There is no Peanut Butter in Russia

2007-05-07T03:18:00.000-07:00

I'm working on writing about my trip to Sochi, really. Mostly, however, I'm sunk into a deep, dark depression and spend a lot of time staring at whatever wall I happen to be sitting in front of. I've been pretty good about not spilling my upsetedness about life into here, but I think I'm going to make an exception today. The cumulation was dying my hair back to blond this morning, realizing that I missed some roots, that the blond dye just got rid of the brown and not the red underneath, and that the ends of my hair are crunchy. Also.

I'm actually upset about leaving Petersburg.

This is a really scary thought. Mostly having to do with the fact that I got used to living here and actually started to like it. The thought of saying goodbye to my host family (at least for a year and a half) makes me want to bawl every time I think about it. Of course, there are a lot of things that I won't miss at all about life here, but it's also that this year of my life is pretty much over and now I'm going to have to make another huge transition. Moving back to Portland for the summer (at least all of that shit's figured out--I found a job and a place to live), and then across the country to Pittsburg, which is another totally unknown quantity. Maybe I'm upset too because I feel like just when I've figured out how to live here, how to interact with people, how to have friends--I'm going home. Which isn't really home anymore either, really.

The other upsetting part is that I don't even know yet when I'm coming back. Since I dealt with buying tickets to Ukraine and France, I asked my father to buy my ticket from D.C. to Portland so I could work on finishing my paper. I thought this was a pretty simple and reasonable request, but he still hasn't done it. He wants me to stop off in Pittsburg and take a look at the city and find somewhere to live, which I'm not really in a huge hurry to do. As far as I'm concerned, I can live out of my car. At this point, I don't even really want to go to grad school. I keep telling myself that it's all going to be fine once I get there and that I'm just in a funk, but the other part of me's not so sure.

I'm not so worried about going to France with my grandparents. They'll probably be snotty about my piercings for awhile (if they have their glasses on and notice), but they'll be fine and they'll pay for everything and I'll probably mostly just get to hang out and read in the sun and eat. Which sounds great. However, I'm way worried about going to Ukraine. Not that I really should be: I've been there before, I speak really pretty okay Russian, and Ukrainians are mostly more friendly than Russians. It's more that I have no concrete plans, no place to stay (although I've been half-heartedly browsing hospitality club), not a lot of money, and no idea about whether or not I'm just an idiot. Let me back up a little. There's a guy. He's Ukrainian. We met in Warsaw, Poland in January. He walked me around when I came to Kiev. We've been emailing, etc. since I got back to Peter. I like him a lot. He's one of the smartest and most interesting people I've met in a really long time. Anyway, long story short, I'm pretty much going to Ukraine to see him. And I'm really not so sure how I feel about that. At first I was really happy and excited, but now I just think I'm stupid and I don't really want to go. But I will go, because I've already bought the tickets and they're non-refundable. I don't know what I'm going to do there for a week since he'll probably be working, but I guess I'll figure something out.

I guess the moral of the story is that change is scary and upsetting. A lot of the time, I wish that I could just live in a box and not have to go anywhere or do anything, or deal with people. Then I wouldn't have to be cranky about spending large amounts of money, and I'd never get hurt or make an ass of myself. Of course, then I'd never have any fun. But I've definitely had more than enough of this shit. I'm tired and lonely and ready to come home, but the end still isn't really in sight yet. Send me happy thoughts.

2007-04-24T01:53:00.000-07:00

Bought my travel tickets, turned in the final (for now) draft of my paper, am getting on the train for Sochi in a couple hours. There is also an attractive man sitting across the internet table, and there is an attractive man in Kiev who I will be seeing in about 3 weeks.

Life is pretty sweet.

2007-04-19T18:16:00.000-07:00

So, I always find it really embarrassing when I post more than twice in one day, and generally I feel like it's something that people should be ashamed of, but I'm stuck on the conclusion for my paper and since solitaire died with my computer, I figure I can do something slightly more constructive and entertaining with my "thinking" time. Whatever.

I also remembered several of the things that I had been wanted to post about but always forget whenever I sit down to write. Number one: the fucking weather. I realize that this sounds totally banal, but it's pretty fucked. Like, it was snowing last week. Not a whole lot, but enough to drag out the winter gear again. Two days BEFORE it started snowing, it was +15 and sunny. Two days after it stopped: +15 and sunny. This morning when I left the house it was already +10 and sunny and I was looking forward to a great day. By afternoon, it was probably +2 and cloudy. Thanks a lot, Spring.

With the advent of Spring and the hideous Spring fashions, this is a good time to review my Winter highlights. First prize for the most heniously ugly thing I've seen this winter goes to either the girl wearing the Mickey Mouse pants, or the girls with the hairy boots. The boots are awful: imagine that you decided that a baby yeti's feet would make attractive footwear, then cut them off, and wore them around town. Second prize goes to all the girls in the puffy down jackets that end right underneath their breasts, leaving their entire midriff exposed in the -25 weather. Very nice, girls. Way to work on the shrinking population problem by freezing your ovaries! Good work! Last but not least, third prize goes to the goths. Because who the fuck is a goth anymore? I mean, really?

While we're on the subject of blasts from the past: rollerblades. When's the last time you saw somebody rollerblade (apart from Napolean Dynomite)? They're seriously the rage here. People blast down Nevsky on their rollerblades knocking over the little babyshkas, drunk businessmen on lunchbreak, and whoever else happens to get in their path. And for as many people as there are on Nevsky (i.e., a lot of obstacles), I have yet to see one bite it. I'm eagerly waiting. And when that day comes, I will laugh, my friends. I will laugh a lot.

Also. Sex in bathrooms. Is really gross. I understand that it's really hard for young people to find places to get busy since everybody lives with their parents until they're at least 30, but seriously, people. I went to a club a while ago and of the 6 or 7 bathroom stalls, only 2 were actually available for use (the others being occupied by horny young couples and kids blowing coke, although where they get the money for that is beyond me). At the internet cafe a couple nights ago, I walked into the bathroom and there were used condoms floating in the toilet. Now, this might be okay if there was, you know, nowhere else to put them, but there was a trash can SIX INCHES away! Right next to the toilet! This is just unnecessary. Not only do they have to rub in that the rest of us aren't getting laid, but they have to be gross about it too. Ew.

And another thing. Personal hygiene. I feel like this has probably been the subject of at least one other paragraph in at least one other post, but the entire country of Russia reminds me of that scene from the Blues Brothers where they're in the fancy restaurant and the man at the next table asks the maitre'd to be moved. "Frankly they're offensive... smelling." Yeah. I understand that sometimes it's hard to bathe every day. I don't. But I bathe when I'm dirty or when I'm starting to smell bad, not when I've already smelled bad for a couple days, then decided to piss myself and roll around in a pile of my own shit. Maybe throw up a little bit on my shirt. Just for good measure. And I'm ALWAYS next to these people. It never fails. I wasn't sure that the B.O. could be worse than it was this winter, but I think it actually is getting worse as the weather is getting warmer. Maybe because people have less clothes on and the stink is closer to the air or something? Somebody smart tell me why they're so much stankier now.

There's some other stuff too, which I will probably write about very soon. Probably involving upcoming travel plans. (And maybe even mullets...)

2007-04-19T05:24:00.000-07:00

I really don't know why I'm writing this, because I don't have any fantastic news or funny stories. Or even major complaints. Life is just... I dunno... life. Pretty much as usual. Except of course more funky. Because it's Russia.

Today in Stylistics class, we learned that slang for the word "super" is "super-pooper." I have never heard anyone use this, nor will I use it. However, it's an interesting and entertaining point of "fact." Also in Stylistics, we're learning how to swear like sailors, although without any actual practice, and without the teacher actually saying any of the words out loud. And she won't even write the full words out on the board. So lame. Luckily I have Russian friends to practice with.

We're going to the resort town of Sochi next week. I'm hoping it'll be warm and beautiful and I can lay on the beach, which means that it will probably be cold and rainy all week. That's it.

Hang tight, kids. It's almost the end!

2007-04-11T03:58:00.000-07:00

The days continue to slide by, bringing me that much closer to GOING HOME!!! Granted that this is still 5.5 weeks away, and more if I can work out going to the south of France and Kiev, Ukraine. France, because it's a free trip, and Kiev because... uh... it's a nice city. Really. No snickers about mullets or people whose names start with G, please.

The most entertaining thing to have happened in recent weeks is that I was mistaken for a prostitute! Granted that it was sort of late and I was standing on the corner, but still... Okay. So. I went over to Margaret's to watch "The Blues Brothers." Since my computer died, I have resorted to inviting myself over when I want to watch a movie. Anyway, the movie ended, and it was still theoretically possible to catch a marshutka home, since it was only 11.15. So I was waiting on the corner, watching the traffic so that I could catch the marshutka if I saw it go by, but then this man came up to me. "Excuse me, miss. Do you work here?" I automatically answered "No!" because I don't like to talk to people on the street, but then I realized what he'd said to me. By the time it had sunk in, he had already walked off. At this point, I figured that I'd probably be better off walking to the metro. So I did. I was totally appalled, mostly since I don't in any respect look like a hooker. Maybe my hair since it has a crappy red dye job right now and I cut it myself (but it's grown out really well). I don't even dress Russian, which is already halfway to whore. Whatever. Men are stupid. Oh, and speaking of men being stupid... There's this creepy guy from high school (yes, the sheep fucker) who still occasionally contacts me. Despite the fact that I haven't responded to him in years. Or ever, really. What's the deal? It's so not healthy to do that shit. Anyway. Moving on...

I found out that the big paper that I was supposed to have been working on all semester is going to be due the day after my birthday. Which is pretty much about as fan-fucking-tastic as it gets. So I will be stressed, cracked out, etc. etc. for my birthday and up all night at the internet cafe. At least they have beer, which might make the whole thing more acceptable. Of course, if I was on top of my shit, I would be almost done by now, but I'm not. I'd really much rather figure out my plans for what (who? what?) I'm going to do after the program and where the hell I'm going to live when I get back to Portland. At least I have a job. And! Maybe the best news of all that I haven't shared because there were some complications, is that I got into grad school at the University of Pittsburgh, and they have basically bend over backwards to get me to come. So it looks like I'm making tracks back east in the fall.

I'm not sure if I really have any more news. There will probably be more posts as my life continues to break down, and thus gets more hilarious.

2007-04-02T19:05:00.000-07:00

Because I know you all care, I am currently sitting in the internet cafe at 6am, next to a surly looking 16 year old playing some bizarre shoot'em'up, listening to Jay-Z from across the room, and preparing a presentation on AIDS (that I forgot I had to do until 11:30 last night).

This is quite possibly the worst morning ever.

2007-04-02T11:15:00.000-07:00

So it was called to my attention that it sounds like I "shat all over Dave" in the last post, which yes, might be pretty accurate. However, bear in mind, gentle readers, that I was, as we all tend to be, actually really excited about the whole thing, even after I found out he was a crazy. Go figure. Anyway, I guess the moral of the story is that you win some and you lose some, and yes, I was probably the asshole in this "relationship"... as well as my last, how many? Fuck counting, it's just depressing.

The biggest news of the last few weeks is that my computer power cord exploded. Actually, almost literally. There was a huge spark and popping noise and a bunch of black smoke. Luckily it was just plugged into the wall and not into my computer, otherwise all my shit would probably be fried. Anyway, when I unwrapped the electrical tape, I discovered that the fat end of the cord was totally blown through and there were also some holes and burned wires on the skinny side that connects to my computer. My host dad, the physics and electrical genius, took a look at it and pronounced it "royally fucked," although not in so many words. He's too cool to be crass. I hauled ass to the only place in Peter that sells Apple parts and they told me that I could have a new power cord that ran on crappy Russian power for $100. Fuck you, Apple! Fuck you for telling me that I shouldn't buy an adaptor before I came! I hate you all! So meanwhile I'm lamenting the loss of my endless hours of solitaire, shitty american music, and being condemned to the internet cafe to write the rest of this fucking paper.

Let's not talk about the paper or conference, shall we? Let's also not talk about graduate school. Or boys.

On a positive note (because those are always really fun...phhbt), I bought euro-trash fabulous jeans at the rinok today for 800 rubles. This is about $32. They are fantabulous. I wish that I could post pictures, but alas, my ability to post pictures to the blog died with my computer. Let me just say that there is pocket detailing and the back pockets came pre-slashed. Please, just imagine the awesome!

Because my highschool is that awesome, we get solicited every three months or so for information about what we're doing. Last time, I said something about how I was hot-air-ballooning to the arctic to establish a colony of three-eyed frogs, or something ridiculous. This time I said, "After a recent brush with the Odessian Mafia involving several kilos of hasish and some handguns, I am on the lam and considering changing my name to Masha Kalashnikova." Of course they won't print it, but it amuses me. Which I guess is really all I can ask for...

...And that concludes this week's edition of all the news and not news that's both fit and unfit to print.

2007-03-13T06:01:00.000-07:00

I know that it's been unforgivably long since I last posted anything remotely substantial, but that's really because there was nothing going on. And as much as I like to pretend that my life in goode olde St. Pete is really fun and exciting, I'm pretty much bored out of my mind and want to go home. Looking at my life is like looking at the empty desert highway, except maybe even more boring, because in my life, there aren't any tumbleweeds.

That said, there has been some hilarity (read, pain and angst that is now becoming amusing) in recent weeks. This I'll share, since the other person involved has put himself pretty squarely on the douchebag list. So. About a month or so ago, right after I got back, I met an American guy named Dave, who's here on one of the other programs. He seemed okay, definitely not sketchy, going to grad school next year and into lit theory. (Yes, I'm a dork.) Anyway, he asked for my number, so I gave it to him. Meanwhile, he heads home, I keep having beers with Margaret and crash at her place. In the morning, there's a text from Dave. This is cool--he said that he'd call me, and he did. So we go out and walk around downtown in the snow then get coffee. He's moderately interesting to talk to and doesn't make me inordinately uncomfortable. The next day, he invites me to go to the internet cafe with him. So we go and check email and don't really talk to eachother. Which is weird. But whatever. We hang out a couple more times, walking around the city, going to a concert, etc. but it honestly never occurred to me that he might be actually interested in being more than friends. Actually, this is a lie. It crossed my mind once or twice, but not seriously.

So then, we go out for a beer. And here's the point where everything gets weird. I feel like I'm usually pretty good at weeding out the crazies, at least, crazy in this kind of way, but I got totally blindsided. I'll explain. So we're having beers, sitting and talking, and I'm being friendly or whatever passes for friendly these days, and then all of a sudden he says something about how he's told most of his group that he has a girlfriend. Um, what? Excuse me? "Yeah, I told some people that we'd been seeing eachother." Uh. Uh. Uh. WHAT? Since when does an internet cafe and a couple beers a relationship make? I have to admit that although I'm a little repulsed, I'm also enough surprised and intrigued at what I think is his audacity to just declare that we're dating eachother. So instead of doing what I should have done, which was punch him in the face and leave him with the bill, I decided to roll with it. Because he's not a bad guy. Maybe inexperienced, clueless... But then it gets better. Because then he drops that his friend Tim said, "Dave, be careful. She's from the West Coast, which means she's probably a liberal." Again, the double take. Wait, my being liberal is a problem, which makes you...CONSERVATIVE?! Bingo. Not only that, but he was baptized at 16 or some other ridiculous age when he should definitely have known better. The other highlight of the evening turned out that he was dead set on my taking his last name when we got married. Don't ask how this came up, because I really don't know. I said that I wasn't going to take anybody's last name when I got married, and then scandalized him by the suggestion that he take mine. Fan-fucking-tastic. So, at the end of the night, I find myself with a conservative christian boyfriend and wet pants because I slipped and fell like an monkey on the ice.

We don't see eachother much over the next week or two, which is okay, because I'm not at all sure how I feel about the whole situation. Other than creeped out... Anyway. Moving along to drama. We watch a movie together and he indicates that he might like things to get a little more serious. This is a problem, since a) I have a fairly substantial amount of baggage at this point, and b) he's pretty clueless about what comes after kissing. He said he'd been laid, on numerous occasions, but he sure fooled me. I realize that maybe some of you will say that maybe I should take pity on the poor guy. After all, how is he supposed to get any practice if nobody will give him a chance? I say, dude, it's too late. You missed the boat. That's what college was for. If you're 24 and don't know basic anatomy, you're going to be shit outta luck. I'm not a personal trainer. People get paid to do that kind of stuff. So, to save myself the embarassment of having to tell him that he's not that great a kisser (let alone anything else...), I opened one of the baggage parcels I'm carrying around with me, fully expecting him to run. Leaving us both a graceful way to get out of things. He got very quiet and said that he needed to think, which I took as a sign that things were definitely headed in the right direction...

And how badly was I mistaken... The next morning, I got a text that just said, "We need to talk," which, as everybody knows, means "This is pretty much the end, ultamatums will be laid down, the situation will be acutely uncomfortable, there might be some crying, and you will probably both leave angry." However, this was SO NOT THE CASE. Seriously, what is wrong with guy? He said that he was cool with whatever baggage I was bringing along, as long as I was serious about the relationship. I told him I needed some time to think, since I'd been heading into a funk, and didn't want to totally get in over my head. So he told me to take a week and think about things and then get back to him.

That was an awesome week. Actually, not really. I was perpetually grumpy, and probably in the worst mood I've ever been in in my life. And not only for that week, but for the next one as well. It was awesome. Somewhere in there, I was supposed to tell poor Dave that I really wasn't that interested in dating him, but I somehow didn't get around to it. I was having a bad week or two, and was mostly just interested in not inflicting myself on other people. I did see him once, and was kinda rude, and he got better than everybody else.

There's also a good story in there about when the useless waste of space bureaucrat from Washington came. I digress, but this was pretty awesome too. So, we have this bureaucrat from Washington, Tim, come to visit us twice a semester. He's supposed to listen to our complaints, tell us he'll work on doing whatever it is that we want him to do, and then do nothing. He's an excellent asset to the program. Anyway, I knew the drill from last semester and knew that he was stupid, and the meeting was stupid and it was Saturday, and I had to go into school when I could have been working. So I was already in an awesome mood by the time I got to Nevsky. Then the metro station exit was closed for no apparent reason, so I had to make a station transfer and then the police only had one door to the underpass open, which they were closing on us. The reason for this was made evident by the huge armored cars, crowds of people in black, and riot police, who were all waiting for the dissident march. Which was basically all the people in Petersburg not happy with the current political situation, marching together all the way down Nevsky. So I snuck across Nevsky in between the armored cars and took the back roads. I was sweaty and furious by the time I got to school. Then the fuckhead at the door had to check my student card against a list before he'd let me in. I swore at him in Russian. Then when I got to the meeting late, Tim wasn't even there yet. The meeting with everybody was pretty quick, but then we had the gathering of the year kids who are writing papers. We had to go around and say what we were doing and how it was going and how our advisors were, etc. barf ad infinitum. I haven't really met with my advisor (and by "haven't really" means "not at all") since I got back and really have no desire to. It's too much work and makes me feel stupid. So I don't. And I told Tim that I felt like I didn't really need to meet with an academic advisor to "direct my thinking" because I was perfectly capable of thinking for myself and writing my own paper, thanks. After a few more exchanges in that vein, he said that I shouldn't have come to Russia if I didn't want to write the paper. Which was so ludicrous, I just smiled. It was one fo those amazing moments when I was just able to sit and think, Did you just listen to yourself? Because I did. And You. Sounded. Like. An. IDIOT. To make it that much sweeter, I went home and composed a nasty little letter to send in to Washington with my kick-ass paper (which only exists as an introduction).

