On Saturday I went to Oceanside for the last time this summer.  How very sad, no more surfing until next summer!  Every time I am out on the water I ask myself “Why did I go to school on the east coast, in a city five hours from the nearest beach?”  Well, I just don’t know, but I better get used to it.  I doubt there is a demand in California for political science majors.  I don’t like California politics, mainly because it’s just boring.  I like international politics, so I guess I’m stuck in DC, because that’s where the jobs are.

Speaking of DC, I’m going back there on Friday…kinda looking forward to my final semester.

I was so bored yesterday that I went to Best Buy and picked up a copy of MVP Baseball 2003 for Playstation2.  I only wish I had done this sooner.  This game is soooo sweet…I could play it forever.  I’m halfway through the “season” (playing as the Angels, of course) and we’re definitely going to win the World Series again…now if only they could do that in reality!

Thanks to my one month in Moscow, I think I’ve acquired enough stuff to open up my very own Russian souvenir store here in the states.  Well, maybe not…compared to last year, I didn’t actually buy that much (amazing, I know).  Here are two things that I did buy, though:

This is a chess set I bought at a store on Starry Arbat in Moscow.  I actually saw this chess set at the souvenir market last year when I was in St. Pete, but I didn’t buy it because I didn’t know how to play chess.  I learned to play last month while I was in Moscow (spaseeba, Luka!), though, so now I actually have a reason to own a chess set.  Anyways, this chess set is US vs USSR.  The board has pieces of a world map on it, and the pieces have US and USSR colors and symbols on them.  The pawns are US and USSR leaders.

This is a matroyshka (stacking dolls) set that I bought at Izmaylovsky Park.  The dolls are (from smallest to largest): Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin.  This is not your ordinary set of stacking dolls, though.  As you can see, each doll is wearing a hat.  I’ve never seen stacking dolls with hats, and these were so adorable that I had to buy them.

Nothing new going on here.  The desert is boring and I would give anything for another 2-4 weeks in Moscow.  We tried the new Las Casuelas in La Quinta…it was so-so…best to stick to the Cafe in Palm Desert or Nuevas in Rancho Mirage.