Moscow : First Posting, First Month
by Diane Caldwell
It's not a rare occasion when I stop to wonder how I've come to be where I am. I warily pulled two 1.36 kilogram bags of marshmallows out of my shipment. That's a total of 2.72 kilograms of marshmallows. The last few weeks I was in Ottawa, I thought everything was proceeding steadily and with deliberate calm. There were, of course, the occasional frantic moments of panic and fear, but these passed. There were many errands to do too, things to organise, people to see. But this was all done in time. I thought everything had gone fine.
It seems, however, that the person strolling through the aisles of Loblaws was experiencing untold mental and psychic congestion. Perhaps the last few weeks in Ottawa before departure, when I thought everything was in control, I was actually balancing perilously on the brink of ordered reason. Throughout the two years I lived in Ottawa I can safely say that I never ate one marshmallow. I wonder why I thought I would require almost 3 kilos for Moscow. Perhaps that person buying the marsh-mallows was the same person who decided I should come here in the first place.
However, moving to Moscow on my own has not been unlike moving to any other city on my own, including Ottawa, aside from the fact that meaningful verbal communication with over 80 percent of the population is limited to "where is the metro station." Perhaps I should not be too quick to define meaningful. When you need to find the metro stop, this conversation is significant. And when I found myself in a taxi driving in reverse, very fast and in the wrong direction down a one-way street, I realised that I would likely not be in a similar situation in Ottawa. Nonetheless, many of the major challenges are alike. I would have to learn the logistics of the city - find my way around, find the shops, develop a routine of sorts. I would have to continue adjusting to the fact that I had said goodbye to family and good friends at home and would now be maintaining those relationships at a distance. At the same time, I would have to develop a support system here, discover new friends and new activities. It's not straight forward and is sometimes daunting.
One of my favourite strategies for handling the intermittent shock I sometimes feel at being here is to start up an internal slide show of good memories. It often surprises me how much memory consists of things that were not noticed at the time: memories of coffee shop sessions with friends, walking down familiar streets at home, biking by the canal, sitting by the lake in Saskatchewan. Familiar smells and sounds. This usually spurs me on to be open to the place I'm in now. The new daily routines, activities and ways of life, as well as an entirely new culture are the building blocks of new memories.
I still wonder though, how often there will be campfires in Moscow. I've likely not even eaten 3 kilos of marshmallows in my temporal lifetime. The chances of eating 3 kilos in Moscow would seem to be somewhere between zero and the square root of 'niet.' Absurd. It still sometimes feels like I'm here by virtue of a wanton decision made by a marshmallow-minded impersonator of my usual rational self.
Although people don't wholly determine their situations, there is still often a nagging need to have made clear choices about what they're doing and where they are in life. Coming to a post alone means that I only have to answer to myself. I must have brought myself to this place by my own choices, and therefore whatever experience I have relies wholly on whether or not I made the right decision. But perhaps that would be lighting incense to false gods. It seems to be more a case of momentum through which I'm here - momentum, plus choices, plus circumstances, plus a multitude of other factors. Gathering the fortitude to experience the magical part of being here would seem to be a more useful enterprise than letting the experience determine the correctness of an illusory decision.
And then I pulled two gigantic twin packs of Rice Krispies out of a box. Of course. Marshmallows + Rice Krispies = Rice Krispie squares. It all makes sense now, at least until the next time I wonder how I came to be where I am.