But back to Dave. After the awkward interaction, I sent him a text saything that I was sorry I was rude, that I'd been having a bad day, whatever, if he wanted to get together later in the week. He said yes, but then canceled with no explanation. Cool. Whatever. I didn't make any other big efforts, and neither did he, until he texted me to ask him he could borrow my Lonely Planet for his trip to Belarus and Ukraine. I wasn't feeling well that day, so I told him he'd have to wait until tomorrow. And again commences the chain of awesome. We were going to meet somewhere at Nevsky after school. I texted him when I got out to see where he wanted to meet. He told me to come to Nevsky Prospekt metro, which is on the blue line. In reality, he was waiting at the Canal Griboedov exit to the Gostinii Dvor metro, which is the GREEN line. Then he tried to tell me that he was where he said he was going to be, which I didn't really want to hear, mostly because he was WRONG, and so I decided to be magnanimous and just let it slide and not get worked up about it. He took my Lonely Planet, was kind of a jerk about it, and then said he was going home. Man, good riddance of bad rubbish. My new rule is going to be that if I smooch someone, they automatically lose any privilige they might have had to borrow any of my stuff. Seriously. So I sat and was angry for awhile and then decided that I'd try to take the high road (see if I ever do THAT again...) and invited him to come out to the bar with us later that evening. We exchanged some texts, and the long and the short of it was that he had been being a jerk (not that he acknowledged this) because he was just confused (whatever) blah blah blah. So he came out to the bar.

I went out with most of the kids who are here for the year, since we don't have anything better to do than have beers and snipe at eachother because we all secretly think everybody else is ungodly annoying but of course can't say so because we're all still here for another couple months... Oh, the joys of the passive-aggressive society! Anyway, we were all having a good time until Dave showed up. And in all fairness, we continued having a good time after he showed up too. Although he sulked and left early because I wasn't going to talk exclusively to him wanh wanh wanh. And that's pretty much the end of that. Definitely not about the passive-aggressive overly-emotional bullshit.

Life has been full of drama drama drama. It doesn't look like it's going to get any better in the forseeable future, although for different reasons I'm not going to get into...

2007-03-03T05:25:00.000-08:00

The last post was obviously a lie. Mostly I am too tired and life is depressing and having to write about it pretty much just makes me want to open my veins. Uh, but I'm still alive and there are plans to start updating regularly again. Or something. Maybe when the sun comes out.

2007-02-05T05:34:00.000-08:00

I am home. Updates will resume soon.

2007-01-12T14:37:00.000-08:00

ANNOUNCEMENT!!!

THE BLOG IS SUSPENDED UNTIL I RETURN FROM FABULOUS ADVENTURES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE.

UPDATES AND PICTURES WILL FOLLOW UPON MY RETURN, ALTHOUGH PROBABLY SLOWLY BECAUSE I'VE BEEN DOING A FUCKTON OF NOT VERY COOL SHIT, BUT THAT YOU'LL PROBABLY WANT TO READ ABOUT ANYWAY.

I MISS YOU ALL, BUT I DON'T REALLY WISH YOU WERE HERE.

LOVE,
HILLARY

2006-11-18T08:27:00.000-08:00

I received an email a few days ago which detailed friends behaving badly. It was not a particularly pleasant email, but I had a lot to do, and I tried not to think about it too much, even as I could hear their voices saying ugly things to one another. It was upsetting, mostly because now that I've had time to process everything, these actions make evident that things that I had thought were resolved and done with are very much not so. And discussions and actions did not happen honestly, as I thought had been the case. And this makes me so ashamed, not only for myself, but also for the other party involved.

It's better that I'm so far away. It hurts just a little bit less.

2006-11-17T08:26:00.000-08:00

School was dumb and lame. Internet was also dumb and lame. I went to dinner with Meg, Gretchen, and Tevon, so I waited at the café and did mad homework until time to walk to the restaurant. It was really cold. My nose really is not a fan. I should ask if the same expression that they use for a pipe springing a leak can be applied to a really runny nose. Moving away from my perpetual catalogue of bodily functions...

Meg and Gretchen were running a little late, so I waited in the foyer of the restaurant. The waiters were not very friendly. The one that asked if I wanted to sit down gave me a really blank stare when I said that I was going to wait for my friends first. I know that I have an accent, but that's a really simple sentence and my accent's not that bad. Seriously. Then another waiter came out and said that unless our group had made reservations there was no way that we were going to be eating there that night. Man, fuck if I know if Meg made reservations or not. There's no need to be nasty about it, either. When Meg came and asked how long the wait would be, the waiter was nasty to her too, so I didn't feel quite as bad. Douchebags.

So we decided that Plan B would be Chinese on the island, and met Tevon at the metro. Tevon's a really huge black dude who dresses in black all the time. He's finishing up his Fullbright on conceptions of Russian masculinity and male gender roles, and he works with orphans. He also like to hoard small bills. In fact, Tevon may have actually single-handedly caused the shortage of small bills in Petersburg. He is also allergic to pork and really hates mosquitos. We had excellent Chinese food, and I had a good time talking with Gretchen.

In the words of Ivan, "End TRANCEmission!"

2006-11-16T08:24:00.000-08:00

I'm going to skip over school because we never do anything interesting. Then I went to the internet café to do research and work and wait until I could go to Meg's birthday party because it was her birthday today. Yay for Meg being old! (Just kidding...) Meg's mom came yesterday, and it was good to see her again. She also brought me Carmax so that when I get a cold and the skin under my nose splits, it won't look like I have leprosy for quite as long.

I bought some beer at the produkti across the street from Meg's. All the coolers that keep tasty drinks cold have some kind of electric locks on them, and you have to ask the lady behind the counter to unlock them for you. Anyway, I bought five or six bottles of beer and was putting them in my bag when I was approached by a bum, who held out a handful of kopeki and said (in Russian): "You're such a nice, smart, pretty girl. Please give me a beer." To which I said, "Uh, no." "But you're so nice and pretty!" "Uh, still no." And I walked away as fast as I could. I'm not about sharing my beer with the bomzhi.

The party was pretty fun—AuTumn was minus the annoying ex-pat from last time (although she in and of herself is occasionally pretty annoying...) so that was good. I also noticed that Jen is a super obnoxious drunk, and she's a real lightweight for her size and the frequency with which she drinks. I'm such a snob. I talked to James a lot, which was fun. There may be a translation dictionary in the works for the long months of dark, bored-ness and depression ahead. I also talked to Neil for a while, and I really liked him. I'm glad that I got a chance to do some character evaluation, but it also made his actions maybe even more incomprehensible. Whatever. I'll continue to be cryptic in the vague interests of protecting Meg's privacy. (There is no word for privacy in Russian. Nor is there a word for fun. Yay!)

James got really pissy with me after I started talking to Neil. I dunno whether it was because I didn't save his chair or because I didn't give him the right question to his question about Alana. Which is stupid, because as far as I know, James really likes Alana and doesn't particularly like me. Which is how I like it. I do not (uh, DO NOT), under any circumstances, want to get reinvolved with him. That's just all kinds of trouble that I don't want any part of. He asked if I wanted to get an apartment with him. And maybe it was because I was already two beers in, but I didn't even feel bad about saying no. Right now I'm all about getting me through this year, and James can fend for himself. He's doped up on all kinds of meds, so he's already got that going for him. I refused. I'm doing it hardcore, which means that I need his crazy even less. Living with him would just be like adding whack sauce to the crazy fries.

Reading back over the last paragraph, it reads almost like a justification for my actions. And I guess in a way it is. I'm not going to lie: it's pretty lonely here, and it would be easy. Then I remind myself that we're both fucking crazy, and he's probably still a really bad kisser. And who wants to deal with that? Let alone the lack of attraction unless I'm drunk... Why am I still writing? Enough. Hvatit.

2006-11-15T08:23:00.000-08:00

Today's excursion was to the Museum of Political History. It was fucking rad, and I couldn't believe I forgot my camera. They had really excellent Soviet propaganda. It's a really huge museum, and we only ran through the Soviet period. Student admission was something ridiculous like 15 rubles (about 60 cents), so I'm definitely going back. Maybe I'll talk more about it when I have cool things to show.

After the museum, we sprinted to the American Consulate to hear some of the fabulous folks who work there talk about how great working for the Feds is. For awhile, it didn't sound that bad until I remembered that I'd have to be Miss America all the time. I guess that line of work's out. They probably drug test too. Oh well. Who wants to move around every two years?

I finished Gravity's Rainbow. I totally earned my rocket tattoo.

2006-11-14T08:22:00.000-08:00

I actually contemplated calling in sick today because I was so tired and I didn't want to get up. I'm tired, hungry, cold, and stressed pretty much all the time unless I'm hot. Then I'm tired, hungry, stressed, and hot. I hate life pretty much all the time. I still have a cold.

I made a big dent in my to do list. By which I mean that I sent emails to profs at the final list of schools and updated my recommenders on where I'm actually applying. I feel like a spaz. All the time.

I also got emails from people saying "Are you dead? You haven't been updating your blog..." I hate the blog. I hate the blog a lot. Fuck you all and your expectations. I know I'm behind, but it's hard to write when there's so much other stuff that I should be doing all the time. And it's hard to make my not-very-interesting life in Russia sound fun and exciting or interesting, or maybe not even that. I've also been informed that the quality is slipping since I don't make fun of people as much anymore. Fuck you all. I don't make fun of people anymore because it's too much energy and effort to get worked up about stupid shit and stupid people. I've moved into the phase of, "Oh, [insert shitty situation here] sucks a lot. That's just how it is here. Okay, moving along to the next shitty situation..."

I know that's lame and boring to read about, but I'm sure that the grand Eastern European Adventure will bring more tales of stupid people. And remember kids, there's a new bunch of kids coming at the end of January for me to hate on. And I'll have a project like thesis, so I'll be extra cranky all the time. Yay!

2006-11-13T08:21:00.000-08:00

Morning is very very early. I am very very tired. All the time. I don't understand what it is. I've been here a couple months now and I shouldn't still be this tired and maladjusted all the time. What is going on?

School was painful, and so was researching grad schools. Although I talked with Reid for a while about the boring grad school stuff and personal statements and we made to-do lists. This makes me feel better. Mostly because Reid has done way less work researching than I have, and he doesn't even have a good or appropriate writing sample to send to any of the programs he wants to apply to. Although he does have all of his recs lined up, and I still need to find a third. I keep waiting until I have a final list of schools, although things are starting to come together.

Got home really late (8:30), had some dinner, and tried to do homework. This was pretty much a failure because I was so tired and then Mom called. I hadn't talked to her since she dropped me off at the airport, and it was actually pretty okay. Apparently she and Dad are totally thrilled that I want to go to grad school and will help me as much as I want getting my stuff together and mailing it. I have no idea whether or not they'll give me any money, but hopefully I can get enough funding that they won't have to feel bad telling me to take out loans. Anyway, the fact that they'll help takes a huge load off and makes me feel way better about everything. Yay!

2006-11-12T08:20:00.000-08:00

It was Lydia Borisovna's birthday today. Ksusha and her parents came over. Anton and his parents did not put in an appearance. There's some kind of whack family politics here that I'm not a party to. But that's okay. I'm not sure that I really am up for family drama in any other family than mine. Russian gives me a headache. Mostly because it's hard for me to follow fast excited Russian conversation about how to remodel apartments. That's just so many words that I don't know.

We had a pretty good tort, though. It was meringue with whipped cream and prunes. I feel like I'm 80, but prunes are kinda tasty, as long as I just keep telling myself that it's only a plum. It's like a plum-raisin. Yummy.

2006-11-11T08:19:00.000-08:00

I rocked the GRE. Not like rocked it really awesome, but rocked it well enough that I don't feel like a fool applying to the Ivy's. Yay!

So I went to the internet café to brag, then home to read Thomas Pynchon. Because I'm just that cool. And I deserved a day off. At the internet café, I ran into Larissa, who updated me on all the party shenanigans that I managed to miss out on. The kids managed to buy and drink all of a ginormous three liter bottle of vodka, plus whatever else that people brought. Several people got really really sick and barfed all over. Kristin insisted on being the hero of the evening and kicked Phoebe out of her own bathroom. Margaret was called, and several kids went to EuroMed at their own request.

So I talked to Meg after I got home, and she was pissed about the whole thing. Mostly because nobody actually needed to go to EuroMed and she had to take a taxi across town at 2am to deal with squabbling kids. Apparently Kristin had put one of the barfing dudes in the bathtub in order to cool him off. Which makes sense, until you realized that when you're drunk, your body can't regulate it's temperature that well, so once you get all the heat out, you get really fucking cold really fast, and Kristen, who works in a hospital and knows everything about anything medical, almost gave this dude hypothermia. Good job!

During the course of the conversation, Meg and I also expressed our surprise at the number of times people have had so much to drink that they've been sick (or gotten themselves into bad situations...). I sort of understand... I've been sick from drinking, but only twice. The first time was totally deserved: I drank a 40 of PBR, and then a 40 and a half of OldE in an hour and a half. The second time I don't feel was quite so deserved, but whatever. Anyway... I understand that shit happens, but I feel like the amount of shit that happens with this group is way more than it should. It's like people don't know how to drink. And the other thing that pisses me off is that these kids don't really know how to care for drunk people. Rub their shoulders? Put them in a bath tub? What?! Drape them over the toilet and then give them water when they stop barfing. Leave them alone. Nobody wants an audience when they're puking their guts out. Jesus. The only time you need to worry is if they're passed out before they've barfed. Why are people so stupid? It makes me angry.

2006-11-10T08:18:00.000-08:00

The GRE is tomorrow. So instead of going right home and studying (because I figure I've probably done about as much as I can do), I went to EuroMed to give more blood to convince the Russian Feds that I haven't managed to pick up the HIV in the last two months. I ran into Ivan on Nevsky. He wanted to hang out, and I wanted to hang out too, but I had to go get my arm poked. It made me sad.

The EuroMed waiting room is pretty nice. They have comfy chairs, filtered water, a fish tank, and free internet. Top of the line luxury. Anyway. I got my arm poked by a super efficient nurse. Usually when I get blood drawn, it's sort of an ordeal. My veins aren't all that big or close to the skin or whatever makes them more poke-able, so usually I have to have all kinds of tourniquets and alcohol rubs and special squeeze balls. But this lady just gave me the rubber band around the arm, a wipe and then a jab. No poking around inside my arm for the vein. No needle falling out of the vein midway through. I'm all about the Russian blood-drawing efficiency.

Then to Chinese food with James, Meg, Neil, Evgenii Yurivich, and the Flagship girls. I don't want to give away Meg's love life for her (because I'm not that much of an asshole) but I think she was happy that she had a posse to counter Neil's Flagship posse. The Flagship girls seemed nice, although both spoke really really insanely good Russian and made me feel pretty much like an idiot. Whatever. It was good Chinese food. And McDonalds for ice cream because no meal is complete without ice cream, according to Evgenii Yurivich.

Then it was suddenly 11, and it was late. And I had to get up very early to take the GRE in not very many hours. So I didn't make it to the last Club Phoebe. Beer makes me sleep well.

2006-11-09T08:17:00.000-08:00

So because I'd been thinking about poetry last night, I started trying to think about what kind of poetry I like, because I do like some of it. The product of all this thought culminated in the following:

There once was a whack bitch named Kristen
Who would tell anyone who would listen:
"I will work," —with a sigh,
"For the FBI,
"But only in trafficking women!"

It's actually preventing women trafficking, but she's a whack bitch, and even Pushkin took poetic liberties. Besides, it's more funny this way.

And none of you wrote any parables of the whack bitch of Whackistan. This makes me sad because I'm sure that many of you have encountered many whack bitches that you could write me entertaining stories about. But looking back, I didn't really make a clear distinction between the whack bitches and the crazy bitches. So. For the record. A crazy bitch is crazy all the time and that's all there is to it. Sometimes she's maybe less crazy than others, but she's always crazy. A whack bitch is a little different. A whack bitch seems really normal until she just goes and does something totally whack, like hits you upside the head and then steals your wallet or something.

Entertain me. It's cold and dark over here.

2006-11-08T08:15:00.000-08:00

I still have a cold, but it's not as bad today. Yay only blowing one gallon of snot today instead of five! I talked to Rob this morning. Yay for a sweet election! Jenna sent me a text message saying "The Dems win! We can go home!" Yup, pretty much.

Today is also excursion day to the Dostoevsky museum. It was really excellent, except that there was a film crew making a documentary about why foreigners (non-Russians) like Dostoevsky so much. Although the more that I think about it, the apartment "museums" (which are more like shrines that make money) are a really weird institution. I was going to say that we don't do that as much in America, but I guess we do. I've been to Mark Twain's house, Louisa May Alcott's house, and the house of seven gables even though I've never had the misfortune to read that particular Hawthorne tale. I guess maybe it's just that our literary tradition is less revered. I didn't give the blog address to any of my high school english teachers, so yeah, I'm going to go ahead and say that our American literary tradition is less rich. Yeah, Art, that's right. Less rich. American literature mostly sucks. Regardless, I still think that these apartment museums are slightly strange. I mean, it's really cool to see this stuff that these famous people owned, and the the rooms that they lived in pretty much the way they left them (or as near as the restorators can figure out), but there's something about it that also really creeps me out.

But I've been distracted from the museum. It was really pretty cool. They'd done a really good job with all the restoration and stuff. In favor of authenticity, they'd even papered it in the same really ugly brown wall paper that was there when Dostoevsky lived there (they knew it was the right one because people put sheets of newspaper underneath new wall paper, so they were able to date it from the newspapers). They had his top hat under a glass dome, and even a cup of tea on his desk. The tv camera was really obnoxious, and most of the kids (except for Claire) weren't so hot on being video taped for tv. They interviewed Margaret for their show. It was excellent. Then Claire volunteered to be interviewed as well, and said nothing, much less articulately than Meg. Is anyone surprised? I mean, really.

After the museum, I hit up the internet café, mostly for grad school applications and other useless stuff like that. Today brought home to me the absolute impossibility of applying for grad school from here unless I have a lot of help from state-side. I'm going to have to ask for help from Mom and Dad. Fuck me. Fuck me a lot. Really hard. Yes, Zhenya, I could take another year off to figure out what I really want to do with myself, but if I took another year off, I'd also have to work 70+ hour weeks again, and I'd be so tired all the time just trying to live, I'd never be able to do anything and I'd end up like Rob, having the best of intentions to go back to school, but never doing anything about it. At this point, I feel like staying in school is the only way that I'm going to get to where ever it is that I want to be.

