smoking in Moscow

          I suppose there might have been a little boosting in there, but not much.  I got a bit lost this morning.  I feel that things don’t get old if you get a bit lost every now and then.  I ran down what to the intersection where I thought I found the super-thin bar a couple days ago.  Well, it wasn’t there.  Yeah, yeah, I hear you all poking at me
for being so smug last time when I said that I had found EXACTLY where the bar is.  It turns out that I did have a pretty good idea of my location because I found a busy road and turned toward home.  It WAS toward home and 30 seconds later, I pulled into the courtyard home of the thin bar.  So I DO know where it is--just not EXACTLY.
Anyway…I felt great running and showing off to all the people going to work and smoking like winos.  Man, I really can’t understand how people can smoke so much.  Men smoke a lot everywhere, but here, women smoke all the time, too.  Here, two or three times every run I have to exhale madly because I am passing someone who is smoking.  Disgusting.   Fifteen years ago in Portugal, I thought I was in the world’s worst smoking country.  That was when this lady was checking out at the grocery store, writing a check for groceries. She had to juggle the stuff she was carrying because she was trying to balance her cigarette and the pen and a bag of chips.  I think things are at least a bit better now because I believe it must be universal that people in stores are not allowed to smoke.  This may have started in the summer of 2004, I think, when Ireland banned smoking in bars.  It was during the European Football Cup when the ban went into effect.  Everyone was grumbling, but that night, I chatted with a couple people who were happy that they could now have a smokeless meal in a restaurant.
But…in the smoking category, Moscow has Albania beat because in Albania, people smoke in bars and restaurants.  In Albania, people smoke even when they are sitting under a ‘No Smoking’ sign.  I will point this out to the person who is smoking and they will just smile.  When I point this out to the waiter at the restaurant, they shrug their shoulders, laugh and say, “This is Albania.”  This is the same thing that policemen tell me when I pick up their discarded pack of cigarettes that they have just thrown in the street.
Moscow has Albania beat in the area of street cleanliness, too.  Albania might have people who are supposed to clean up the streets, but here, people actually DO it.  The streets are immaculate here.  Even the dirt around the playgrounds gets swept once a day or so.  This is all done by hand, too, with wicked witch of the west brooms made out of stiff reeds and long grass.
That bad part about getting lost today was that I had said that I would call the boys at 6:30 Tirana time.  That would be 8:30 here.  So I went out at 7:45, thinking that I would run for 30 minutes or so and then be back.  Well, 7:45 turned into 8:00 and 30 minutes turned into 47, so I didn’t get inside until 8:55.  I hadn’t received anything from Maura telling me that it would be a good idea to call, so I didn’t feel too bad.  When I got the email, I read Maura’s message that Maxim was having a hard time getting out of bed and a call might jumpstart him to get the day moving.  I did, with no answer, but soon, I got a Skype call that took me to the kitchen table where Oskar was eating breakfast.  It was a great call—very relaxed.