Here we are at the end. Hey! Neat. It only took me, what, two months since our return to finish my last blahg entry about our trip to Russia. I appear to be following a logarithmic posting scale.

I’ll keep this one short. Partly because the memories are starting to fade, and partly because they weren’t that crisp to begin with. The stress of traveling was well and truly catching up with me by the end, and I was starting to shut down. I’m just not the best traveler in the world, it turns out.

So what do I remember? Hmmm. Walking. More walking. A visit to a huge and, by American standards, abnormally warm food market. The warmth really amplified the scents. The stalls and the selection were glorious. The merchants were insistent. The chopping blocks were heavy and worn and shaped in fascinating curves by years of cleaver cuts. I failed to document it properly while there, but I did record our modest purchases back at Beth’s apartment:

We hopped on a bus and…went somewhere else. Ah yes, an art museum, I think. Like I said, hazy. But on the bus ride there I did catch a little British Style:

And traipsing around the rich district we spotted a rare Predator-themed Russian rice-burner facing off against a no-bugling sign:

And…and…more architecture, and a thrilling men’s choir we caught rehearsing in a little side room when we dropped in a touristy sort of church…and…and…

You know, it really was a bit of a haze. I remember a heavy Russian meal on our last night, and much toasting, and much vodka, and the next thing I can recall was sitting quietly in the back of a taxi cab on the way back to the airport. Sitting silently with Elizabeth, each staring out our own window as our last views of Moscow rolled by. Beth had explained to the cabby that we spoke no Russian and he would need to write down the charge for our fare. He pulled up to the airport, wrote down his number, I gave him our last rubles and said the only Russian word I knew (“thank you”), to which he responded with the only English word he knew (something like “Goodbye”) in an “I’m a tough Russian but hey I’m a nice guy too and I wish you all the best” sort of way—which I really appreciated at that moment—and then we were dragging our suitcases through customs and lines and inspections and lines and then the plane and…

…hey, is that a melting glacier? Nice.

The trip home was…not pleasant. Not terrible either, but something in between. On the one hand, the United States doesn’t welcome visitors with any great warmth. As our huge plane full of passengers unloaded into a cramped, windowless, narrow, hot hallway, no one explained why we were standing there going nowhere. A woman screamed at us in English and in Spanish—Spanish—to stay in line and ignored any questions about what the hell was going on. It was a pure cattle drive.

But! Oh, yes: but. Here is the end of the story. I have often heard the phrase “I love my country”. But I have also always felt…suspicious of that expression. I knew what love felt like, and I sort of knew what my country was, but I just couldn’t put the two together. Not really. It is a phrase that seemed to be quickly said but rarely felt. And it’s not the sort of sentiment I’m comfortable throwing around in a meaningless, unmotivated way.

But. After moving past the screaming New Yorker, and through the first set of customs lines, and on to the next set of security lines, I saw in front of me a woman and a man sharing a huge laugh. Total strangers sharing a huge, throaty laugh. And the way they shared it was, somehow, in a way I can’t explain, utterly American. Just gorgeously, warm-heartedly American. Something warm and electric traveled from my cheeks down into my heels at that moment, and I found myself thinking: “I love my country. I really, really love my country.”

And I did. And I do. For reals.