The second part of our "Dostoevsky-day" excursion was to see the play, "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man." It was ridiculously awesome. It's a pretty typical Dostoevsky "love will save the world" parable, but the play was so cool. It was in a room like Raskolnikov's: a little attic room with period furniture and lit by candles. We sat in chairs around the perimeter of the room, and the actor appeared out of a huge trunk in the middle of the room and delivered the monologue in period costume, etc. He got right up in our faces and climbed and stomped around. It was way cool. I want some glow in the dark prayer beads.

So Dostoevsky is all about love, which started me thinking about how we express love. I won't expound at length because it's boring, but I started thinking about the difference between expressing love in prose versus in verse. Mostly because I also had the misfortune of reading some incredibly bad love poetry recently. Why is it that so much poetry sucks so much? I'm not really a fan of poetry, and I never really have been. Maybe I'm just uncultured, but I don't get it. I'm not a poet and I don't have any pretensions to being a great writer either, but I feel like you can do so much more with prose while avoiding more clichés. Whatever. Love is dumb.

2006-11-07T08:14:00.000-08:00

I still have a cold. My head feels like my brain has been embalmed with cotton balls. My ears won't pop when I ride the metro, so my head feels extra funny. This is probably the worst cold that I've had since the one I had about this time last year when I chugged decongestant out of the bottle and had coughing fits that made me have to sit down and rest. The one where I thought I had TB? Alex remembers, if only because I hacked all over him every other night...

Lots of people were missing at school today. This was a big mystery until Meg explains that this is because four of them were attacked by some drunk dude at a bar and then saw the drunk dude shoot the bartender in the chest. Good times. Dude hit the girls, and punched Clark in the face and broke his nose. And all this time I had been feeling bad for being lame and never going out to bars! Now it turns out that rather than being lame, it was a survival mechanism! I win!

James had very much wanted to meet Ivan, so I set up a meet and greet. It went well, and they got along better and had more to say to eachother than I have to say to Ivan, so that was cool. Mostly also because I wanted to think a little bit more about this people getting beat up thing and wasn't really in the mood to do a whole lot of small talk. There was also an exchange of sorts. I'm vaguely disturbed that I now apparently exude enough sketch that I can go halfway around the world and meet people who like the same kinds of things I do. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing...

Home for homework and study. James put his hand on my knee as we were riding down the escalator. I'm not sure how I feel about that. Mostly not so much. Ew.

2006-11-06T08:13:00.000-08:00

Today was a day off for the state holiday. Which was good, because I still have a cold. This blows. I woke up and took more decongestants three times last night. That's so not okay. I hate not being able to breathe. Lydia Borisovna made us vareniki (jam in a sweet pasta shell) for breakfast. They were pretty tasty. I walked Laura back to the metro station so that she wouldn't get lost and then went to the grocery store for lunch stuff and more kleenex.

I read more of the Rainbow until I felt too guilty about not studying for the GRE. After all, I only have to take the damn thing in five days. I did that until I couldn't stand it anymore and then did homework and went to bed. It was a very chill day off in between emptying the entire contents of my sinuses every two minutes.

2006-11-05T08:11:00.000-08:00

I woke up with a really bad cold. Not just the congested, stuffed head feeling, but the sore throat and the so much snot it should be illegal cold. I was alone again this morning so I went back to bed and slept most of the day. When I wasn't sleeping, I was re-inspired to read Gravity's Rainbow. I am now past halfway, which means that I will most absolutely finish. Or something. It's only taken me five months to get this far...

Unfortunately, I had to get up at some point because Laura was supposed to be coming over to spend the night. And here's why, because this is pretty excellent. She wasn't just spending the night because we were planning on going out and getting really drunk. It's because her hozyaika was planning on having her lover over and wanted Laura to leave. Just for the night, though. So in the interest of keeping everybody happy, Laura came over here. My hozyaika's reaction was actually pretty cool. She said, "Rita's not married? She has a lover over? Good for her!" I'm glad that I'm with such a liberal family.

Anyway, I went out for drinks with Laura and James. We stayed on Vaska (the island) and went to the same bistro that Meg and I went to before. They have very cheap beer, which makes me happy. At some point James said that I was a hard drinker, and I got a little offended. Maybe because Kris also said that I was a drinker. But that's okay. I'd rather be a drunk than a 32 year-old pot-head living with Mom. I made James explain, and his rationale was that it was a compliment: that he's seen me drink quite a lot, but he's never seen me be stupid drunk or totally out of control. And that may be true. I've been stupid drunk plenty of times, but usually only in very controlled situations (after lessons learned the hard way). Mostly, I don't feel like I'm actually that much of a drinker mostly because most of my friends drink just as much if not more than I do, and also because I drink way less here than I do at home. It's also a little touchy because Grandpa's a hard-core boozer. I love my tolerance, but I don't love those genes.

Enough meditations on the black state of my soul. We eventually packed it up because the metro was going to close and as much fun as the drunk walk home was with Meg, I wasn't quite up for it with Laura. I wanted some more decongestants like whoa and then to pass the fuck out. Which was pretty much what I did. And it was excellent.

2006-11-04T08:10:00.000-08:00

Today is a national holiday, so there is a fascist march down Nevsky. My plan is to stay home and not go out as much as possible. There's always more violence around the national holidays. And also probably because the fascists have a permit to march and the antifascists aren't so much fans of the fascists and will probably start some big rumpus. I was hoping for a huge cool-looking bruise on my ass from my aborted love affair with the escalator, but no such luck.

I talked to Alex this morning about grad school and personal statements and all that kind of good stuff. This was actually the first time I'd talked to him since before I left and it was pretty good. I forgot how much I like to talk to him, and the amazing capacity that we both have to talk about nothing for so long. Anyway, it was really nice to talk to him and he had some good advice for me and helped me pin down what I'm going to write about a little better.

I still don't have any cell phone service. Surprise surprise.

Then Meg called and invited me to come over for dinner. Yay dinner. Nobody is home and I like some company sometimes. I headed out for Meg's a little bit early so that I could swing by the Megaphone store and attempt to figure out why my phone doesn't work. I was all ready to use the phrase "This isn't service, this is shit" if they tried to tell me that they didn't know what the deal was. Unfortunately, they did know exactly what the problem was: I still owed them money. I think that that's a big pile of shit because they keep a running balance as you use your minutes and it's pretty hard to go way over because they just turn off your phone. But rather than listen to more incomprehensible explanations, I decided to fork over the cash and get the hell out of there. And then they turned my phone on a half hour later!

This was good because I got hopelessly confused trying to find Meg's house. But all was well and we hung out a little bit before everyone else started arriving. Tevon took over the role of doorman, which was excellent when James (!) arrived and Tevon wouldn't let him up. It was really excellent to see James. I hadn't quite realized how much I missed people from home and how excited I was that somebody else who understands me and the proper way to roll was here with me. This is also mostly because the other kids in my group are a bunch of fucking squares. I don't think of myself as particularly "extracurricularly experienced," but these kids make me look like a fucking expert and it makes me really sad. AuTumn brought this super annoying ex-pat named Michael that she'd met at a bar somewhere. James and I started the skype-age as soon as we heard that he was an English major from Princeton with a shelved (unfinished and unpublished) novel about South America (written while he was living there, of course) and currently working on a collection of short stories, fictional of course, set in Russia. Anyway, I had a great time being an asshole to this poor man who absolutely deserved it for being such an perfect example of why everyone around the world thinks that Americans are know-it-all jerks. Jen and AuTumn had the misfortune of misinterpreting James' question: "Have you ever played Mortal Kombat?" as a pickup line, and then Meg felt compelled to elucidate the nature of past relations. Boo.

But it was a pretty excellent night, including a mad dash through the snow to catch the very last metro home.

2006-11-03T08:07:00.000-08:00

Lydia Borisovna was gone when I got up this morning, but she left me kasha on the stove. It was actually really nice to have the morning to myself and ease into the day a little bit. They're actually really nice about the fact that I don't really like to talk in the morning, but I always feel a little bad about it. My brain is just not up to the gymnastics of managing all that much more than good morning, please, and thank you.

So probably because I was having so much fun all by myself, I left the house a little bit late this morning. So I got to the metro late. And rather than waiting in line and trying to elbow my way over to the standing side, I decided that I'd just go ahead and thump down the running side. Except that I forgot that the escalator was wet from all the melting snow from people's boots, and I slipped and fell on my ass. And not just fell, but fell and slid down several stairs (on my ass) into the man in front of me. And people laughed at me. So I picked myself up and continued to run down the stairs away from the people who had seen me fall. Those were some of the hardest stairs I've ever fallen on and my ass hurt a lot. It still hurt when I got to school and it was lame that I had to sit on it all day. It still hurts now, actually.

After school, I had to go to the knitting store with Jonathan. Sometime a long time ago I said that I'd fix the hole that he made in Jessica's mitten, and that he's go to the yarn store and buy the yarn to fix it. So I had to go today. I was cranky and did not want to go at all. Mostly because I don't really know anything about how to fix holes in mittens, other than it involves some yarn and a needle. And not that I knew the words for either one of those. Whatever. So we went to the knitting store, and I walked up to the counter, showed the lady the mitten, and said, "There's a hole and I have to fix it. What do I need?" She looked at the hole and then said that I could either cut the top of the mitten off and reknit it, or I could pull all the stitches together with some black thread for 13 rubles. I liked the easier 13 ruble option.

Then I went to the internet café to do "grad school research" which mostly consists of halfhearted looks at Slavic Languages & Literatures programs and reading livejournal. But I got an email from Claire in Paris, who apparently hates France about as much as I hate Russia, and we all know that misery loves company. It made me really happy to know that all the people who come back with glowing opinions of study abroad are really full of shit.

So more about the cell phone. I'd been trying not to get too mad that I still didn't have any service 23 hours after I paid for more minutes, but it hasn't been working too well. I saved my receipt just in case something like this happened, so I went back to the Ultrastar with the receipt and said, "I paid for minutes yesterday, and I still don't have any service. What happened?" To which they said that everything was fine on their end and that I'd have to take it up with my service provider. Blow me.

At this point I was too tired and fried to even contemplate going back out and dealing with the phone company, so I went home and watched tv with Lydia Borisovna and had dinner. Then I fixed Jessica's mitten. Lydia Borisovna was very curious about why I was fixing the mitten. She said, "Why didn't these kids just ask their hozyaika's (host moms) to do it?" To which I said, "I don't know. Maybe their host moms didn't know how." "Psssh. What kind of hozyaika doesn't know how to fix a mitten?"

Then I studied for the GRE and went to bed. More good times on Friday night.

2006-11-02T08:05:00.000-08:00

Morning comes so early. So so early. And with a big fat hangover. Go figure. Jenna works close to where I live, so we piled into the marshrutka and headed to the island. It was the first time I'd been in a marshrutka this trip. I'm always vaguely afraid that they won't let me out, but I was reassured that this will not happen. The driver didn't hear the girl sitting in the back say that she wanted to get out and all the other passengers yelled at him when he started to go by her stop. The driver was nice to us and let me out close to the metro so that I could run home and grab my books and stuff. It was a pretty awful morning and I wasn't sure I was going to make it. I went to text Meg to tell her that I might be late, and then remembered that I didn't have any minutes on my cell phone. Right. So lame.

School was so painful. I'm not sure whether it was because of the hangover or because I'm just getting restless or whatever, but every single class was the longest class of my life EVER. Even longer than the Russian Formalism class, and that was particularly awful specimen. Politilogia was the worst. Not that that's unusual or something, but today was especially bad for some reason. Maybe because the teacher kept pushing for a discussion and nobody was in the mood.

I hit the cash machine and then the internet café to ascertain that in fact, nobody loves me. Then I went to the cell phone store and bought more minutes, and went home to do homework. I am checking my cell phone (turning it on and off) every hour and waiting for service to magically reappear.

2006-11-01T09:19:00.000-08:00

Wednesday is excursion day, and yet again, I have no pictures for you. But I have a good reason this time, not some bogus excuse like "they wouldn't let me take pictures of the beer factory because of terrorists!", but we went to Kresti Prison today, and nobody gets to take pictures of the prison. Today was a nice reminder of why I don't want to ever get caught doing anything illegal here.

So anyway. Because it's Wednesday, you also get a little history lesson. Because I should at least try to be informative if I can't be entertaining. So Kresti was built way back when and opened in 1892. It's cool because it's super old and it's also built in the shape of a cross. It also has an old church that's undergoing restoration smack in the middle of one of the crosses. The prison is actually a huge compound (as they tend to be) and it's very centrally located in downtown Petersburg. It's maximum security, and Kresti is only where they keep you before your trial. I can only imagine that where they take you after that is about a billion times worse. Anyway, the cells are really small and supposedly only have six people in them (according to the guide), but my good friend Lonely Planet says that they actually have more like ten to fifteen, sleeping in shifts. The doors were about as thick as my hand and totally soundproof. We found this out when the guide shut some of the group in one of the rooms and we couldn't hear them scream. Ha ha.

The doors also have a small window in the middle of them, probably about the size of two of my hands put together wide, and a hand and a half tall. Or about the size of my Katzner dictionary. Anyway, these windows are pretty small. However, I did see one of the prisoners on the upper level had managed to stick his entire head out of the window and was talking to the guard. I'm not sure how he did it, because the windows are too small. Amazing. It was really creepy to walk down the hall and have people come to the window of the door (if they had one) and watch you. It made me feel like I was the one in the zoo, rather than the other way around.

The prison is actually a really beautiful old, red brick building that's slowly deteriorating. The day was grey, drippy, and cold, and as strange as it is to say, made the prison prettier. Maybe just because it fit the mood or something. The prison museum was cool. They had all kinds of artifacts that prisoners had managed to smuggle in (like knives, files, guns, and bombs), tattoo guns with ball point pens, and things that the prisoners had made out of bread. Don't ask how this works because I don't really know. Actually, I do, because I watched that Sorokin movie. Alex, you know what I'm talking about. They chew the bread up until it forms a paste that they can mold. When the paste dries out, it becomes really hard like clay. It's really gross. But kinda cool. (In the same way that I'm fascinated by the color of my stomach acid...)

After the prison, we all needed some cheering up, and so I went to the sit-down Teremok with some of the other kids. And what better thing than blini and bad company? Actually, the company wasn't that bad. It's not like I really have problems with any of them. Some of them are just annoying. Which doesn't make them bad people. Actually, whatever. It totally does make them bad people. If I can't stand to be around you, you're probably either a bad person, or too good of a person. I'm such a snob. Anyway.

I headed home for a little while before heading out to Novus to hear Jen and Lafleur DJ. I was pleasantly surprised by the company. I ended up meeting Jen's soon-to-be ex-partner Mischa, a Russian who speaks flawless English and translates for a living. He's really cool and I ended up getting rather sloshed and heading out with Jenna, fully intending to catch the metro and go home. But then Jenna said that we should go get shwarma and stay at her apartment. And being drunk, greasy shwarma sounded like the best thing ever. Also because it smells so good, but everyone always tells you not to eat it.

Why should you not eat shwarma in Petersburg? Ask any Russian, and they will tell you that it's made out of dog. This may or not be true, but it's pretty tasty. Regardless, there are better and worse places to get shwarma. Meg says that the shwarma by her house is bad, but the one where Jenna and I went is better. I've decided that the difference in quality must be due to the age of the dogs they're using. The shwarma cart at Senia Ploshad must employ faster, younger men who can go out and catch the younger and tastier dogs. It's a funny thing—you never see any puppies in Petersburg...

So we had drunk shwarma standing outside in the cold, and it was quite possibly the best thing I've had here. I know I say that about everything, but this might actually be true, drunk or not. Then we wanted water, so we headed to the grocery store where there was also the drunk purchase of a hat, some diet coke, water, and hair die. Then we walked to Jenna's house and decided to play drunk beauty parlor at 2am. My hair came out pretty well. I was going to take a poll (from the three of you who actually respond...) as to what color I should do my hair (I'd been debating about going either a bright out-of-the-bottle dark red, brown, or blond) but then I just decided that I'm going to be blond again for a while. It looks pretty okay. Deciphering the directions was a bit of a mess and I'm glad that I'd done it all before. Otherwise my hair (and Jenna's, who did dye hers red) would be a disaster. We finally got to sleep around four, still drunk.

2006-10-31T09:13:00.000-08:00

Grad school blows so much ass. I pretty much can't describe it because it's just too depressing. Actually, I'm just afraid that if I start talking about it, I'll never stop. Suffice to say that I sent a "pity me, I'm too dumb to do grad school" email to poor, long-suffering Zhenya. That man deserves a medal for putting up with my shit even after I've graduated.

So I was totally going to blow off the Halloween party because I hadn't felt like I was going to be in the mood for hanging out with people and I didn't bother to figure out a costume. But by the time I was done being angry at the Harvard application (who am I kidding, really...) I decided that I really just wanted a beer. Or maybe five. And maybe to talk to Meg. So I hopped over to the Halloween party. It was also snowing. And walking in the snow is fun.

Anyway. The party was at City Bar, which is near the American Consulate, and is apparently an excellent place to either meet American soldiers or super obnoxious American ex-pats. There were some super excellent costumes. Evgenii Yurivich was a frat boy (frut boi po-russki), Meg was Princess Leia. A pirate, a gypsy, a vampire slayer, a nerd, and several cats made an appearance, along with one of the Ghostbusters, President Kennedy and Jackie Onassis (featuring Jonathan in drag), and the Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy duo. My disguise was surprise. Whatever. The beer was good, although expensive. Poor awkward Erik was Draco and won quote of the night with: "I can't sit down—I've got a stick in my pants!"

I got a little sloshed and talked a lot with Meg's Russian friend Valya. She's an art historian, and she's super nice. Anyway, we made fun of one of the dudes who pulled up a chair at the other table of American students. He's a Clarkie, but he was really old. He also liked to talk a lot about how well connected he was in Petersburg and how he'd only been there two months and was working illegally, and so on and so on and all about him and how excellent he was. And yes, the phrase "I want his phone number like I want AIDS" may have come out of my mouth. Whatever.

I was about ready to head home and make my obligatory drunk dial. Meg was a little sloshed and said that I should make some certain drunken confessions involving "the L word." I dunno how I feel about all that. I said it once before I left, and I said it once in a voicemail after I had a freaky dream, but I'm not sure that I'm really up to all the rest of it. I have a hard enough time with "I miss you." Because the other person has to say "I miss you too"—otherwise they're an asshole. So there's not really any choice there. It would make me happy if he said it first, but I'm not holding my breath. Mostly because I'd just die.

