I've gone ice skating a few times this winter, and going ice skating in Russia is an interesting experience. First, I don't have skates, so I have to rent them. That requires giving some old lady your passport (the look on everybody's faces when I pull out my American passport is priceless). The poor ladies always struggle to figure out how to write my last name, but so far I haven't had any problems (no one has sold my passport yet).

Once I get my skates, it's time to hit the ice. As a whole, people here can skate pretty well, but a skating rink in Russia operates on the same set of rules as Russian driving--chaotic anarchy. People skate against the flow of traffic, stop without any warning, and weave in and out of other people. Add a whole bunch of tiny little kids who come up to my knees and some old ladies who totter around and get in everybody's way and you have a nearly limitless potential for crashes. I can skate decently well, but I'm not all that good at stopping on a dime, and that's a very useful skill here. Last week I was skating and a little toddler girl fell right in front of me. I was looking back at my friends and didn't see this happen, and I only noticed the girl just as I was about to skate right into her. So I spread my legs really wide and skated right over her, which made everyone around laugh.

Here are a few pictures of ice skating last weekend. We went to a big outdoor rink that all the Russians said was like an artifact out of the Soviet Union. The tickets you get when your pay for your entrance onto the ice were printed by the order of some defunct Soviet agency in 1977. The skates were kind of lousy, but the ice was decent, and there was the greatest of Russian/American pop music playing over tinny loudspeakers.