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Home is where the heart is

If I was tired, I didn’t notice. Kate opened the door and came in. I had never seen her wear winter clothes before. I kissed her. Against all odds, there happened to be a few other people there in Vytegra’s tiny bus station, but I didn’t care if they saw.

I followed her back out into the bitter cold, where her father’s car was parked. He helped me put my bags in the trunk. Kate and I sat in the back seat, she on the left, I on the right. We stopped at a gas station to use the restroom and then, in the car, had a small breakfast with some hot tea. And then we headed to Pudozh.

The sun rose slowly, casting a blue light on the broad, endless road with nothing on it but snow and a single car. Everywhere, tall evergreens with snowy branches flanked the road as if to see what all the commotion was about.

Finally, we reached the outskirts of a town. It was Pudozh, Kate’s hometown. After making the trip to Orlando, stopping in Germany, spending a few days in Saint Petersburg, and enduring sleepless night on a bus, I had finally reached my destination.

Pudozh is a small city that seemed to have a lot of apartment buildings. Soviet-looking ones, of course. We stopped at one and got out of the car. Up on the 5th floor (the Russians number their floors the same way we do) was Kate’s family’s apartment.

The two doors (for warmth, I assume) opened to a short hallway. On the right was the living room, and on the left was something like a den, which was where Kate was staying. In the back was a perpendicular hallway with a bathroom, a water closet (what I would actually call the bathroom even though it technically isn’t one [unless you take baths in your toilet]), a small kitchen, and, presumably, Kate’s parents’ room.

Now I could relax for a while. Kate and I got on to our own schedule. Her parents would come and go, and we would sleep when we wanted and stay up when we wanted. We might sleep for hours and hours and hours and then stay up just as long. I’ve never done anything like it. When we were awake, we would watch movies or do our own Internet things. Or we would play with the cat, Buzik. Most of the time, we were in Kate’s room.

We would go to the kitchen to eat. Kate often ate little pieces of bread with meat and cheese on top of them—like tiny open-faced sandwiches. We would have leftovers from the last meal her mother had made. The food was simple: chicken and rice, things like that. But it was real, and you could taste it. Kate’s father brought in some raw milk. I can’t really describe how it tasted: kind of grassy? But it was good.

And then there was tea. We Americans make fun of the British for loving their tea so much, but lots of other people live on it. Kate had a relatively enormous appetite for tea when she visited me (and teased me at first for not knowing how to make it [haha, get it? teased???]), and now I could see that in her country, it was totally normal.

We made tea after almost every meal and often between meals. I’m not a big fan of your plain old black tea—I think it’s bitter and isn’t improved by sugar or milk—but I managed to pick out one that I liked. It was Greenfield Creamy Rooibos, a British import. Kate, however, told me that it wasn’t technically a tea, so there you go.

My second day at Kate’s was December 25. I woke up sometime in the afternoon—outsleeping even Kate, I think—and her parents presented me with a box of Cadbury chocolates as a Christmas gift. It was very nice of them to give me something on that day, especially since Orthodox Christmas is on January 7 and most Russians aren’t religious anyway.

After a few days of staying inside, Kate and I got ready to go out so I could see Pudozh.