Moscow 2013 * My Soul is a Cow

Happy New Year from Moscow! I took the train from Petersburg, but it wasn't a "very Tolstoyan experience" because the train was so modern that it felt like being on a plane. Police everywhere. I was sitting with a family with two kids, a sweet well-behaved little girl and her evil younger brother. Their parents gave me chocolates and tangerines, and everyone was happy drinking tea. In Petersburg, on the cab to the station:
Mr. Driver: how are you going to get to your hotel in Moscow?
Anna: I'll get a cab?
Mr. Driver: they are so expensive in Moscow, it's not like here (of course...).
Anna: then maybe I should take the subway.
400 rubles, do svidania.

But then I was tired and had a headache and it was snowing and cold and Russia is usually so cheap, so I jumped into the first cab I saw and...2500 rubles pazhaluista. You guys do the math...

So it was the end of the year and everyone seemed to be weighing the about-to-finish 2012. I wonder if I should do it as well? I wanted to run a half marathon and I ran it. I wanted to learn Russian and I kind of learned it. Apart from this, I don't think anything else went the way I expected it to go. Sometimes I look at people's lives and they seem so amazing. Part of it is a matter of narrative, part of it is that life is amazing, except for when you start thinking that everyone else's is but not yours. For me, it usually happens because I have so little energy. I can read fast, walk fast, cook fast - but then my soul is a cow and it takes me ages to digest what I read saw experienced. I wish I could write, I wish I could describe - but that happens rarely. This is frustrating, but I am learning to accept that it's just the way it is. On the other hand, I was thinking: my bones have been in so many places already, my eyes have seen so much beauty, my ears listened to so much music and poetry. And all that is with me, forever. What I like the most is when something reminds me of the feeling I felt when a certain thing happened, so I can experience the new thing and remember the old thing and re-feel the feeling. Like these lines by Erich Fried say:

und ich erinnere mich an diese Worte
wenn ich aufwache in der Nacht
und am nächsten Tag bei der Arbeit
und ich sehne mich danach
sie dieselbe Worte
noch einmal sagen zu hören
und auch danach
daβ sie nochmals
genau so aussehen soll
wie sie aussah 
als sie sie sagte 

[and I remember these words when I wake up in the night and on the next day at work, and I long to hear these same words once again and I also wish that she once again looked the way she looked when she said these words] 

And this is a song I've been listening to lately

[and I go, I go after the fog, after the dreams and the smell of the taiga]