in all her swanky glory.

kitas, in red square near st. basil's cathedral

last night, i had the pleasure of hanging out with my friend, kitas, who is abandoning beautiful dc (and a whole slew of friends) for what her current roommate calls a city with a broken bell. damn philly, stop taking my friends!

kitas and i met at pre-college visit and were pretty much thrown together in every freshman college related instance after. luckily, we became good friends and have kept up regularly for the past few years.

i'm a little bummed that she's moving but am happy that i have another friend to visit in philly (oh, and that she was brave and determined enough to decide that she was worth more than the crap she was being given at work). maybe one day, i'll learn appreciate that city the way that real philadelphians do (and maybe start putting my foot down at work when my crazzzzzy clients call me at 5:30 on a friday evening and saying that they had an emergency and that i need fix something. hence, why i am at work this saturday morning at at 6:00. yes, that's a real timestamp; i just finished calling halfway across the world.)

one of best memories that kitas and i have besides her scary obsession with one of my candles, the way she made my psycho roommate, fay, cry because she kept her dead dog's picture in her locket, our obsession with this random professor that we deemed MacDaddy, is that she and i went poland and russia together just two years ago. it was a pretty awesome trip. we went to see jeannage in poland, then flew to see my cousin lou in moscow, and then back to jeannage's party house krakow for more polski fun.

on our first night in poland, we drank mad dogs which is just guaranteed pukage in a (pretty!) shot. yeah, vodka, grenadine, and tabasco sauce. i took 6 of these, trying painfully to keep up with the poles after having had only onion soup for dinner. kitas tried her best, and on our drive down to the spas in krynica (in the mountains near the slovak border), had to take an unexpected stop. that was pretty funny.

during the trip we took a side trip to auschwitz and randomly ran into a kid from college -- who is mostly remembered as the kid who tried to use real paper in the overhead projector during our class-wide senior comprehensive presentations. and the guy that told donner that her underwear was on the roof. he was weird. and i thought it was creepy that i ran into him in the torture chambers in auschwitz considering the last time i saw him was said event with projector.

also, of course, in the rynek, we ran into the popemobile. sorry, i had to...





in russia, we took millions of tours of the city with cousin lou, hung out with my cousin's chauffeurs teaching them english and "filipinski" and recovered from flying aeroflot.

all in all, we took 9 flights within an 11 day trip but had a great time celebrating our fabulous, single, mid-twenties. now that we're both 'growing up' it's exciting to be nearing that big 3-0 as things fall into place with homes, jobs, and sense of self. but most importantly, it's great to have a good friend by your side to bitch with during the whole arduous process.

it's been a long 10 years, kitas! cheers to you! we'll miss you in dc.

kitas, at a club in krakow, after mad dogs and grass vodka.