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Well, I’m quite glad to be back in Moscow, though you probably figured as much. Only six hours after arriving last Wednesday, I quickly ‘registered’ my visa and left for Balabanovo (100 km outside of Moscow), where I had volunteered to teach at an English camp that a friend of mine runs. It was a lot of fun and I even made a few new friends.

I also got my self into an argument friendly disagreement about Cheburashka, Russia’s most famous cartoon character. My friend Lena is convinced that Walt Disney stole the idea for Mickey Mouse from Russia’s Cheburashka.

That’s absurd, of course, because Mickey Mouse appeared almost 30 years before Cheburashka. If anything, it’s the other way around: Cheburashka could be the illegitimate child of Mickey. They certainly do resemble each other. Check out these ears:

Either way, I like Cheburashka better. He’s kind of Ewokish. Mickey would probably win in a fight though. . .

And speaking Russia’s favorite cartoon character, when I got back to Moscow on Monday I discovered that Cheburashka is at the center of a controversy that made the front page of both Moskovskij Komsomolets and Argumenty i fakty last week. It turns out that Russia’s Olympic Committee has bought the rights to use Cheburashka as their mascot for the Athens Olympics and in their current bidding for the 2012 Olympic games. The rights to the the cartoon creature are owned by Eduard Uspensky, who wrote the book that inspired the Cheburashka madness. However, the cartoonist Leonid Shvartsman created Cheburashka and his consent was not sought by the Olympic Committee.

More than 40 Russian cartoonists are petitioning the committee to make an apology to Shvartsman.