Kazan-Yerevan

I recently read a pretty funny David Sedaris piece on how boring epic stories of awful air travel can be, so I will spare you my complaints except to say two things:

There are two adorable and unbelievably naughty little Armenian boys on my flight to Yerevan. As I was putting my carry-on through the conveyor and trying to explain what the x-ray of Ivan Ivanych was (I'm not sure why they wondered - I mean, his x-ray looks exactly like what you'd expect an x-ray of a hedgehog lawn ornament to look like), I also was treated to a full-body x-ray of 4-year-old Sasha, the younger of the two, who crawled onto the conveyor and managed to get all the way into the x-ray machine while his mom and the security women weren't looking. Conveyor belt operator and Sasha: very amused. Her supervisor and Sasha's mom: not very amused at all.

My last time leaving Russia (2008), I burst into tears of deep existential anguish when I forked over my documents to the passport control lady. This time, I was much more pleasant and businesslike, and was rewarded with the request that I remove my glasses (clearly a spy disguise) and a ten-minute questioning conducted with my glasses off: Why are you leaving Russia? Why were you in Kazan? What were you studying? (My visa type is "for study," so some bending of the truth had to happen there.) What is this "summer Russian course" you speak of? Why are you going to Yerevan? Do you have relatives there? Who are you staying with? How long will you be there? Do you have a "tourist voucher"? (By then I was getting pretty short with the woman, possibly implying that she knows very well that there is no such thing as a "tourist voucher.")

Duly noted: next time, just burst into tears. The whole episode reminded me of an article we read in one of my classes next year that boiled down to this: the Russian bureaucracy is so inefficient because it works based on the assumption that everyone is doing something illegal, and enormous amounts of state resources must be devoted to ferreting out what exactly it is. Well, you caught me, passport lady. I'm not sure what exactly you caught me doing, but you made all the people in line behind me very cranky at me, so you clearly won.