I don't know, maybe I just have an idealistic view of the place. Anyway the old town section of Moscow was just as beautiful as the first time I saw it, last April. Now is when we get to meet most of our translators. Some of them I knew from my last trip, but it felt like I had known all of them for a long time. First day in Russia and we had made many friends. We had about eight hours to go shopping, grab a bite to eat, and to build relationships with our new friends, before we had to hop on a train. Man does time fly by when your having fun. Luckily all of these translators were with us for the whole trip. We boarded the train at eleven o"clock P.M. and looked forward to the seven-hour train ride with our friends.
I keep saying friends because like I said, we already felt so close to them that they weren't just translators anymore. We got to Nizhny Novgorod early in the morning, got a quick tour of the city, and then got shown the hotel that we were staying at. At this point I didn't have time to check out our room much, I just knew where it was, and that I was rooming with a teenage buddy of mine, which I was very thankful for. We had a team meeting in the lobby just to tell the band and the techs that they had a chance to play at a "disco" that evening. We had no clue what to expect at a "disco" so we just hoped and prayed for the best. We went straight from the meeting to the concert hall to set up for the disco.
This was my first time seeing the sound equipment that I would be working with, and it was a scary time. The soundboard wasn't even set up to handle a full band, so I did some quick rig job sort of thing, and practice went well. Come to find out a "disco" is more like a club party or a rave. Everywhere we looked somebody was drinking or smoking and the worst part is this is a teenage event. We all just saw this as a good time to invite them to our main concerts, so we did. Finished that chaos around ten o"clock and finally got to go to our rooms.
