Yesterday, I got a note in the mail that a package was waiting for me at the post office. You see, here in Russia, the postman doesn't deliver packages to your door, but rather you have to go to the post office and retrieve it. The little note that you get also has a form that you have to fill out, and this is especially difficult for us poor foreigners--the form asks all sorts of information about your passport, but an American passport doesn't have most of the details the form wants. So I filled out as many of the blanks as possible and set off to the main post office this morning. 

I quickly found the main post office (the directions I said to turn right at the Lenin statue downtown and head toward Post Office Street--pretty simple). It turned out, though, the my package was at a different post office. I pretty much knew where this other post office is, but I asked the security guard just to make sure. He heard my accent and must have thought I was German because he started to explain what to do in really halting German. When it was obvious that wasn't getting the job done, he fortunately switched back to Russian. I've never been that badly mistaken for a German before. 

Anyway, when I got to the correct post office, I waited around while two ladies argued with the staff about how much they could stuff into their boxes. It turns out that ten kilograms is too much to send to Bryansk (a city near the Ukrainian border). After the staff finally got the Bryansk ladies under control, it was my turn. The lady working behind the desk fortunately didn't mind that my form was only partially complete, and she gave me my package after a about five minutes of searching around in the back room for it. Package in hand, and 45 minutes late for my Russian lesson, I boarded the bus and headed to the American home. Quite an ordeal, but it was well worth the effort. Now I have a bag of candy corn, so it finally feels like fall.