Panic! In the Espresso Bar

I write in a new cafe.

I just spent ten minutes figuring out how to and then adding it as a place marked on maps.google just so I could include this picture.


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That's where it is.

Anyway. This area of town is well developed - it's on the north end of what I've before labeled Moscow's equivalent of 5th Avenue, and this location has these huge floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides, and a huge wrap around bar, and really cushy booths, and it's so comfortable in its generic Americo-West-European-ness.

And that thought scares me. It doesn't shock me, but it saddens - to think that I still think of as comfortable that to which I'm used, and think of as "Russian" those things that fit into the tales about the uncomfortable and the bizarre and the unpleasant.

I try to comfort myself by saying that I'm being too harsh on my own psyche. I won't change my understanding of what comfortable or exotic are just because I'm in a different country. I don't need to have everything be American. I just don't take pleasure in enduring unpleasant things. Right?

Right?

Why do I feel like I keep asking this same question, this entire year? Why can't i break the loop, or tip the balance in one way or another: either admit what the problem is, critically analyze my way through and address the issue, or backslide into the anti-intellectual beast all Americans are trained to be, and just enjoy what I want to enjoy, no questions asked...