Uh. Right. So I walked to the metro with AuTumn. Okay. I'm sorry. I have to stop and tell things a little out of order because I found out that AuTumn spells her name with a capital T and this requires a little explanation before I go on with the story. Anyway. Back in the day AuTumn used to be Autumn, but she had a good friend named JoAnn and was super jealous that JoAnn had two capitals in her name. So one day Autumn told her parents that she wanted two capitals in her name. And her parents said okay. And Autumn said, "I think I want to capitalize the T!" And her parents said okay. So Autumn became AuTumn. WFT? What kind of parents let you do something when you're eight that will make you look like an idiot for the rest of your life? Seriously. What. The. Fuck. I mean, on the list of offenses, it's not as grievous as like, I dunno, molesting your kid or something, but making them look like an idiot forever is right up there.

But back to the story. AuTumn had invited a friend of hers to the party. His name is Hank, he's Dutch maybe? and he's been living in Petersburg for a long time, speaks really excellent English, and has a girlfriend. However, he's got to be about the sleaziest motherfucker I've met this side of Reid Allmandinger. And most of you know exactly how much love I have for the Dinger, but for those of you that don't, I'll give you a hint: many long days of torture wouldn't be enough. Anyway, this dude Hank does not give off a real great vibe. For example. As soon as he sat down at our table, everyone except AuTumn turned to Meg with the "Who the fuck is that?" look. Anyway, apparently AuTumn hangs out with this guy a lot and that makes him fine. Whatever. That makes AuTumn dumb and makes her going to get raped or dead because she doesn't have a sketch detector. But whatever. She's twenty eight and doesn't need my advice.

I was accused of only calling while drunk. Which is not true. Only about half the time. Really. And I didn't make an ass of myself or say anything I shouldn't have. Yay! Another awesome day!

2006-10-30T09:08:00.000-08:00

I am a grammar rockstar! While brushing my teeth! So, I was thinking (the way I normally do) as I was brushing my teeth this morning and then I started wondering why the obscene Russian phrase "idti na khui" (loosely and humorously translated as "go to the dick") uses the preposition na. I was puzzling over this and thinking about the various situations that call for the use of na rather than v. Directions... Some buildings... Islands... Peninsulas. What is a penis? Oh yes, a peninsula. Grammar at work! I win forever!

Then I got to feel even better when I called Rob and found out that he broke his hand. Wait, that sounds really mean. I was happy to talk to Rob, and I was sad that he broke his hand, but I was amused that he was enough of a dumbass to break it punching a wall. Especially over pool hall formal. I'd go on and make fun of him some more, but he probably "reads" this and (I hope) feels like enough of an idiot already.

School only mildly sucked today. So it's not really worth talking about. Although Meg chastised us collectively for speaking too much English. Whatever. It's hard to speak Russian all the time. I don't hang out with any of the other program kids really, so I'm speaking Russian most of the rest of the day. School is the only opportunity to speak English, and the feeling is pretty much that you should be able to make the most of it. I actually made my first joke in Russian today when I was telling Lydia Borisovna about what Margaret said. She asked why the students were speaking so much English, and I said that it was too hard to complain in Russian. Which isn't really a joke, and isn't really that funny, but she laughed, which is the first time that humor has been communicated.

But backing up a little, I had email today! I can't even begin to explain how lame it makes me feel to get excited about getting email, but seriously. It's sad that I hear from Alex more regularly than from my parents. But yeah. Emails from lots of people! Mostly about grad school and telling me not to be such an idiot about certain aspects of my life, but it was exciting nonetheless.

Today was also an awesome day because... Anybody? Anybody? No, Claire didn't get hit by a bus. FIRST SNOW!!! That gets caps and lots of exclamation marks because it's really exciting. We don't get the snow much in the Portland, so any snow is cool, but this was the first of the year. Yay snow!

2006-10-29T09:07:00.000-08:00

Anton is still here in the morning. There are more blini and lots of kasha. I'm totally in favor of having Anton over all the time. He gets bored with the trains and I remember how boring it is to stay at the grandparent's who don't really know what to do with you. However, I know that all eight year olds like to play on the computer, regardless of what language they speak, and I never took off the Gameboy cartridges that Reed put on my computer years ago. So we learned how to play Tom & Jerry together.

I wish that I could say that I did something interesting, but really, that's about it, folks. I did some homework and studied for the GRE, and then did some more homework.

2006-10-28T09:06:00.000-07:00

So at some point in the morning when my phone beeps, I remember that I said that I was going to meet Reid and Candice and go costume shopping with them. This seems like a bad idea, especially since the time that I will have to leave the house is quickly approaching and it's still early and it's Saturday. So I pass on going costume shopping and go back to sleep.

This is pretty much all I did all day. Well, that's a lie. I did some laundry because just about everything I owned was dirty. And I read Pride and Prejudice. Not the whole thing, but I'm working on it. This is harder than it sounds because I'm reading it in Russian. It makes me feel cool. And no, I don't understand all of it, but I understand enough. It's also easier when you've read it in English and seen the movies probably eight hundred times.

Then Anton, the grandson, came over. I had planned on a super quiet Saturday night, skipping the Halloween party at the American ygol in favor of tea and making myself feel smarter by reading in Russian. But plans were derailed slightly by the arrival of an eight year old. He's blond, and actually reminds me a lot of Nate, one of the kids that I used to teach swimming to, except that Anton's older, Russian, and not autistic. Right. Anyway. He's a sweet kid, and kinda shy. He got out all the electric trains and built a pretty elaborate track set-up. I was actually a little glad that he came because Lydia Borisovna made blini, which she doesn't normally do. Yay blini. The best Russian food ever, other than fried pelmeni.

2006-10-27T09:04:00.000-07:00

Politologia didn't suck because we watched a movie. That's about all I can say. No, that's actually a lie. I could say a lot about this movie, because I actually kinda liked it even though we did have to watch it for class and it's a fairly typical heavy-handed Soviet film. But it had lots of Jesus in it, which made it very interesting from a subversive point of view. Anyway, this film is called "The Ascent," and it tells the story of these two soldiers in WWII who go out to try to find food to save their village and their misadventures. The upshot is that they get captured by the Germans and one of the soldiers (the one that we've thought is the weaker one) stands up to torture and doesn't betray his comrades, while the other breaks without even the threat of torture. The one who's been tortured then tries to sacrifice himself to save the lives of the other prisoners with him. This doesn't work, but there's a lot of nice suffering Jesus shots and white light. Blah blah blah. I could talk a lot more about the cinematography, but this is only interesting if you've seen the movie. So whatever. Moving along.

After school, I was supposed to go try to see a movie (again) with Reid and Candice. Reid had to go to EuroMed for a checkup, so Candice and I investigated movies. They were either all at bad times or too expensive, so we set up camp in the internet café with cheap wi-fi and dicked around until Reid came back. I did almost all of the little internet errands that I'd been either putting off or just forgetting to do. Like signing up for Hospitality Club. And the GRE. I'm talking it on November 11. Soon. Barf. So instead of going to a movie, we had dinner and then the "one beer" that of course turned into several. But it was good times. Candice tells too many stories about the good old days of undergrad in Texas or about Ultimate Frisbee, or about previous trips to Russia, but she's okay other than that. And I like Reid. Anyway, I also like beer.

I'd had horrible insomnia all week, but I slept well tonight. About fucking time.

2006-10-26T09:03:00.000-07:00

The heat is on at school. This is so great. It's still not on a lot, but it's actually kind of warm in the classrooms now. I can now study without wearing my coat, scarf, hat, and gloves. Rock on!

I still have insomnia. This sucks. I'm tired and cranky all the time. It also made me really not want to go and meet my new tutor. But I did. Even though I was tired and cranky and just wanted to go home. She seems pretty cool. She's a good friend of Lena's and is a journalism major and trying to decide what field she wants to go into after she graduates. She is also cool because she rides a bicycle in Petersburg. She rides without a helmet, so I'm sure she's going to be killed. I'm not sure if that makes her cool or not, though. She has a super-awesome mullet. It's really long in back.

I think the only other thing that I did today of note was talk to Rob for a long time. And that's probably not really noteworthy to anybody except me. That was good. I'll spare everyone from having to read about it, and spare myself the embarrassment.

Although I did learn that I should maybe be slightly more circumspect about what type of personal information I post on here, because all kinds of people I never expected actually do read this. Like my boss. (Hi Sue!) And the dude I mentioned a few entries back who I thought didn't read my blog. Well, I don't know if he actually reads it, but he at least looks at it. Along with creepy people on the internet that I don't know at all. Anyway, I'm debating making an end to personal information, but really, what's the point of having a blog if you're not oversharing?

2006-10-25T09:00:00.000-07:00

So, I know that in the past there have always been pictures on Wednesdays, but we may be getting to the point where the pictures on Wednesday stop, either because I'm too cheap to pay for permits, or because I'm straight up not allowed to take pictures of what I'm seeing.

Take today, for example. The excursion was fucking awesome. We toured the Baltika beer factory and got to taste all the different kinds of beer they make. But they wouldn't let us take any pictures because they're afraid that we'll either steal their special recipes or because we'll take pictures and then use them to find some way to either break in or blow up the factory. And we all know that Russia without beer would be a sad country indeed...

This was actually a really cool excursion. I'd never been to a beer factory although I'm from the land of fucking micro-brews, and that huge factory that used to be in the middle of the downtown Pearl that I can't remember the name of right now. It's where Whole Foods is now. And I know that a huge factory is a little different than micro-brewing, thanks, but all the same, I feel like I should have been before now. Anyway, we got to see all the tanks where they age the beer, and I've never seen so many giant tanks of beer in my life. The smell was amazing. All I could think about was how happy I would be if one of those tanks just spontaneously sprung a leak.

Then we went through (and when I say went through, we walked through the factory in these glass skyways) the bottling part where they make the bottles, complete with a machine that they called an "american worker" that was like a roller coaster for the bottles to cool them off. Then they fill the bottles, cap them, wash them, slap the labels on, and package them. The whole process was so fast. It was incredible. The plastic bottles went faster than the glass ones, and with less breakage and spillage.

We also got to go through some of the warehouses where they keep the beer before it's shipped out. This was a warehouse bigger than an airplane hanger where they keep cartons and cases and kegs and whatever the fuck else beer comes in. Anyway, this looks like enough beer to keep people busy for a good month, but it turned out to be only big enough to keep Russia drunk for three days. And Russia isn't even the leader for per capita beer drinking.

Speaking of disturbing things related to alcohol drinking, there's a liver failure epidemic going around Russia right now. All the prices for the cheapest alcohol just went up, and the people who could barely afford the rotgut that is legal to sell are now drinking god knows what, and as a result, are undergoing liver failure. Needless to say, the state is very concerned about this further decrease in population. The pictures of bright yellow people on the news are really gross.

Anyway, after we made it through the warehouses and past the huge wall of gifts that people have given the factory, the guide showed us the special Balitika horses. Apparently, the horses are part of their ad campaign, which involves people in period costume driving around downtown Petersburg with horses and a big wagon full of (empty) Baltika kegs. There were only two horses there (the rest were somewhere else) and they looked pretty much like all horses look.

After that excitement, we got to go to the tasting room where we had beer and snacks. Because drinking's no good if you can't remember the three rules of Russian drinking: 1) Never admit that you're drunk (because that means you're a pussy); 2) Never drink alone (because that means that you're an alcoholic); 3) Never drink without food (because this also means that you're an alcoholic). Anyway, we got to try all kinds of different Baltika beers, which are numbered according to some arcane system that nobody can really figure out. Anyway, I liked No. 8, the unfiltered wheat beer. The 5 tastes a lot like Miller with a little more kick, and is apparently the number one seller. As usual, there was a discussion of the purpose of non-alcoholic beer, which most people agreed was created for recovering alcoholics until Meg came over and laid down the law: "Baltika 0 isn't for ex-alcoholics! It's for athletes, pregnant women, and designated drivers!" Somehow this was more funny when I was sloshed.

We were all a little punchy by the time the guide officially declared the tour over. And then he disappeared and came back with gift bags with Baltika mugs in them. Yay free things!

After the excursion, I was supposed to meet my new tutor, Zhenya, but we ran late at the factory and we decided that it would just be better to meet Thursday. This was really good because I've had bad insomnia all week and haven't been getting more than a couple hours of sleep. It's really hot in my room now that the heat's on, and even though I sleep with the window open, it's still not quite enough. Anyway, for whatever reason, I haven't been sleeping, and I've been feeling like shit. I'm always surprised how close being drunk is to going on very little sleep. There's that same feeling of being at a remove from everything going on around. And being slightly buzzed in the middle of the day and real tired was enough to kill whatever little motivation I had to go do anything.

So I went home and did homework or read a book or something. I don't remember.

2006-10-24T08:56:00.000-07:00

The heat is not yet on at school, and it's now significantly colder inside the building than outside. Especially since the temperature has changed from 0ºC on Sunday to +13ºC today. Anyway, it's not quite so cold that you can see your breath inside, but so cold that your toes get numb if you sit too long without fidgeting.

I can't remember what else I was supposed to talk about today.

Oh yeah. When I came back from Kazan, a fridge had joined the bathtub and radiator in the "defunct junk" pile outside the elevator on the first floor. Today when I came back from school, the fridge had disappeared, but the tub and radiator were still there.

I also figured out what the strange thing in the kitchen is. It's a chainaya grip. This requires a little explanation, because this strange thing has been sitting in the kitchen for a while, but I totally didn't understand the explanation the first time around. So basically, there's this big jar with some bacteria swimming around in a tea and sugar mixture with some cheesecloth over the top. The bacteria grows into a jellyfish-like layer/creature, I'm still not quite clear which, and lives on the top of the tea mixture. You feed it sweet tea and it eats the sugar and makes the tea sour. Then, when the jellyfish gets to a certain thickness, you drink the tea. This is supposed to make you not get sick. As Rob said, it's basically jellyfish poop. And yes, I plan on drinking this vile concoction when it's ready. It sounds super gross, and it's just about gross enough that I couldn't possibly pass up a chance to find out exactly how gross it is.

Ew. Jellyfish.

2006-10-23T06:47:00.000-07:00

School seems to be going better now that I'm in the faster class. I still understand what's going on, and I feel like I'm actually learning things. Not that I wasn't before, but the pace feels much more comfortable, and I'm not bored. I'm not crazy about being in class with Kristin, but it's not like I have to listen to her talk all that much in class. It's the outside of class that you have to watch out for. The only thing that I don't like so much (other than Kristin—soon there will be pictures so that you can all see and appreciate my annoyance more fully) is the new professors. I really liked all the profs that I had before, and it's definitely a trade down for razgovornia praktica. She seems totally nice outside of class, but she's a little bitchy and just not very good at doing the synonym thing, and she looks at you funny sometimes if you have to ask. She's also severely anorexic. Like whoa. Actually, she looks like Julia Roberts, only minus about 50 lbs. It's gross. She has M.C. Hammer pants, and that's because they don't make any pants skinny enough to fit her. And frankly, I'd rather not see that her legs are as big around as my hand.

We had a test today that I probably totally bombed. This is only the second test that I've had here, and the other one was grammar and was open book, open note. This was in class, and we'd only had about two classes on the material. It's really good to know how to go on the metro and other kinds of transport, but it was a lot of vocab to learn all at once. But apparently it doesn't matter how you do on the tests because it's only the final that matters. Way to freak you out...

Monday Meeting was the usual, but we're going to have a couple Halloween parties. Yay Halloween. On the back of the handout Meg gave us were a bunch of costume ideas. But where do you buy things like burlap or paint? Not that I'm creative, but it'd be cool to have a costume. Whatever. I probably won't end up going anyway. It's too much work to figure all that shit out just to stand around with a bunch of assholes you don't want to hang out with anyway.

I hung out until it was time to go to Discussion Club at the ygol. I'm not sure why, because I was cranky and really didn't want to go. Maybe because I feel bad for Meg or something, and it is sort of a reflection on her, albeit indirectly, if not very many of her students show up for this thing. Anyway, the theme was pop culture, and it was way less painful than the last time I went. I didn't have to try to describe a beaver or anything.

Afterward, on the way to the metro with Meg, a new country was born to take its rightful place among the many "stans" of the world. While you may not have heard of Kazakstan, or Tatarstan, everybody's heard of Crazybitchistan. And everybody knows somebody from there. This new country is Whackistan, and is a close, close neighbor of Crazybitchistan. Every country has its own parables, although the only parables from Crazybitchistan that I remember have to do with either Lurline or Noah Depper. Go figure. Anyway, Meg said that I should write the first parable for Whackistan, "The Whack Bitch from Whackistan." However, I'm all out of fresh ideas about whack bitches and their whack adventures—my life is whack enough. So, a smuggle-able into the country bottle of absinthe goes to the best parable. Remember to sign your work, kids.

2006-10-22T06:46:00.000-07:00

I found a note that I'd written myself on my bookmark for Gravity's Rainbow. It says, "Fetishization of technology, particularly vis à vis technology as the instrument of death."

I have mixed feelings about this note. Because one one hand it's just so nerdy and academic, and yes, maybe even a little bit pretentious, that it makes me a little ashamed. But then the other part of my brain is like, "But dude! That's so cool! Because it's not only fetishization of technology in the abstract, but it's also sex with technology and becoming one with technology as it kills you! Death by technology is the ultimate orgasm! That's awesome! You could write a dissertation about this!" And then the other half of my brain is so ashamed that it has to shrivel up a little more and let me descend further into nerd-dom.

But to return to Meg on my couch. She woke up a little before I did, and had apparently been contemplating how to play the fact that she, the director of my program, was waking up on my couch. Because my host parents were definitely up and about, and it was maybe a potentially awkward situation. But it turned out okay. They were a little surprised, but pulled out an extra plate and dished out some kasha and made some coffee. Then Meg split for home, and I headed out with her to the internet café for blog updating, emailing, and grad school research. I did a little blog stuff and wrote a long-ish email to my mom, and then that was about it. It takes a really long time to post everything and make it look nice with the pictures and stuff. Even though I write all of this stuff ahead of time and it's mostly just cut and paste...

When I finally made it back from the internet café, I saw some small boots in the hall. The granddaughter had come to visit and was taking a nap. So it was quiet time for about an hour; long enough for me to eat and get comfortable with my book. Ksusha is two, very cute, and almost incomprehensible. Kids are really hard to understand in general, and she's just learning how to talk. Although she knows more animal words than I do. I need to get on that. Also with the food and general household items. I'm really really bad at that stuff. Anyway, she called me tyotya (aunt), but it took me about half and hour to figure out that when she said that, she was referring to me. We had fun. I chased her around with her toy snake, and then she showed me how she could count five balloons: "four, five, six, seven, eight, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fifteen, sixteen..." She's pretty awesome. She also invited me to come have tea with them sometime. Yeah.

Then I did the usual homework thing for class and went to bed.

2006-10-21T06:43:00.000-07:00

So today. Really. Was. Not. Exciting. And the only reason that I have anything to report about today is that I went out for drinks with Meg. This was after sleeping in, and then studying for the GRE most of the afternoon. I called Ivan to see if he wanted to hang out, but he was buying boots and said he'd call me back. Then there was a furious SMS-ing session with Meg, who needed advice about whether or not she should go to drinks with Evgenii after her crush who was going to go with them cancelled. This is also slightly problematic, because it is suspected that Evgenii may have a small crush on Meg. Oh, the drama of the love triangle!

