Well, something did indeed happen, but it wasn't exactly fun. Don't be alarmed, nothing happened to me, but there have been some disturbing events in the good city of St. Petersburg. Last night, an Indian medical student was stabbed to death outside his dormitory, presumably by one of the many fascist groups here. This is really super fucked. Not to mention scary. I feel fairly safe since I appear (at least potentially) ethnically Russian, but that doesn't mean that something similar couldn't happen to me.

The fascist neo-nazis are really really big here. Interestingly, they seem to target mostly the young men (and we're talking young--fans seem to start about age 10 or so) and play to the xenophobia that's been stirred up recently. These guys are mostly so fucking scary because they're well organized. They had a rally a couple days ago (knowing that they were going to stir up the anti-fascist groups), and the end result was a good-oldfashioned street brawl when the anti-fascist group arrived throwing punches. And even though the anti-fascists have the might of ideology on their side, they still come off like the assholes for not having a permit for their own demonstration and for busting up the other guys.

Black marks for everybody.

So remember how much trouble I had with my cell phone a couple weeks ago? It turns out that I ran out of minutes. This shouldn't be a big deal—you just go to the store and buy a phone card, call the number on the back, and they put the money on your account. However, as it turns out, they shut off my reception when I ran out of minutes, so even when Meg said that it should be a free call and that she still had service when she was out of minutes, this was a big fat lie and I now don't have a phone that works because it's too late to go out to the phone store and put money directly on my account. I'll have to go after the excursion to Kronshtadt tomorrow. Blyad.