The government, as a rule, discourages specialization: Military officers and diplomats are constantly transferred from one post to another, from one region to the next. Still, specialists do emerge.

While I was in Astana, a ballet master from St. Petersburg's Mariinsky Theatre staged a performance of 'Giselle' in the opera hall. It was one of only a few performances to grace Astana's concert spaces in many weeks, and tickets were impossible to come by.

In truth, I was desperate to leave New York. And Moscow was a special place for me. It was the city where my parents had grown up, where they had met; it was the city where I was born.

My grandmother was content to sit in the back yard wearing her old, wide-brimmed summer hat and occasionally getting up to feed herself raspberries from the seemingly inexhaustible bushes.