There are posters all around town reminding people that November 4th is People’s Unity Day. The holiday was reinstated in 2005 (after nearly 100 years of not celebrating it) in an attempt to fill the gap left by the former November 7th October Revolution holiday (why did the Soviet Union commemorate the October Revolution in November? Because by the old calendar it was indeed an October revolution, but under the new calendar it’s anniversary fell in November).

It’s quite interesting to ask Russians why they don’t have to work today. There are various answers, but according to Wikipedia and confirmed by my own observations, less than a quarter of Russians can even name the holiday no matter how many posters the government puts up. The general consensus among those I asked was that Nov 4 is just a nameless, Spring-Holiday-instead-of-Good-Friday kind of day so that Communists can remember the October Revolution and everyone else can have a much needed day off. Only 4% of the population, again taken from Wikipedia, knows that it is a holiday to commemorate an early 1600’s uprising against Polish invaders. Maybe Casimir Pulaski Day is a good parallel. How many Illinoisans really know what he did or can even spell his name?

Since it is a holiday surrounded by so much confusion, no one really knows how to celebrate. I got together with a few Russian friends that I met while studying abroad but hadn’t yet seen since coming back. I only knew what metro to meet at, not where we were going, so I was a little surprised when we ended up at a Starlite Diner (having already made plans to go to a different Starlite Diner later to wait for election returns).

The Starlite Diner is a very strange place. It ought to be located a few yards off to the side of a major interstate in 1950’s middle-America, not in the center of 21st century Moscow. The menu is everything the name “diner” promises to deliver, with a few unexpected additions, like mulled wine. I wasn’t alive in the fifties, so maybe mulled wine really was a favorite at the soda fountain, but I have a feeling it wasn’t.

It’s not just the menu and the taut plastic and polished chrome decor that make the Starlite so surreal. It was like wading into a pool of English and occasionally the warm familiarity of my mother-tongue would drift over from another table. There was enough Russian around that it wasn’t quite like going back to America, and there was a large plasma screen bringing us live coverage from CNN so it wasn’t quite like going back in time, but it was certainly one of the most sensory-taxing places I’ve eating in Moscow—causing location and decade confusion but not convincing enough for me to suspend my disbelief.

We walked into the Starlite around noon and by the time we left, maybe about four-thirty or five, it was already dark out. I saw Barack Obama and John McCain vote, live, from half way around the world. I was prepared for what to expect later at the election viewing. Best of all, I got to catch up with old friends in easy conversation that wasn’t constrained by time period or country but encompassed all sorts of experiences.

Election day and results party photos