Anyway, it was decided that since it didn't seem like Ivan was going to be calling me anytime soon, we should just plan on having beers at 8, so that Meg would have a good excuse for having a drink with Evgenii and then splitting. Meg was appallingly late and I waited at the metro station for forty-five minutes. But it was okay, because I had a book, and there were lots of people to look at, so I wasn't bored.

She took me to a couple places on the island, which was good, because I hadn't done any exploring on my own and had no idea where the fuck the bars were. We started out in a café until they closed, and then moved to a much pricier German place two doors down. It was really nice. I forget how nice it is to talk to somebody who knows who your friends are, and who already knows you well. It was also really nice to talk to somebody about the weird feelings of growing up, and maybe kinda feeling like you've maybe met somebody that you might want to spend a significant bit of time with. And how to tell that person that they mean a lot to you without sounding like a douchebag.

I'm going to get a little personal here, so if you're not into crap about my not-love life, skip down to the next paragraph. I'm not sure that talking about this is really okay, mostly because most of you can probably guess who I'm talking about, but I know he doesn't read this, so whatever. Anyway. There's somebody back home that I really miss a lot. And this isn't really like a "Oh, yeah, I guess I miss him" if I happen to be thinking about it, but more like an all-the-time "Oh my God, how am I going to make it through the next seven months with only phone calls?" type of thing that hasn't gotten much better since I arrived. Of course this is all made way worse by the fact that I'm sure he doesn't miss me anywhere near as much as I miss him. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that I don't want to do another year far away from this guy. That I miss him too much. And it doesn't matter that we're not dating or together in any sense of the word (that that we have been ever), but I just really want to be his friend and be near him. Which sounds like the dumbest and sappiest thing in the world and makes me want to barf, but that's how it is. Although, the good thing about me being away is that we actually talk to each other when I call. Which is not something that we've ever really done that much of before, except when we're drunk. And it's been really pretty good. But I'm starting to look at grad schools and wonder how on earth I'm going to do another couple years away, especially if he's staying in Portland. Because just telling him how I feel is weird and freaky, right? But also planning my life around him is weird and freaky, right? I totally have no idea what to do. Mostly I'm afraid of having this conversation because this is also someone who's hurt me on a couple of separate occasions with this kind of stuff, and I'm not sure that I'd want to hear his response. Because part of me knows that he's got too much inertia built up to change anything about his life, and I think that hearing that might also just break my heart. I don't know. I just want so badly to be his friend and be where he is and I'm just not sure how to do it. I wish life was easier and that I could just man-up and tell him and not worry about what he's going to say. Which would probably be nothing anyway.

So yeah, anyway... Growing up sucks. Enough of that. By the time we emerged from the German bar after accosting a group of English speakers at another table and demanding to know what program they belonged to, we headed out for the metro. Or rather, I headed, and Meg staggered. We had three beers together, but she had two before she met me. And alas, by the time we made it to the metro, it was shut tight and dark for the night. However, we were on the island, so we headed in the direction of my house, where it was pretty clear that Meg was going to have to spend the night, as she was in no condition to be negotiating the dangers of a taxi on her own. It was a night full of minor wrong turns, me having to pee down a sidestreet (fervently hoping that nobody was out walking around or looking out their window), and Meg's umbrella getting run over by a car after she swung it around and it flew off the wrist loop. We eventually found my street and we came in as quietly as two drunk Americans can, had some tea and I put Meg on the couch in my room.

I had bad dreams all night. Something about "mad fish disease." Gross.

2006-10-20T06:42:00.000-07:00

Today sucked a lot because I had to go to school. After seeing all these kids for a week, the last thing that I wanted to do was spend more time with them. However, today didn't suck as bad as it could have for a couple reasons. One, I'm doing a trial group switch to see if I like the faster paced semester group better. Two, we didn't have to go to politologia. And three, there were stupid master-classes for some seminar about how foreign students adapt to life in Russia that I didn't have to pay attention to and I could just sit back and think about how much I didn't want to be there.

So I peaced out of school as fast as I could so that I wouldn't have to talk to anybody. I hadn't checked my email since a day or two before I left on the trip, so I was anxious to do that. My mom had written before I left that my car had been broken into, and I was very afraid that my pool cue had been stolen because I forgot to get everything out of my car before I left. However, Mom wrote to say that my pool cue was safe, as were some pillows and bed sheets. Also, she offered to photocopy my thesis notes and send me the photocopies so that the originals wouldn't get lost. Which I'm very very grateful for because that's going to be a monumental task, and I'm not sure that she realized what she was volunteering for. It was also a good day because I finally heard from Alex. And yes, you get publicly shamed for being a bad correspondent, but only because you're the only one I worry about. All the rest of you either don't do as much dumb shit, or are better about not telling me that you do dumb shit, so I don't worry.

It was Jessica's birthday, and it's Laura's birthday on Sunday, so a big group of them got together at a restaurant downtown somewhere. Laura called me around 9:30 to ask if I was coming, which was nice, but I was too cranky to contemplate going, let alone appreciate the fact that someone had missed me and called to find out where I was. I had a very happy evening sitting at home and writing about the trip and being cranky. Ivan of the bad breath also called and invited me to hang out this weekend. I'm supposed to call him sometime. Cool.

Life is so much less exciting now that I'm home, which means that I have significantly less to write about. This is good, because maybe it means that I can soon resume life as usual and not be worried that I'm so far behind on my stupid blog. It's also ridiculous that I worry that people might care if I didn't write about every single one of my days. I'm getting more neurotic all the time. It's awesome. Really.

2006-10-19T06:41:00.000-07:00

The only thing that I could think about when I woke up in the morning was "Holy fuck, I'm still on the train, and it's still so long until Petersburg..." So I rolled over, hit the play button on Shooter Jennings again, and dozed until I couldn't doze anymore because the train lady was going up and down the aisle demanding the bed sheets. So I got up, had some breakfast, and talked to Laura for a while. Then I had to have some quiet time because everybody was driving me crazy, and I had quiet time most of the way into Petersburg.

We got into the station around 12:30, and I've never been so glad to see anyplace in my life. I had to negotiate buying a new metro pass since mine had conveniently expired while I was gone, and that was fun waiting in line with all my bags. Not that they were big, but they were kinda heavy and bulky. Anyway, the metro was done, and I arrived back at my host family's apartment, or I guess I should just say home. I gave the chak-chak, ate some lunch, and then took a long nap. Then I took a shower, had some dinner, did a little reading, and went to bed.

We spoke a lot of English on the trip, and it was actually pretty difficult to speak Russian when we weren't in service situations. And I was both surprised and pleased that I missed speaking Russian, as evidenced by the fact that it was kind of a relief to speak with my host family. Although this may also be because I had a lot of super nerdy and academic conversations with Laura, and there's just so much less pressure in Russian to be smart, because I'm just not capable of expressing myself intelligently in that language. Oh well. Maybe someday.

2006-10-18T06:38:00.000-07:00

We had to get up early today to catch the 9am train back to Petersburg. We stumbled downstairs to find that a significant portion of the group was also planning who they were not going to sit with on the train back. Breakfast, hotel checkout, and schlepping our bags to the station was pretty uneventful, except that Natasha somehow managed to guilt-trip the hotel into giving Laura her money back. But now begins the chronicle of the epic train ride. Which I realize isn't really that epic, but it was more than a day, and it made me realize that the train is totally like the circus, only on wheels.

Anyway, Laura got on the train first and managed to snag us the last two bunks in our section, which actually ended up being in a coupe with Russians, rather than other Americans. While slightly frightening, it was okay. The woman on the bottom bunk didn't talk to us at all, and the man who had the top bunk across from us also didn't really talk to us for most of the ride. There were two asiatic looking dudes who had the aisle bunks who stared at us a lot but didn't talk to us.

I did a lot of people watching, because it was more interesting than doing anything else. As it turned out, in the carriage was our big group of Americans, and also a fairly large group of Russian teenagers, probably between the ages of fourteen and seventeen. I'm not sure how the Americans behaved because they were sitting behind me and I didn't go hang out with them, but from where I was sitting, I could see into the Russian kids' coupe. They were all pretty drunk at some point or another during the ride and spent a lot of it jumping around on the bunks and hitting each other. At some point, the man with the lower aisle bunk got on the train and kicked the kids out of his bunk.

When this particular man got on the train, he was pretty obviously sloshed to the gills. I'm pretty bad about telling when folks are drunk, but this dude was ripped. He actually reminded me a lot of Dennis. Not that I'm saying that Dennis is frequently drunk, although I'm sure that he is, but more the way that he looked and interacted with other people, I guess. Anyway, when this dude got on the train, the train lady asked him for his ticket, and he had a hard time finding it. Then when she started giving him a hard time, he kept digging through his passport, and then handed her the ticket with a big, slow, goofy grin. Then he swatted the kids off his bunk and took a nap. When dude woke up, he started talking with the Russian kids, pestering them for a drink, and mildly hitting on the girls. Girls are about fifteen, dude's at least thirty. Dude also came on board the train with a crew, as I found out later when they all went down to the restaurant car and returned with beers.

The highlights that followed their return are as follows. They settled in with the Russian kids, but were apparently making the girls uncomfortable or talking inappropriately, or something, because the train lady in charge of law and order came back and yelled at them and told them to go to their own bunks. Which they did for a little while, but then they broke out the cribbage board. The crew was sitting up by the other American students, so dude went up and joined them and then they were all playing quietly for awhile. But then there started to be some kind of ruckus, although whether it was just among the Russians and somebody cheating or somebody not getting a turn or whether it also involved the Americans at that point was unclear. But the train lady came back and calmed things down for awhile. But then the drunk dudes started talking with the American students and trying to hit them up for money, and apparently making lewd remarks or just generally touching the girls. So the train lady came back again and sent them all to their bunks, and Margaret told everybody not to speak Russian with the drunk guys. At some point, one of them yelled, "khui na blad'," which is really super super bad (and loosely translated means something like "fuck the whores" except way worse). In the morning, the wake'n'bake crew made their pilgrimage to the restaurant car and returned a little the worse for wear to resume their harassment of the American students.

But meanwhile, life in my compartment was pretty quiet and sleepy. I did some studying for the GRE and I napped a little, and talked to Laura some. Ate, and then repeated the above actions. Of course, all this was interspersed with watching all the drama. Laura complained that the younger asiatic dude kept staring at her, and she didn't want to go to sleep, because then he would be looking at her while she was sleeping. I felt compelled to point out that if she was sleeping, she wouldn't know that he was watching her, so it didn't really matter. She told me the next morning that her leg spazmed in the night and the asiatic dude across the aisle kept tapping her foot until she woke up. Then he pointed at the ceiling, at she thought that he wanted her to turn the light on, and she couldn't figure out why he didn't just ask the train lady. Although, as she was putting her mattress away the next morning, she realized that the dude probably thought she was cold and was trying to tell here that there were blankets on the shelf above the top bunk. Another lost in translation.

I also spent a little while talking with the dude in our compartment before I went to sleep. He seemed like a relatively normal thirty-something guy by the name of Volodya, who lives and works and Petersburg, but has family in Kazan. He wanted to know what I thought of Russia, and then wanted to know if I'd been to Hollywood and Disneyland and what that was like, and whether we had a lot of tornadoes in the US. Uh, what? Maybe in the south or midwest sometimes, I guess... He knew how to say "My name is Volodya," "table," "hello," and "fuck you" in English. He said that the phrase "fuck you" was a very good one to know and that it helped in a lot of situations. I told him that actually, probably not. He told me that I shouldn't go to Kiev because it's boring there, other than St. Sophia's. I'm totally still going anyway. And it will be a train odyssey. Because fuck if I'm bussing it from northern Russia to the fucking Ukraine. I did pretty well with the whole conversation thing, but I did make a faux pas when I asked him if he spoke any Tatar because the our guide said that kids who grew up in Tatarstan had some classes in Tatar. He got a little offended and said, "No. I'm a Russian," but then he realized that I'm just a dumb American and didn't mean to imply that he was an ethnic minority, and thus NOT RUSSIAN, and explained that of course, he knew a few words, but no, he didn't speak it.

But yeah, train adventures...

2006-10-17T06:21:00.000-07:00

So we woke up the next morning after Laura hit the snooze several times and we decided that since breakfast was very soon, we should probably get up. I was mostly dressed and sitting on the bed putting my socks on when I looked over at the door, which was slightly ajar, or rather, it was closed, but not latched. So I asked Laura if she had opened the door either last night or this morning, which she hadn't. At which point she came out of the bathroom, "Oh my God, where's my purse?" It had been moved from next to her bed to over by the door. The thief took all the money that she had in her wallet, but didn't touch the rest of the stuff in her bag, like her passport, iPod, or digital camera. She didn't lose any cards or anything because a Petersburg thief got those about three weeks ago. All my stuff was there and my wallet was intact. Then we both realized that somebody had been in our room at night, while we were sleeping, and had taken Laura's money.

This is such a profoundly creepy thought that I can't even explain.

Actually, I can a little bit. It's just so creepy to think that somebody that I don't know was watching me sleep. And that they could have done anything to me, and I probably would have been so sleep-addled and scared that, you know, whatever. Somehow, I'm more creeped out by the idea that the dude was watching me sleep than the idea that I could have been raped or killed, because really, that could happen on the street here. But whatever. I'm okay. Laura's okay. Everybody's okay. Laura was only out about $70, which also wasn't that bad, all things considered. Anyway, at breakfast we found out that Margaret and Natasha had also had a nocturnal visitor to their room, and they had locked their door. Luckily Natasha woke up and saw the guy, asked him what he was doing there and then chased him out.

After breakfast and complaints to the hotel about the thief in the night, we piled onto the bus and headed out for the Raifa monastery, about 45 minutes or so from Kazan. The Raifa monastery is famous for housing the famous icon, the Georgian Mother of God. Don't worry if you haven't heard of it, because most people haven't. There are also Mother of God icons for most cities in Russia. This one is just special because it comes from Georgia. Like the country, not the state. Anyway, the monastery was pretty cool, but you all know that I like this kinda stuff. The two churches that we got to go in were disappointing, but the icon was nice. That sounds so weak. It was "nice." It was cool to look at, but it looks like most other icons of Mary and the baby Jesus with a really ornate cover over it. And I feel really weird looking really hard at it and trying to see what it looks like rather than saying a prayer and kissing it.

The coolest part of the trip by far was the monks that the tour guide had somehow coerced or conned or, I'm sure, paid to sing for us. These four monks sang some hymns and a few traditional Russian songs for us in the big church. The acoustics of the church were incredible and I was amazed at how much sound just the four of them made—they sounded like the whole choir. It was so beautiful. I looked at the icons and listened to the monks singing and not for the first time, but maybe the most profoundly, I realized why the emissaries sent out by that long-ago tsar said that the Greek Orthodox was the most beautiful religion. It is. Really.

Probably not many of you except maybe Joe know this about me, but I've been fascinated by God and religion for quite a while. Maybe it has something to do with not growing up religious and just being perpetually unhappy and unsatisfied with my life. And I've never found anything that makes it better. Probably because I think too much. But anyway, standing there in that church listening to those monks and looking at those icons was both overwhelmingly beautiful and overwhelmingly peaceful and overwhelmingly agitating at the same time. So when they were done singing, I had to go outside and have some quiet meditation time. And Joe, you'll appreciate the irony of this I'm sure... The first bench across from the church was in front of a small stone pillar with a cross on top of it. And I sat down in the first seat, directly in front of this cross. And I was so preoccupied with feeling strange and overwhelmed that I didn't even notice until after I'd sat and thought for a long time.

I'm not sure that I decided anything, but I cried a little and that seemed to help. In fact, crying seems to help most things in life. Life is still the same and as confusing and horrible and awful as ever and I don't think that's going to get better. But I really like churches because they're pretty and they smell good. Which is kinda like my criteria for choosing dudes, come to think of it... Anyway. I figured that since I like churches, God will probably not strike me dead if I go and stand in a church for awhile once a week. Especially if it makes me feel better. But who knows. Joe, I'm sorry that you weren't there and I really missed you a lot while I was sitting on that bench in the cold. Because maybe you would have known what to say.

Moving away from the heavy personal stuff, the ride back from the monastery was uneventful. The city of Kazan reminds me a little bit of Portland, but also not. They have very strange divisions between urban and not-urban, by which I mean that they seem to not exist. There would be dachas for about a mile, and then a field with some cows in it, and then some more big apartment buildings. Some of the neighborhoods that we drove through reminded me a lot of old-town Beaverton, and not necessarily in a good way. However, Kazan's got the big communal Soviet style apartment buildings that the Portland metro area still thankfully lacks.

Something else that I noticed while on the way back to the hotel is that almost no drivers get out of the way of emergency vehicles with sirens and flashing lights. I've noticed this in Petersburg too. I'm not sure why, because sometimes people yield, but a lot of times they don't, and it doesn't seem to be a law that they have to. I asked Lena about it one time and she just shrugged and said that people were always happy to slow the police down. That I sort-of understand, but the fire truck? The other thing that puzzles me about the emergency vehicles is that they very rarely seem to be in a hurry. Which maybe makes them less urgent to get out of the way for, I guess. Oh, Russia. Here's where I sigh and shrug my shoulders.

We had lunch when we got back, and today, instead of the usual normal Russian food, we had some Tatar stuff on the table. So I had the Tatar version of a fruit roll-up, made with prunes, apricots, and nuts, and a chak-chak. I'm not even really sure how to explain what a chak-chak is, so I guess I'll start simple. It's a desert, and it's made with honey, and some macaroni looking things, but they're not macaroni because they're more bread-like. Anyway, these macaroni things are all stuck together with the honey and it's really dense and sticky. Actually, it's kinda like a rice krispie treat with honey instead of marshmallow. And the macaroni pieces are bigger. But yeah, same idea. It tastes kinda weird, and I'm not sure whether it was good, or whether it was another "interesting experience."

After lunch, I went on an unsuccessful expedition to find a particular souvenir for those of you with houses and stuff. In the mosque, they had a tapestry with a big blue glass circle with an eye in the middle of it. My mom has one of these in her kitchen, only minus the tapestry. It's supposed to bring good luck and to ward off the evil eye or spirits or something. Anyway, the mosque didn't sell just the blue glass circles with the eyes, and neither did the rinok outside. So I started out with Margaret and Natasha and Brandon, but Natasha got called back for a meeting with the hotel director to talk about how whack it was that there were strange men breaking into (or just walking into) rooms at night and stealing (or attempting to steal) things. So we walked up to the Kremlin while we were waiting and ran into a large group of students that I really really really didn't want to see.

