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I took a Russian class at Notre Dame. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would fly someday in a Russian spacecraft with two cosmonauts, speaking only Russian.

When I was in high school, I liked to pretend that I was a Russian foreign exchange student. I would do things like go into a pizza restaurant and tell them I'd never had pizza before, and they'd bring me into the kitchen and show me how to make an American pizza. It's really fun.

I would have loved to have met some former spies, but they don't readily advertise themselves unless they're not living in Moscow, and even then. I'm sure I've met some without realizing it.

I joined the city government, and we start to operate as the bureaucrats on the local level, so we were the only ones in the whole Russian team who were experienced in practical bureaucratic management in the complicated condition of 1990.

The role we can play every day, if we try, is to take the whole experience of every day and shape it to involve American man. It is our job to interest him in his community and to give his ideas the excitement they should have.

My biggest entertainment in Moscow was to go to the subway and watch people. When American students visited, I watched them; I learned English from them.

Never met Levinson. Ever. He directed those American Express spots for us for Seinfeld, and I was off on some guest spot that I didn't even want to do... and I got talked into doing it.

To fly into Moscow was a joy. I was trying to understand what people were thinking and how to earn money. In the end, I stayed.

I've completed half of my space training at Space City in Moscow. I love adventure, and I've been training in a centrifuge and MiG Fighter with a view to going into space and being a spokesman for space exploration!

I operated a periscopic TV camera so the commander, Anatoly Artsebarsky, could establish where we were heading. It is real teamwork on Soyuz.