excess

I managed to spend about 12 hours in restaurants on Wednesday.
The day got off to a nice, productive start. I got up at 5:45 to get to an early morning meeting at the other end of the city. The meeting finished at 9:30 and I headed straight for the library to get in to the fotocopy babas before the crowds arrived. This I did, and by 1 I felt I had got enough done to take a break…and that is when things got decadent. I met Igor and Ira. We were all hungry, and Igor mischievously suggested going for sushi. The thing is that Ira just moved here from western Ukraine, where apparently she never tried any national cusine other than Ukrainian. Igor knows this, obviously, and it was for this reason that he suggested the sushi. So we went to planeta sushi (a chain found all over the city selling edible, decently priced sushi) and went a bit crazy. First we ordered all the fresh fruit drinks Ira had never heard of (guava etc) and made her try them all, then we ordered a truly excessive amount of sushi and set about trying to teach Ira how to use chop sticks. It was a bit ridiculous, but after some drinks we were all laughing, including the waitresses. This went on for several hours, and the restaurant even brought us dessert sushi (with fruit inside) on the house. In the process we also managed to cover every topic imaginable from post grad examinations to Serbian post modernist writing. We must have seemed like a group of freaks.
This would have been a nice relaxing day had it stopped there. However in the evening, as every Wednesday evening, I had to go over to a company where I teach and check documents twice a week. But when I arrived, I was greeted by Vladimir (the ex KGB friend of the pirate) and Oleg who announced that we were not going to be productive, but rather were going to go out. Vladimir had already made reservations at B2, a restaurant/ night club with regular concerts. So we ended up in a jazz lounge with a band playing café del mar music while we drank and ate….naturally, sushi. We were there for hours. We kept ordering random plates just to try them, and then the mobiles came out and Oleg and Vladimir started to invite some friends and the table filled with people and plates…..i stumbled home at 2, although I had to be at the other side of Moscow at 8 to teach a class.
I actually made it to the class on time. Masha, the student, greeted me with “oi, I am too tired to work, lets go downstairs to the restaurant.”
We did, but I ordered only coffee. There was no room for more.