Because by this point in the trip, I'd had it with pretty much everybody. Actually, that's a lie, but I'd had it with more than half of the group, and I just kept running into the kids that I really just didn't have any interest in seeing. Because that's the way my life works. Finally Natasha was done with her meeting and we were able to make a get-away from most of the group, but we picked up two that are not on my list of favorites: Claire, and the awkward Eric. Remember Eric? He's the weird one who likes to sit by me on the public transit. Yeah. I put on my mean face and nobody except Natasha and Margaret talked to me (well, Brandon did, but I talked to him first) and I even had worked out how to say, "You know, honestly, I'm just not really interested in hanging out with or talking to you" in case Claire wanted to try to be friends. And really, it's probably better that she just kept to herself. Because I'm just charming enough that I probably would have said that to her. Why am I such a bitch? What's happening to me? Oh, right. Living in Russia.

We walked around for awhile and Natasha and Meg bought insane numbers of chak-chaks to take back to people in Petersburg. I bought a small-ish one for my host family because they really like sweet stuff. As do most people here. The desert industry is huge. Then we walked around a little more, and I looked at every souvenir place for those blue glass circles with the eyes in them, but the only kiosk that had them only had really really ugly ones that were too ugly to buy, as cool as they were. They were so ugly. Really. I would have been ashamed to bring them back for you guys. Somewhere along the line we lost Claire and acquired the super-obnoxious Laura F.

On the way back to the hotel, we stopped for hot chocolate and blini at a café with froofy desert drinks. Everyone else had pudding hot chocolate, but I wasn't feeling so down with the pudding. So I got something with a lot of coffee, chocolate, and enough whipped cream that I should have had a heart attack right there at the table. It was yummy. Then to the universam that happened to be housed in a gigantic pyramid. I don't know, so don't ask. Here's the pyramid at night, and that's the cool Laura in front of it. She probably also doesn't know that she's on the internet, but that's okay.

I bought extra food for the infamous 27-hour train ride because I figured that Laura would have forgotten, or wouldn't have gone out. And as it turns out, I was totally right. She had stayed behind when the group went out, and then she was the only one, and she didn't really feel like wandering around a strange city by herself. I don't blame her—I don't really even like wandering around Petersburg by myself, and at least that's somewhat familiar (or, rather, I have a map). Then I took a shower, and I totally took advantage of the hour that I paid $2 for and shaved my legs. Because there's no point in paying for an hour if you're not going to use most of it, and they don't let you use half at a time. Also: there were really only two showers for the whole hotel. I pretty successfully managed not to think about how gross this is. The billiard room was right next to the showers, and I was very tempted to go down and ask whatever Russian dudes were playing to teach me how to play Russian style. But when I looked in, they were all of fourteen or fifteen, so I changed my mind.

When I got back, Laura made me do crime scene reenactments with her. This meant that we turned off the light to assess how dark it must have been when the thief came in, and whether Laura could have seen him from where she was laying. And then she had the great realization, "Oh my God! His face was right by my head! That's so creepy!" Uh. Yeah. Can we turn the lights back on now?

So we thought happy thoughts, locked the door, and went to bed.

2006-10-16T06:05:00.000-07:00

Although, I do have to say that the only perk of waking up at 4:15 was seeing Claire's train attire. And I so wish that I'd had my camera out. Anyway, she was waiting in line for the bathroom wearing... Anyone? Socks. Underpants. A tank top with no bra. And a hat. No pants. No pants. NO PANTS. I understand that it was really really really hot on the train, but no pants? Socks and no pants? I fail to understand. Completely and utterly. Katie, you should make a "no pants" dance.

Anyway, we got into Kazan around 6am. Everything was fucking dark and really cold. Especially after being on that train for so long. Anyway, our hotel was within walking distance of the train station (and, in fact, close enough that the hotel shook when the trains went by), so we walked for twenty minutes in the cold with all our crap. However, we did get to nap for a couple of hours once we got to the hotel. And this hotel was definitely a step down from the last one, judging both by the size of the rooms and by the fact that in Kazan, you have to pay for your showers. I roomed with Laura W. again, the misadventures of which will be related shortly.

So we napped for a couple hours before having to make it downstairs for breakfast and excursion time. I have somewhat mixed feelings about the breakfast offered by the hotel in Kazan. While they were definitely more organized and had a much bigger buffet, I'm not sure how I feel about the fact that salad, macaroni, and meatballs are considered breakfast food. And they didn't have any yogurt. I like yogurt a lot.

After breakfast, we had a big bus excursion around the city of Kazan and a walking tour of the Kremlin. The Kazan Kremlin is actually pretty neat. It's inclosed in a giant white wall and they have a mosque inside. Because Kazan is not just Russian, but is Tatarstan and is also Moslem. Which means that they also have some really crazy awesome looking architecture, and the Tatars mostly speak Tatar (duh) rather than Russian. Although everybody knows Russian.

We walked up to the main gate of the Kremlin with the huge clock tower that the guide told us something interesting about, but I was too far away to hear her and wasn't paying attention anyway. Then we walked around the outside of the Kremlin for a little while and looked out at the city and got oriented as to where our hotel was in relation to the Kremlin. The answer was: not very far away. Then we wandered inside the Kremlin walls and took a look at this cool new mosque that had just been built. I can't decide whether it looks more like the Disneyland castle or some kind of alien spaceship. Definitely more like an alien spaceship at night. Any votes?

The mosque was cool because we actually got to go inside. I'd never been inside a mosque before. We had to wear special plastic slippers over our shoes, just like we do most other places that handle a lot of tourists. It was pretty cool, although we had to go through a metal detector as we came in. I'm not so sure how I feel about that, although I'm pretty sure that the answers are along the lines of "not that great" and "kinda freaked out." But yeah, the mosque was neat. No pictures of the inside because that's taboo.

Then we continued our wanderings up to the leaning tower of Kazan. Supposedly, according to what I understood from the guide, in the time of Ivan the Terrible, there was a really pretty girl. And Ivan the Terrible really wanted to marry her. But she didn't really want to marry him, because, you know, he's Ivan the Terrible. So he locked her up in this tower. And then she jumped out and killed herself after maybe he threatened to do something to her family? That part I wasn't so clear on, but I did get that she jumped. That doesn't really explain why it leans, and the guide said that the tower was actually built after the time of Ivan the Terrible, but there you go.

Then we went into the Orthodox church in the Kremlin. It was super big, and I think it was pretty, but they shuffled us in and out so fast, it was hard to get a good look. Because if you hadn't gathered already, I really dig the churches and icons and stuff.

On our way out of the Kremlin, we went through the "secret" bastion, or whatever the fuck the big things in the middle of the wall are called. It's called "secret" because it was how the people of Kazan got the jump on invaders. The way this works is that it's the only bastion with two arches. The main road went through this bastion, and the invaders would have to pass through this bastion to get into the Kremlin. However, both of the arches of the bastion had portcullises, and when the invaders, or part of them, were inside, the people of Kazan would drop the portcullises, trapping the people inside. Then they'd shoot at them or do other nasty things through little arrow holes in the walls. Medieval warfare is fucking awesome.

Then we piled onto the bus to go see the icon "The Lady of Kazan." There was some story about a fire and a dream recurring three times that somehow had something to do with the icon that I'm totally unclear on. Because the icon "had revealed itself three times in the dream" and I totally just don't know. I though that the icon had been destroyed in the fire, but maybe not. Who knows. Anyway, we went to see this icon that's super famous and apparently really beautiful, but it's hard to tell because they have a gold and silver cover over it to protect it. Although I did feel smart when one of the guys asked me, "Why is Mary black? Did they paint her that way?" Uh, no. Mary is black because the icon is painted on wood, and then varnished, and gets darker as it ages, like most other paintings. The church also had some other icons, but nothing that was super exciting or interesting. Although Jonathan did get reprimanded for standing with his back to the iconostasis. And then he started bitching about it, which actually made me kinda angry. In the Orthodox religion, icons are a direct manifestation of God, and standing with your back to the iconostasis where the icons are mounted is like turning your back on God, quite literally. It's a respect thing. Even if you don't believe, you should have the courtesy to respect other people's beliefs and not get pissed off when they ask you to do so.

Enough ranting about religion. After the icon, we drove around the city a little bit in the big bus. Kazan is at a weird stage right now and it's undergoing a lot of urban renewal. Many of the buildings downtown had been abandoned and left to rot, but are now being torn down and/or renovated. Like in Nizhny-Novgorod, Kazan is building a lot of new apartment buildings. But the weird thing was that I didn't get the sense that Kazan was that big of a city. Granted that it's about the same size as Nizhny, but it feels totally different. There just don't seem to be as many people, and it makes me wonder where they all are. Do they actually live there? Or are they building, hoping to attract new people to the city? It's a mystery.

After we stopped even pretending to pay attention to the guide and answer her questions, she told us that she'd just stop talking and let us look out the windows of the bus. Which she didn't. But that was okay, because we were on the way back to the hotel and lunch. Mushroom-noodle soup is really yummy.

After lunch we had free time. I ended up going up to my room for awhile because I wasn't quite ready to brave the town with the rest of the group. Laura W., the long suffering roommate, joined me. I tried to set down a record of the events thus far in my little black book so that I could remember the most amusing incidents for the blog later, but mostly we just ended up gossiping about the other kids on the trip. And we mostly determined that pretty much everybody sucks. Actually, this is a lie. There were a few people who were okay, and some that were neutral, but by in large, the group sucks. I could go into detail about what I dislike about each person, but this would really only be gratifying for me, since I'm the only one who knows them.

By the time that it was starting to get dark, Laura and I decided that we should probably brave the streets of Kazan to at least check out the main pedestrian walkway and find something to eat for dinner. We shuffled out into the cold and made it down to the main drag, which looked a lot like it did in Nizhny-Novgorod, only with more souvenir stands. And buildings in the process of being torn down or remodeled. Or maybe both. So we wandered around in the dark for awhile and then decided to look for a grocery store to buy things for dinner since neither of us were either feeling all that hungry or up to negotiating ordering things at a restaurant. So, we wandered over to where I thought that Natasha had told us the grocery store was and it turns out that I'm just bad with directions or misheard. But we did find a mall. And Russian malls are weird. They're a little like American malls in that they have a lot of stores, but these stores are all really small. And they're usually more like cubicles in an office, except a little bigger. So we wandered the mall until the security guard kicked us out, at which point we resumed our hunt for a grocery store.

I accosted a lady on the street, but she claimed not to know where one was. The outdoor rinok was long closed, but after going down a sketchy back alley that we didn't know was going to be sketchy until we were halfway through it, we found a grocery store. But first, how did we know the alley was sketchy? Because it didn't have many lights. But most importantly, because there was a silent casino with the doors open, and in front of it were three black Mercedes with lots of Tatar men piling in and out of them with doors opening and closing in no particular order. And if that doesn't scream sketchy situation, I'm not quite sure what does. Here are some night pictures of downtown Kazan.

After buying nutritious things like cookies, ice cream, and juice, we headed back to the hotel with the plan of hanging out in the room for a little bit and then trying to find Phoebe's room where there was theoretically another drinking party happening to celebrate the first night in Kazan. However, being the big nerds that we are, we started studying for the GRE and totally missed whatever drinking happened that night. Then it was midnight and time for bed.

So here's where we were idiots. Is everybody ready? Because the denouement doesn't come until tomorrow. So, I got into bed and put my headphones on to try to go to sleep and when Laura came out of the bathroom, I asked her if she had locked the door. At which point she said no, and that she didn't really think we needed to. I said that we should, but didn't insist, because the chances that something happening were pretty small. So we turned off the lights and went to sleep without locking the door.

2006-10-15T03:17:00.000-07:00

Breakfast was much less exciting today than yesterday, and they had cherry yogurt instead of pineapple (that was weird and not all that tasty) and more blini, so everything was okay. There was also a lady with a big fur coat, bleached blond hair, and more plastic surgery than Dolly Parton to look at.

After breakfast, we packed up and headed out to a wooden architecture museum. This is basically a collection of old buildings, like a peasant house, a merchant's house, a barn, a well, a church, and some other stuff. It doesn't sound all that exciting, but it was actually pretty neat. The houses were covered in really intricate wood carvings, and thinking about how long that would have taken to do gave me a headache. This was all outside, and it was snowing just a little as we were walking around. Not wet snow like Portland, but the yucky dry snow that comes with a lot of wind.

Natasha, the trip coordinator, had arranged for the people who worked at the museum to sing us some traditional Russian songs, and then teach us traditional Russian games. This was all pretty crazy, and I'm glad that I wasn't hung over. The songs were pretty incomprehensible, and I also can't say that I particularly liked them. However, there was one song where one of the dudes blew on this horn that "called in the cows" and another dude in a wolf mask jumped out and ran around the room grabbing people. That was pretty funny. Mostly just to see people's reactions when this dude in the wolf mask grabbed their arms and shook them around a little.

Then we went outside and played village games. This involved a lot of standing in a big circle and holding hands. As all of you know, I'm not a good sport about stuff like that. However, I figured out quickly that I only had to be a good enough sport that I wouldn't be singled out, and then everything was sort of okay. I'm going to talk for a little while about these games, because they were kinda funny. The first one involved all of us holding hands in a big circle with one person in the middle. The museum people would sing a song and we'd walk around the circle until the end of the verse and then the person in the middle would do something that we all had to imitate. The person who imitated the worst had to go in the middle. So I was a good sport: I threw my hat in the air, I danced, I took my shoe off, I did a handstand, and I rolled around on the ground, and I didn't have to go in the middle.

The second game also involved holding hands in a big circle, but this time there was a girl and a guy in the middle. The chick started in the middle, and the guy outside the circle. The object of the game was for the guy to run after the girl, in and out of the circle, and catch her. This is supposed to be difficult because everybody in the circle is supposed to let the girl through, but not the guy. When the guy catches the girl, their turn is over and he has to kiss her some number of times (this ranged from 1 to 20). Really, in that game, everybody loses.

The third game that we played was a lot like London Bridge. Except with more holding hands. Two people started in the middle of the circle and made a bridge by raising their arms. They sang a song and at a certain point of the song, they'd bring their arms down and trap somebody inside, as the circle turned into a snake and had to pass underneath this bridge. The caught person would then join the bridge, and the snake of people would have to pass underneath more than once, increasing the chances of losing more people. I know this sounds really horrifically complicated, but it's not. It also involved a lot of running and ducking. While holding hands. I was just thankful that it didn't involve holding hands in people's crotches or kissing.

I'm not sure that I understood the point of the last game that we played, because I definitely did nothing the entire time. Mostly because I didn't want to kiss anybody. I'm really not about the gratuitous kissing of people I don't know or like. Anyway, the girls started with a big circle, holding hands. The guys started by squatting in a small circle in the middle. The dudes then sang a song, the gist of which was "Nobody loves me because nobody will kiss me, so I guess I'll just sit here and get drunk." The girls were supposed to leave the circle and kiss one of the guys, at which point they'd trade places. This went on for quite a while, while I contemplated how glad I was that participation in this seemed to be optional.

After game time, we walked around for a few minutes, but everybody was cold and wanted to get back on the bus and go back to somewhere warm. On the way back, we passed a railway coach that had been converted into an Orthodox Church. I was very sad that I couldn't get a picture of it. It had an onion dome coming out of the top. It was super awesome.

Evgenii decided that he wanted Tex-Mex for lunch, but between the Baskin Robbins escapade the day before and the fact that I'm not really much of a fan of Tex-Mex anyway (and really not so much in Russia), I decided to pass on the group excursion. So I ended up at a café with Meg and Natasha for most of the afternoon. Which was fine. The food was good, and I discovered that hot chocolate doesn't mean the same thing here as it does in the States. Surprise! When you order hot chocolate here, it comes with a spoon, and usually a water chaser. Because here, hot chocolate is something between pudding and a melted chocolate bar. It was okay—just not quite what I was expecting or wanted.

We went from there directly to dinner all together, where I had one of the nastiest salads I've ever had the misfortune to be served. I eat a lot of things here, but I still don't really like beets all that much. I don't really like peppers either, but I like beets way less. And I'm not really a big fan of mayonaise, unless it's on a turkey sandwich or in egg salad or deviled eggs. This salad was beets, apple, and mayo, garnished with a pea. I don't really like peas, either. I ate the apples, even though they were purple. And apple and mayo is one of the grossest things ever. Ew. The rest of dinner was okay, although I'm always a little weirded out by the mystery juices.

We headed back to the hotel and collected all our stuff and then headed out to the train station to catch the night train to Kazan. This was a short one—only 9 hours. We left around 9pm, meaning that we were slated to arrive in Kazan shortly after 6am. Blech. I also didn't do too badly in the bunkmate battle; in our little section we had Clark (who's pretty okay and very quiet), Laura W., and Kristin, who was really the only one who I wanted to strangle by the end. The train was so fucking hot I wanted to die. And we were in a regular car without the special bio toilet this time, so the bathroom was closed for the first hour and a half. I was dying by the time I got to take off some layers. I also didn't sleep a whole lot—it was just too hot. There were also a lot of people going by in the aisle, and Clark moved around and got up and down kind of a lot. Although it turned out okay, because by the time that the train lady woke us all up at 4:15am so that we could all have a chance to use the bathroom, I was so crabby that I didn't care if I was being rude by just putting my headphones on and ignoring everybody.

And really, at 5am, I couldn't care less how many kids Mel Gibson has.

Kristin was full of lots of little fun facts like that that she was more than happy to impart. I don't usually have a whole lot of patience of inane people, but I have even less on not much sleep. And I really couldn't make myself care about her apple juice, or the crick in her back, or that she didn't sleep well. I glared out the window for a long time.

2006-10-14T02:58:00.000-07:00

I woke up with one of the worst hangovers I've had in awhile, even worse than the one after my going-away party, and approaching the one that I had after the last time that I actually got sick off of vodka. Not only was this a bad hangover, it was also an unfair one. I feel like I should only have to pay if I've actually had fun the night before, which was definitely not the case. I seriously contemplated not going to breakfast, but decided that if we were having excursion until 2, it was probably better to eat something.

I made it all the way to the doors of the cafeteria before I had to turn around and find the bathroom. It took a couple trips to get everything out (the color of stomach acid never fails to amaze me, but this time it was blue because of my adderall), but finally everything was more or less okay. I wasn't thrilled about the prospect of riding around on the bus, but that turned out okay too. While I'm on the subject of Russian buses, they suck pretty much a lot. There are no shocks, they're always too small, they smell, and the drivers are without exception, fucking maniacs. They (the buses, not the drivers) also look like bugs.

This is the Volga river from outside the hotel.

Our first stop on the excursion was the Stroganoff cathedral. It was commissioned by one of the Stroganoff family members way back when and is super beautiful both on the outside and on the inside. It's also got crazy colored onion domes. Check it out.

There are no pictures of the inside because that's really not okay. Except if it's a museum, and then I'll probably be too cheap to pay for it. Anyway, it was very tastefully done and it smelled really good. Incense that is not nag champa is a great thing, guys. Anyway, there was the usual iconostasis and some saint's relics, and lots of babyshkas kissing the icons. I dug it a lot.

After that, we piled back into the bus and drove around the Kremlin, having sights pointed out to us on the way. Then we got out and walked along the top of the ridge that the Kremlin's built on. It was super cold and windy up there. And when I say that it was cold, it was probably the coldest that I have ever been in my life. And I was wearing two pairs of long underwear, three shirts, two sweaters, a hat, a scarf, and my dumb gloves that don't have any fingers.

