Jenna, Steph and I stayed late at the studio to work and planned to meet the rest of the group at the restaurant but when we got there ten other people had joined the party and there was no room for us. Rather than trying to figure something out the extra girls told us to find somewhere else to go. It was the first time in Russia I have been really angry and it was only later that I deduced how much it had meant to me to be with those people on that day (with the hopes of a drama free evening). I grew increasingly unnerved as the three of us headed down Tverskaya looking for some place else quasi-American to go. Eventually, after several frantic phone calls from Henry, one of the few people legitimately upset we weren’t there, we went back to the restaurant and sat in a separate section with him, segregated from the rest of the party, doing our best to laugh off the situation. The strange thing is that in a weird way it was refreshing to feel upset about something like this. I have spent so much time here inside my own little world that I wondered if I would really feel tied to these people. I wondered what relationships would remain important, if any at all would last. In the end we were all together, our Russia clan, the only ones that really mattered, for a slightly dramatic, mildly unnerving, truly familial holiday evening.