It's a Small World After All

This is Lenin's Tomb in Red Sqaure in Moscow in Russia.  I have been there.  I have seen Lenin's waxy 80+-year-old dead body.  However, I was there after the fall of Communism.

Today, a guest lecturer came to the class I TA for to talk about what life was like in the 1970s while he was there working for the US government as an 'intelligence officer.'  (That means he was a spy.)  He showed us some fabulous pictures of Red Square on May 1st back in the 1970s.  May 1st is international Labor Day. (Yes, everyone but the US is in on it.)  In his pictures the lines to get into Lenin's Tomb snaked around a good chunck of Red Square.  Also, he had pics of the Politburo and military leaders standing along the top of the tomb overlooking the people in the square.  It was pretty sweet.

I had lunch with Mr. Guest Lecturer afterward and found out that after he retired he started volunteering to monitor elections around the world.  So, I lived in a Russian city called Nizhni Novgorod in 2004, and I went with my host mom to the polling place.  It turns out that Mr. GL was in Nizhni Novgorod monitoring the election that put Putin back into power for a second term.  WE WERE IN THE SAME CITY AT THE SAME TIME!  And today we met in Fort Collins, CO, for the first time in our lives.  (PS, he said he'd hook me up with the right people so that maybe I can monitor elections someday. Sa-weeet!)