If any of you want to send me March Forth cd's, I'll love you forever.

Somehow March Forth and fingerless gloves got crossed... Interesting. Anyway, we walked over a concrete bridge that had cracks in it (yay safety!) to go have a look at the church where Gorky was baptized. This was also a very tasteful church. Sometimes the churches are really ugly. I'm not sure why this is—maybe it's just that the murals or frescos or whatever the fuck they're called are just ugly. Or maybe it's just that I want them all to be done by Andre Rublyof. In any case, this church was totally okay. It also had a really great old icon that I liked a lot. It was one of the ones of the mother and child, but this one was cool because Mary was really sad but Jesus was laughing. Usually he just looks serious, but he had a big old happy smile in this one. But Mary looked so sad—it was very human. I can't describe it.

We also saw the outside of a 18th century merchant's house. It was really only cool because it was old and had cool tiles on the outside of it. I guess the architecture is pretty cool, but we didn't get to go inside.

After that, we got to go back to the bus because everybody was cold and cranky. We drove around the city for a little while and then we got escorted down the main pedestrian street, Bolshaya Pokrovka. This was a lot like Nevsky Prospekt in Petersburg, but with less restaurants and even more designer stores.

At some point, I learned the factoid that the cost of living is the same in Nizhny-Novgorod as it is in Moscow, but the salaries are a fraction of what they are in Moscow. This is also interesting because Nizhny is a fairly small city—only about 1.5 million people. On the other hand, it must be growing because they were building umpteen million new apartment buildings. I dunno. It was nice, but I was too cold all the time to really appreciate it. I also bought myself some grotesque earrings that are not designer, but just ridiculous. But they're green, and I wanted them. Mostly because they're huge and ridiculous. I forgot to get the picture out of my camera, but there will be a picture soon.

Anyway, after lunch at the restaurant in the Kremlin, we continued our excursion with a tour of the Kremlin. This wasn't really any more than walking around outside for a while until everybody was thoroughly cold and grumpy. We did see the outside of a pretty cool church, and the eternal flame that they have up there for the WWII memorial.

After that, Evgenii proposed that he would lead an expedition to the universam to buy groceries and warm clothes because we were going to be outside a lot the next day. However, somewhere along the line, this turned into a quest for Baskin Robbins. Don't ask me how, because I don't know and can't explain. Granted, ice cream does taste better when it's cold, but why it had to be from Baskin Robbins is a complete mystery. Maybe just because Western is "better"—except that in most cases relating to food, it's not. Anyway, I followed Evgenii and a large group around the city on this absurd quest (there were two Baskin Robbins, but neither of them seemed to be in business as they had disappeared by the time we arrived), but bailed around the time he said that he would just go to McDonalds. Here's a monument I saw on the way.

So I headed down the pedestrian street with Laura F. on a quest for a warm coat for her (which she accomplished because money is no object, nor is she picky) and gloves for me (which was not accomplished because money does matter, and I'm really picky). I find the fact that she spends money like there's no tomorrow slightly amusing since I know she's on all kinds of scholarships. Well, maybe if the feds had given me more, I could buy fancy coats and go to the opera whenever I wanted too. But I also remembered why I try not to spend a lot of time with her—she's just really fucking annoying. She seems very nice, but she's just one of those people that tries too hard. She wants to be liked so much that she just overdoes it and just comes off as being weird and affected, or just annoying. She also talks funny. Yes, in both languages. Although Laura W. said it's because she's from Maryland and not because she has a speech impediment. Shto-ever.

But, while walking around with the obnoxious Laura F., I discovered something that made my soul happy: you can get take-out pizza in Russia. This is a country that doesn't really believe in take out (except for McDonalds and Teremok, which have walk-up windows) and most places will look at you strangely if you ask for something "to go." Anyway, Laura had said that she had seen a lady with a pizza box, so we went in and negotiated a mushroom pizza, to go. It was pretty tasty, although it had sour cream instead of tomato sauce. This was actually not quite as gross as it sounds. Actually, that's a lie. It was kinda gross. But, I ate it anyway.

Then I was tired from being hung over and having to endure the company of Laura F. for two hours and I was lame and went to bed around 8. It was also super cold in our room and I didn't really want to have to deal with going downstairs and talking with the people at the front desk to have them bring up a space heater, so it was just easier to take a long shower and go to bed. Laura W., my poor roommate, was very sad not to have someone to study GRE words with, and apparently I missed when her hairdryer started spewing sparks into her hair when it got fried in the electrical socket. But I had a real good 12 hour sleep.

2006-10-13T02:46:00.000-07:00

Wow. It was a Friday the 13th and I didn't even notice.

So, to pick up where I left off, I woke up tired and cranky after waking up on the train after a less than full night of less than restful sleep. In addition to this, I was subjected to Kristin's inane comments about how we were now in "the real Russia" because we weren't in a city and were going by abandoned factories and apartment buildings. I'm glad that we still feel like Russia is totally back-ass-wards and that dilapidation and disrepair is its natural state.

Anyway, after our arrival in Nizhny-Novgorod, we schlepped all our stuff into a rented bus and rode to the hotel. Most of the ride was taken up with comments that we were "back in civilization" because cell phone service had returned. Half an hour after check-in (not really long enough to do more than brush your teeth and wish that you could take a nap) we met in the lobby to go to breakfast. Breakfast was at a restaurant in the Kremlin that we ended up eating most of our other meals at. Which was okay, because the lunches and dinners were much better than the breakfast we got. Don't get me wrong, I love kasha (oatmeal-y something), but this stuff was like cold congealed snot. Or something grosser, but that just makes me want to barf. And the sirniki (little cheese cakes made without cheese—don't even ask) were inedible, which made me want to cry. Anyway, breakfast was a letdown, combined with the bad news that were were going to be on a two-hour bus ride to a matryoshka factory. For those not in the know, matryoshkas are the brightly colored nesting dolls. The factory also makes other traditionally hand-painted wooden objects. Like spoons. And boxes. And really hideous end tables.

I passed out almost as soon as we got on the bus, as did almost everybody else. I think the poor guide was only talking to Margaret and Natasha, the tour coordinator. Even Evgenii Yurivich, the dean of our program who was along for the ride, was passed out. I know this because he had very rumpled hair and sleep marks on his face when we got off the bus.

Anyway, the factory was actually pretty cool. The guide had some kind of accent and she used a lot of words that I didn't understand, so I stopped trying to listen to her after the first five minutes of the tour. I realize that this doesn't say very much either for my language skills, or for my enthusiasm to learn, but it was cold outside and she was really boring. We did get a great tour of the factory, though. Apparently, they have a lot of tour groups come through so the workers aren't at all bothered by large groups of people coming through and taking lots of pictures. I felt like it was too much like a zoo, so I didn't take pictures of the people. I hate people taking pictures of me while I'm at work, so I figured I'd extend them the same courtesy. Instead, I took pictures of mass produced wooden products. One of the coolest things that I saw in the factory but couldn't get a picture of was a stencil of Lenin's head on a wall. However, his head was mostly covered up by nude calendars.

It was funny.

The factory also has a big museum of wooden crap that they make. And it's actually pretty crazy. They have all kinds of traditionally painted stuff—everything from dolls, and tables and chairs to plates, cups, and silverware, salt and pepper shakers, boxes, giant swans that serve no apparent purpose, and chess sets, and so much more that I can't even remember. They also have the most ginormous wooden spoon and bowl that I have ever seen in my life. There's a bad picture of it, but it doesn't even begin to convey the enormity. The spoon is at least 8 ft tall, probably 9 (because it's probably 3m and I wasn't paying attention to the guide).

Anyway, after lunch (which was actually really pretty good for the factory cafeteria), we hit up the souvenir shop and then hit the road south back to Nizhny-Novgorod. Although another word about food before I continue the saga. As most of you know, I'm a fairly picky eater. Granted, I've become less so as the years have progressed, but as of this summer, there were still things that I wouldn't really eat or that I would pick out and eat around. Like peppers. Or cucumber. Or weird things that looked funny. But here, I just eat whatever they put in front of me without asking any questions. Because as long as it tastes okay, I'd really probably rather not know what's in it. Take for example the Russian kotlet. I'm not sure if we have cutlets in the States, but I'm pretty sure that when Mom made something like that it involved chicken being breaded and fried. However, a Russian kotlet is mystery meat delux, but also fried. It usually tastes pretty good. Sometimes there's stuff in it other than meat that I hope is onion or garlic. Sometimes there's bone chunks. But anyway, I feel like the point that I'm fairly unsuccessfully trying to make is that Russia has made me a less picky eater. Whether or not I'm a better person for that remains to be seen.

I dozed on the way back to the hotel, but I was listening to Shooter Jennings and came to the abrupt realization that I was acutely unhappy. And the things to cure this acute unhappiness were about three 40s of PBR, a pack of Camel Lites, everybody's favorite "extracurricular activity," and a lot of pool. Seeing as my chances of getting any of those things (with the exception of the second) was nonexistent, I broke down and bought a pack of smokes. Because I've come the realization that this year is going to be like last year: it's going to suck a lot (really really a lot) and if I'm going to make it through and maintain some semblance of my sanity, I'm going to do whatever it takes. And if that means an occasional cigarette, maybe that's okay. I won't be happy about it, but I won't be killing myself either. I also bought a lot of vodka, and this is the night that I came to know the true meaning of the Russian phrase "Drinking vodka without beer is like throwing your money into the wind."

Now, everybody knows that vodka gets you drunk. Or at least it should. But I had about 9 shots of 45 proof vodka and was not drunk. Not even a little. I just got grumpy and irritated because I should have been drunk and everyone else around me was drunk. But let me back up a little and describe the revelries of the first night in Nizhny-Novgorod. It all started out with a party in Candice's room that everybody (except Margaret and Natasha) put in an appearance at, with Evgenii Yurivich as toastmaster. And he pours rather large shots. Even Claire turned up, and by the time I got there, she was fucking wasted. Which was funny, because she started trying to do drunk yoga and fell over. And then she spit in Candice's cup and fell over on her face. At some point, she also gave Laura W. the finger. So things went pretty well for a while, until people started to migrate downstairs to Phoebe and Jonathan's room. It was around this time that Reid slammed Laura F.'s fingers in the bathroom door. Not once, but twice, because he was drunk and couldn't figure out why the door wouldn't close and didn't connect the yelling with something he had done. Anyway, Laura was bawling and her hand was bleeding, but Evgenii, as the responsible adult, poured lemon vodka over the wound and then proposed another toast. He's my hero.

After Laura F. was bandaged and left to sleep off the remainder of her rudely shattered drunk, the few of us left made our way downstairs to Phoebe's. When we walked in, Candice was trying to pass out on the floor. She had been trying to match toasts with Evgenii and had come out rather the worse for wear. About five minutes later, she started barfing all over and was very ill for the rest of the night. The toastmaster kept drinking through it all, regaling us with the only line of the Marilyn Monroe song he knew: "I want to be loved by you..." Around the time that people started to wander off to bed and Phoebe announced that she also needed to barf, we were out of booze, and Evgenii issued an open invitation to get beer and drink on the street. Note that drinking on the street is illegal in Russia, and we didn't have our passports back form being registered at the hotel. However, this was all okay because "we would be with him, and he has a Russian passport." Anyway, because I was not drunk (still) but desperately wanted to be, I said I'd go along. So it ended up being me and Reid and Evgenii (who couldn't walk straight by this time) heading out to a bar.

The bartender was less than pleased when we came in, but was agreeable because we were taking the beers to go. Evgenii was much put out that they didn't have MGD and he had to have a Baltika. And I'll pause a moment just to say how fucked it is that he prefers to drink Miller over a perfectly acceptable beer like Baltika. Not that Baltika's great, but it actually tastes like beer, rather than stale pee. Now, I drink Miller too, but that's because pints are $1.50, not because I like it. He also gave me grief for smoking Camels, to which I was very tempted to say, "You smoke Parliments and Pall Malls. Don't even fucking start with me," but decided that it might just be better to say that I like the way they smell. Which is true. But seriously, how white trash do you get? He also has a mullet.

Anyway, after getting through most of the beer and most of another cigarette, I was feeling buzzed enough to hope that maybe I might get drunk after all. But alas, it was not to be. Had I had the foresight to have bought another beer, all would have been well, but I'm just not that cool. Anyway, remember kids, "Drinking vodka without beer is like throwing your money into the wind!"

2006-10-12T02:45:00.000-07:00

Wow, it was so nice to wake up and not have to go to school today. I slept in late and then got up and finished packing and my host mom gave me enough food to feed a small army to take with me on the train. It's about 18 hours to Nizhny-Novgorod (south-east of Moscow and majorly south-east of Petersburg) on the overnight train, but that's really only one meal that I was going to miss. Anyway, it was a lot of food, that actually mostly got eaten as people moved around the train. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The train. We met in a big group at the station and then piled onto the train. We went third class, which mean by platscar. I'm sure that most of you have never been on a sleeper train, and I wish that I'd remembered to take a picture so that you could see how this works. Anyway, the train car is divided into little compartments with four bunks (two on each side, on top of each other) and a table on one side, and the aisle and two more bunks on the other. The aisle runs through the whole car and everything's open--no doors and no privacy. This actually isn't as bad as it sounds. We were in a new car, which meant that we had special bio toilets that didn't close when we went through the sanitary zones. I'm not sure how this works, but it was pretty cool to be able to pee whenever I wanted.

I ended up sitting with Clark, Phoebe, and Jonathan for this first leg. Which was pretty fun. We ate a lot of food and talked a lot and then Phoebe brought out the booze and we started passing. Margaret came back when we opened the champagne, but instead of getting mad that we were drinking on the train (after she told us to wait for the hotel), she held out her cup. And no 18 hour train ride would be complete without "truth or dare" and "never have I ever," and gave me the opportunity yet again, to realize why playing these games is always a bad idea. Whatever. It's not like I really care if I'm one of the first to get out—it just makes me interesting. Or something. Anyway...

I snagged the bottom bunk, but didn't end up getting a whole lot of sleep, what with people moving around all the time and then a fat man getting on the train. This fat man set up his bunk and then passed out. This wouldn't have been a problem (after all, that's what you're supposed to do at night on the train) but he had set his cell phone alarm and it kept going off, but he wouldn't wake up. So there would just be this super loud beeping noise. And at first we couldn't figure out where it was coming from, but then the fat man woke up and turned it off. But it turned out that he had just reset it, because it started beeping again five minutes later. Anyway, everyone wanted to kill him by the time the lights came on and the train attendant was yelling at us to turn in our bed sheets.

Other than the horrible realization of waking up in the morning and realizing that I was still on the mother fucking train and we still weren't to Nizhny-Novgorod, it was a pretty chill and pleasant time on the train.

2006-10-11T02:39:00.000-07:00

So I know that Wednesdays are usually exciting to read (or not, but I can dream...) because I post pictures, but today I didn't take any pictures on the excursion. Why? Because I went to the naval museum, which was inside, and they wanted 80 rubles to take pictures. I'm all about the free pictures. So, unfortunately, you don't get to see the inside of the naval museum in Petersburg.

Which is actually a real shame because this was actually one of the cooler excursions. The guide was super nice and was really into showing us stuff. We saw lots of crazy models of old boats and a little boat that Peter the Great used to ride around and fire off his toy cannons in. That was pretty cool. And humongous oars that went almost all the way up to the super tall ceiling. And lots of submarine stuff. And mines. Anyway, I'm not really usually all that interested in naval history or whatever because the guides are usually just telling you about the generals or what battles were fought when or where, but this was different because she showed us models and described what life was like for the sailors, and then we got to look through a periscope.

Yeah. I'm sure you can all tell that it was just about the neatest thing that I've done here. For real.

Anyway, one of the other dudes from the group told me about this other internet café that's a lot cheaper than the ones that I'd been going to. So I headed over and got two hours of wireless internet for $5, which is actually a really good deal here. I hate paying for internet. Because I totally shouldn't have to, and it makes me really angry. Anyway, I updated the blog and did the emails I needed to, and then looked at grad school stuff for a little while. I won't bore you with the details, but I need to figure my shit out really fucking soon.

Then I went home and hung out for a while and did a little packing for the big week-long trip. We'll only be gone for a week, but that still takes some packing and gathering of things.

To make up for nothing happening, maybe I'll briefly describe the elevator and the front hall of my apartment building. Mostly because I took pictures. Right now, we have an old radiator and a bathtub sitting in the front hall by the elevator. I don't know why, and they don't seem to be going anywhere, but here they are.

The elevator, although you probably can't see from the picture, is really only big enough to comfortably (Russian style) fit three people if they're not too fat and don't have big bags. The elevator also goes down a little bit when you step into it, which never inspires much confidence. However, since I live on the eighth floor, I figure that should something happen, that's only barely enough time to realize what's happening before I'm dead. These are my cheerful thoughts as I walk out the door every morning.

And who says I don't have a Russian soul?

2006-10-10T03:47:00.000-07:00

For the last day of classes before a vacation, this was pretty anti-climactic. However, something important happened today. Meg and the dean, Evgenii Yurivich, told me and Lexi after school today that after consulting with the faculty, we can change classes and move to the intermediate group for the semester kids, if that's what we still want. We have the week to think about it, and we can test out the class for a couple days when we get back and see how it goes. This still leaves them with the problem of what to do with us next semester, but I think they'll take care of that one when we get there. This is good news, and I'm pretty excited.

Other than that, I came home and did the little bit of homework that was assigned over the break and then did GRE stuff and caught up the blog. Boring boring life as usual.

Except for the part where I had nightmares last night and woke up still kinda freaked out. I've been really pretty good about only calling Rob once a week (and I didn't call last week), but I had to call on my way out the door this morning just to make sure he was okay. I couldn't shake that "something's wrong" feeling and I still haven't, even after talking to him and having the whole day to forget about stuff. Weird.

This is the last post until I get back from Kazan. There will be pictures and many rants when I return. Until then, leave me happy (or not-so-happy) thoughts.

2006-10-09T03:46:00.000-07:00

Today, I somehow got roped into going to the optional Russian-American discussion club. I think Meg said something about cute boys, which was a blatant lie. Anyway. The way that this works at the ygol is that a bunch of Russian kids who want to talk to Americans show up and then Meg brings over the three or four American kids who don't really want to talk to Russians show up. Then they shove us together in a room for two hours and we talk to each other. The first hour in Russian and the second hour in English.

There were a lot of Russians. Maybe twenty kids, so we divided up into two groups. And we were supposed to talk about the educational system in America versus the educational system in Russia, but I ended up answering questions like "Please tell us what Oregon is like," and "What is your state animal?" and "Can you sing your national anthem? Right now?" and "Can you please tell us what lots of different large American cities are like?" Seriously. What the fuck. I didn't sign up to try to describe what a beaver looks like. Although I did get the word for tail, which was pretty cool. It was painful, and I was painfully awkward. I don't like speaking in front of a lot of people, and having to speak Russian in front of other Americans just makes everything about a million times worse. I dunno why, because it's not like anybody cares or is judging me, but still. Mom was a big believer in the saying "It's better to be silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and have it confirmed," and I'm right up there with her, much as it pains me to say it.

I shouldn't be an asshole. She's paying for this trip. Or, rather, my dad is paying for it, but my mom is letting the money out. I'm so glad that all of that stuff is fading to just a bad dream and that I don't actually have to really think about it. Although I am going to have to ask her to ship all my notes and stuff. Fuck. I knew I should have just put it all in a huge box and sent it ahead.

After discussion club, I went home and did homework for hours and hours. The biggest bright spot in the day was that the heaters came on! A little. But this means that we'll have heat in the apartment! I can't remember if I explained how this works already, but the heat in Russia is regulated and controlled by some outside agency, probably the feds. The heat is turned on only when the temperature gets below a certain point (I've heard anywhere from +5 to -14—and that's all in ºC, bitches). Speaking of temperature, I have no idea how ºC works, although I know that when it's about 15, I probably don't need a sweater under my jacket, but that 11 is pretty fucking cold, especially if the wind is blowing. I'm not sure that I want to know what the negatives feel like.

Yay heat! And tomorrow is the last day of classes before the long trip to Kazan and Nizhny-Novgorod.

2006-10-08T03:45:00.000-07:00

And I drank too much last night. And was hungover and slept all morning. And then decided to bum around the house and do nothing, rather than go to the internet. Thus, there was still no blog update, and nothing interesting happened today.

2006-10-07T03:41:00.000-07:00

So today, being Saturday, I had to go to school for a mandatory meeting of some kind with some director of ACTR who doesn't actually even have an official title in the organization. Whatever. Anyway, I had to waste my Saturday afternoon to come into school and get yakked at by some dude who didn't really know what the fuck was up with anything.

Basically, I think he just wanted to make sure that we were all okay and that we didn't have the program and were going to flip the fuck out and kill somebody. However, but the end of the meeting, I might have flipped out and killed him. I dunno if he was jetlagged or incompetent, or what the deal was, but god damn. Anyway, there's also another good Claire moment in here. I feel like that's all I've been writing about, but she's just been in such good form this week. And it gets better! Just wait! So, this meeting is taking place all in English and the dude is asking us if we're being fed and how classes are or whatever, and Claire, as usual, speaks only in Russian.

In this case, I got pissed off because I felt like it was rude, rather than just because it was obnoxious. I dunno. If someone is asking for your honest opinion and feedback, conducting the conversation in your native language, I really feel like you're being an asshole if you dick around with all the "um, uh..." that you have to do when you look for a word or grammar construction in a language that you're not as familiar with. And I don't care how good you think you are: you still can't express yourself as fluently and fully as you could otherwise. She was saying something about walking home alone in the dark, and I was definitely not the only one doing the "dude, it totally serves her right if something happens" eye-roll.

But moving away from Claire for a little bit, the rest of the meeting was for the poor suckers who are here for a year. We have the option of doing an independent research project, culminating in a 20+ page paper in Russian. And Russian pages are not 8.5x11. Russian pages are fucking huge. Anyway, he was supposed to make us a presentation about the paper, but then he just asked if we had any questions. Uh, yeah. How about you describe what it is that we're supposed to do? Maybe what the process is like? And maybe what sort of expectations you have? It was like pulling fucking teeth.

The upshot is that basically it will be like writing another thesis (except in Russian), complete with the disappearance of whatever non-existent social life I had here anyway. The bitch of it will be that probably most of the material that I want is in photocopies or notes somewhere at my parent's house or on the internet (which I will have to pay to use and pay again to print shit). Plus, there will probably be fees for archives and libraries that the program won't cover. And Russian libraries are pretty whack anyway. You can't check the books out, so you have to read them there. Fucked up, and a pain in my ass. Luckily, if I want to continue my thesis romance, I can buy all my books myself and read them from the (un-)comfort of my very own desk.

I'm still totally unsure what I want to do, but I have a few vague directions. I'm looking at continuing working with Vladimir Sorokin, but with a different text. I could translate, although I'd have to also do an analytic component. I'm okay with this; it's just another thesis. Only maybe bigger and badder because it'll be in Russian. Anyway, Sorokin wrote the words and story for a very controversial opera a couple years ago and I'm playing with the idea of translating the opera and then writing about it. I have yet to read the opera, so I'm not sure what I'd write about, but probably just like what I did with my thesis: what's happening in the text and how it functions within the framework of conceptualist art. Only minus most of the historical crap that I had to do my second chapter on. I have a few days to knock things around and come up with some type of proposal.

After getting minimal information about this project out of the dude from Washington, the meeting degenerated into talk about visa and registration. This is Meg's first year and I don't expect her to know everything. However, this dude from Washington has been a top mucky-muck in the program almost since it was founded. And he can't tell us how many entries we have on our visas or where we could get registered if we came back to Russia before Meg. In Russia, there are these great things called "immigration cards" that the happy people at customs take from you when you leave the country. When you come back, you have to get a new one and be re-registered at the place you live within three days of returning to the country. Talk about a pain in the ass. And why did this dude not know how any of this stuff works? They deal with it every fucking year. Anyway, I guess I really just wanted to express my astonishment that this guy was so worthless. But really, I shouldn't be surprised.

After the meeting, I went to the ygol and did a little bit of GRE crap with Reid while we waited until 6pm, which is when Pheobe said that it was okay to come over. Pheobe's babyshka frequently goes to the dacha for the weekends and Pheobe invites everyone over and we all get drunk and talk shit, and it's generally a pretty good time. But first there was GRE, and then McDonalds and the totally bizarre experience of talking to Reid's boyfriend from home. I really hate doing shit like that. I really really hate when people either hand the phone to you, like "Hey, please talk to this person that you don't know while I'm busy being a dickhead" or even worse, when somebody passes the phone on you and you have to talk to the other random asshole who just happened to be standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. So guys, unless I happen to know the person you're passing me to—don't fucking do it. Especially since I have to spend a small fortune to talk to your ungrateful asses.

Then it was Phoebe's. And Phoebe was greeting everyone with the "You can't come into the kitchen unless you've had your two shots of vodka!" And let me explain that Phoebe's kitchen is about the size of the one at Rob's. And we somehow fit twenty people in there. Crazy. Anyway, I can't even remember ever even taking a shot of vodka, and I don't think that I've even had any vodka since that one night that I got so sick that the only things I remember are Éva holding my hair out my puke and looking at the shoes of the CSO's and vaguely wondering who was seeing me passed out on the floor of the bathroom. So I was, shall we say, a little apprehensive, about the vodka. But a shot is only a shot. And chased by a huge beer, another shot seems like an okay idea. And then maybe another of each, but who's counting at that point anyway?

At some point in all of this, Claire showed up, although I know for a fact that Phoebe had not actually said, "Hey, I'm having a party and you should come." The expression on Jessica's face was absoultely priceless when she answered the phone... Anyway, I vaguely recall needing some more of something to keep me busy and maybe on the other side of the room. I don't place a lot of faith in my ability to control my mouth these days, and it's way worse when I'm cranky. But things were fine and I stayed on the other end of the room. And at some point, I did hear her speaking English. And the weird part of it was that she sounded totally normal and actually like she might be kinda cool to hang out with. Although, I'm very inclined to just chalk this up to being drunk and in a good mood.

Whatever. I got successfully and happily drunk on my one drinking night. And as long as it's only one night a week and I'm still not smoking, I'm not even going to feel bad about how much I think about other extracurricular activities, which I will leave to your imagination, because this is the internet and everybody can be found.

2006-10-06T03:39:00.000-07:00

I made another friend today! It never rains, but it pours. Today at lunch, Reid tried to get a group of kids together to go see a movie, but every one cool had been out drinking the night before and wanted to go home and take a nap. Because I'm lame, I had a relatively decent sleep (as far as all that goes) and I was totally up for a movie. However, Reid wanted to go and study for the GRE for a little while first.

So after school, Reid and I met up with Erik, who was also heading over to the Amerikanskii ygol for some hott GRE action. This made me feel really guilty because I brought my books with the best intentions of studying and taking the test and applying to grad school for next year and actually having something exciting like loans to look forward to rather than working for PP&R. However, it's really hard to get shit done over here. I've been tired, and it's always so much easier not to study and I'd pretty much decided that maybe I was actually okay with taking another year off, now that I'm back in school again. However, Erik dropped the bomb that it's not in fact too late to apply since pretty much every thing's due around Jan 1. So I'm thinking that maybe if I start to get my shit together and invest some significant time and money in the internet café, then I could have something to do next year. This is a lot of extra work and stress that I'm not sure I want to do and that I'm not exactly looking forward to. But, if all the cool kids are doing it, at least I'll have company.

On the way down to the ygol, Reid related his opinion of Claire, which can be summed up in the following story. Reid and a couple of the other kids joined one of the gross, overpriced gyms here, and they all had to go together to pay and get the student discount and all that good stuff. However, instead of waiting for the group, Claire takes off ahead of the other four and is done with her tour and negotiations by the time everyone else gets there. Reid said that this wasn't really what bothered him; she wants to do her own thing, fine, that's cool. However, it was when they all had to discuss $$ and she kept speaking in Russian that nobody else could understand that he got pissed off. Finally, when they were fully able to demonstrate her superior command of the language and that they did, indeed, need her to speak English so that everybody was clear on what was happening, she did switch to English. And the first thing she said was.... Does anybody want to guess? C'mon, it's priceless. "Oh, I guess I do remember how to speak English after all! I thought I might have forgotten!" As Reid said (to me, although it would have been much better said to her), "Of course you remember how to speak English, you dumb cunt. It's your fucking native language. You don't 'forget' how to speak it after a month." I like Reid. He's pretty okay.

So, it turns out that the American Corner (where there's a GRE and other standardized test study room) was closed, so Reid and I walked over to the movie theater and investigated what might or might not be playing in English and determined that there was nothing we wanted to see that wasn't super expensive and playing super late at night. So movies another night. Since Reid doesn't like to go home (his host family is out for most of the day and he gets lonely in the apartment by himself) we walked around a little bit, went to the internet café and gave some very cursory glances at some grad schools, and then got some food and headed for home.

Stupid grad school.

2006-10-05T03:38:00.000-07:00

So, I think I mentioned awhile back that we had to do a skit at some point for a "foreign student mixer" party at school. That was today. And this party was one of the most painfully awkward experiences of my life. It kinda actually comes close to senior prom when my ex that I'd dated for three years (and lost my virginity to, for Christ's sake) showed up with the chick that he dumped me to hold hands with at architecture camp. I take it back. This might actually have been worse.

This party was for all the foreign kids studying Russian at Gertzen to get to know each other and hang out and have fun. However, the Russian prof's idea of "having fun" consisted of each group doing some kind of skit, song, or dance. This part actually wasn't that bad. And everything would have been okay had that been it. My dumb group did a skit about ordering lunch in the cafeteria and dealing with the bitchy waitress. I was the bitchy waitress, remember? One of the other groups did a Swan Lake ballet parody, and there were some songs, which weren't as cool.

Then they told us that we all had to go outside to the courtyard. We were divided into teams and did those horrific "team-bonding" relay races that everybody hopes that they're done with after first grade. There was the "run in a squat" and the "run with huge hops" which were only mildly embarrassing, but then they got serious with the "everybody stand in a line, bend over and put your left hand through your legs and grab hands with the people in front of and behind you—then run as fast as you can with your face in their ass and your hand in their crotch." Seriously. What the fuck. That's not fun. That's awful.

Then back inside for musical chairs and forced dancing. I don't dance unless I'm trashed, and certainly not in front of a roomful of people I don't know. Fuck that shit. And especially not while some dude I don't know has to either hold my leg or my ear. Yuk. You're just kidding yourself if you think I'm even going to try. No, I'm not a good sport. Anyway, I was some seriously pissed off by the time I finally got to leave. Zhenya (I guess I should be correct and call him Evgenii Yurivich), the dean of the students (who spent the whole time rocking out—he was the best part of the day) came up to me and asked if I was okay. I said yes, but that I was going the fuck home. Except without the fuck, because I can't swear in Russian. Which is also lame.

Laura ran out behind me and we ended up going into Gostinii dvor because she wanted to buy a wallet and I was still too mad to deal with getting on the metro and being touched and molested by more people I don't know. We walked around the mall and looked at expensive clothes and ugly fashion and Laura didn't buy a wallet. But we did spend some quality time bitching about that shit-awful party. Jesus fucking Christ.

2006-10-04T03:30:00.001-07:00

Today was Wednesday! Guess what that means, kids! That's right! It's picture time!

We went to Pavlosk today, the summer residence built for Pavel I by his ever-loving mommy, Ekaterina II. It's basically a palace, some other buildings, and huge-ass park. This excursion was less boring than most of the others, but probably because we got to walk around in "the woods" and Meg got us lost trying to find the palace.

That was at least entertaining. And I don't mind walking around in the outside. It actually kinda reminded me of home in a nice way. I'm not really much of a nature kid (well, I like walking around outside while I'm tripping as much as everybody else—that's a joke, Mom) but I really just wanted to sit in the middle of the woods and get lost. Or not really lost, but just lost enough that I wouldn't hear any other people. Too bad you always have to stay with the group or the militsia will get you.

I think that I might also be making another friend. I know that sounds totally retarded, but as we all know, I don't really do the whole making friends thing very well. Anyway, I walked around with Laura a lot and she's pretty cool. She's quiet and laid back in the same kinda way that I am, and she's also fucking crazy (in a good way), which helps things a lot.

Yay trip! Yay friend!

Also, because I just remembered, I'm going to relate another Claire story. Because it's funny, and I don't like her, and being mean on the internet makes me want to kill her less. I know I'm a horrible person and that I'm going to burn in hell, but I'll figure that one out after I make it through this year. Anyway, this story comes courtesy of Laura, who has an internship with Claire at the Hermitage. Apparently, at the internship orientation, there was a dude who spoke a lot of really fast and enthusiastic Russian that Laura didn't understand. There was also a woman who spoke English that Laura and Claire will be working with maybe sometimes. And this woman doesn't speak Russian. But Claire refused to speak English. She would have compromised and spoken French, but finally the conversation had to continue with Claire writing her half of the conversation in English. As much as I secretly wish that I was that hard-core, there's a time and a place for everything. AND THERE'S NO TIME OR PLACE FOR YOU, BITCH! Oh, I'm so going to hell...

In the negative for the day is one of the dudes on the trip. I can't figure out whether he just really wants to be friends or if he kinda likes me. He's just awkward enough that he might just want to be friends. The rub is that I'm not really that interested in even being friends with him. He's kinda gross in a way that I can't really put my finger on and we also just didn't really click the couple times we conversed, and I'm not that interested in trying any harder. But he sat by me both times on the marshutka today, and it was gross.

Ew boys.

2006-10-03T03:29:00.000-07:00

This was a very boring day. Really nothing happened except that I went to school, checked the email that I don't have, and then went home, did homework and went to bed.

2006-10-02T03:27:00.000-07:00

Please congratulate me! I realized recently that I've been (successfully) on the no-smoking wagon for more than a month. Since the day before I left town, as a matter of fact. I'm still pretty grumpy and usually want a smoke real bad, but it's mostly more for the sake of having something to do than because I actually need or want a smoke. And I suspect that the grumpy is more just because I'm always some combination of tired, hungry, cold, and stressed.

I also started grinding my teeth and clenching my jaw again. I'd been getting headaches but I couldn't figure out why until I woke up one morning and my teeth hurt. Yay for low levels of stress all the time...

Indian summer is officially over in St. Pete as of today. The weather up to now has been pretty nice (although since I'm a wuss, I started wearing long underwear about three weeks ago) and it sometimes gets warm enough to take your sweater off in the afternoon. However, today was fucking cold. Like end of November in Portland cold with lots of rain. Just a really nasty day. I can't wait until they turn the heat on.

So, I spent most of today sms-ing (or texting, but I'm going to go Russian here) with Ivan of the bad breath. At some point in the last couple days he invited me to "go to nature and gather things." Probably meaning "Let's go pick some mushrooms" but what we were going to gather was left unspecified. Anyway, I declined and went to that funk show. Today, I got a message from him asking how the show was and we proceeded to spend the rest of the morning and early afternoon sms-ing back and forth. The result of all of this was that he said "Hey, come hang out with us!" But by the time I got out of Monday Meeting (that sounds as religious and dippy as it is) it was time for them to go to class. So I went to Russian class with Ivan and his two stoner friends.

Russian class was absolutely incredible. I never went to public school, but I imagine that that's kinda what this class was like. Made even more ironic by the fact that the title of the class was something like "Intellectual Communication." Anyway, the kids spent literally the first ten minutes of class arguing with the professor about whether or not they could hear her from the back of the room. Then she finally made everybody move up two rows. Then there was more drama when she asked whether they'd done the reading and why or why not.

Twenty minutes after we walked in, the prof finally starts reading her lecture. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that only two people were paying attention. And no, I was not one of them. I passed notes with Ivan. I found out that he's a big stoner, but he likes punk music, Douglas Adams, and Hunter Thompson. No real surprise there, I guess. Anyway, the rest of the kids were just reading novels or magazines, poking each other, or whispering. Even the two chicks in the front row were talking to each other. It was amazing. I'd never seen a class like that anywhere I've gone to school. And Ivan said that it's always like that.

When it was break time, Ivan and his one remaining friend (the other one having snuck out halfway through the first part) went out for a smoke because Ivan was peacing out. Slava was very interested in why I came to Russia: "So, I get that you read Dostoevsky and liked it. But why are you here?" Why, now that you mention it, I haven't the foggiest. Why the fuck am I here? If any of you figure it out, please let me know.

2006-10-01T03:25:00.000-07:00

I woke up with a cold, so instead of being responsible and a good friend to all of you who were anxiously awaiting my next update (hah!), I woke up late, and then took a nap and went to the grocery store and Jenna's dinner party instead of the internet café. Whatever. There's nothing happening in my life that's so important that everybody needs to know about it immediately. And if there was, I'd call. Besides, I only get two emails a week (one's usually from an ex of some kind and the other's from facebook), so there wasn't anything urgent.

Anyway, the dinner party was way fun. Jenna and Autumn (for those of you who missed last time, Jenna is a friend of Meg's from the Fullbright, and Autumn is Jenna's recently arrived roommate) cooked a shit-ton of vegetables and a chocolate cake and invited cool people over to eat good food. And I felt very lucky to be one of them, because I experienced my first nasty Russian food this weekend. My host family like to take off for the weekends, which is fine, although sometimes a little lonely, but they usually leave me food. And the food for this weekend was some kind of meat patties in the fridge and some kind of kasha on the stove. Kasha is word that means "cooked grain of some kind" and there are lots of different types of kasha. I really like the one in the morning that tastes like oatmeal, but this was not like oatmeal, and it was really nasty. Maybe some kind of buckwheat or something, but I've never seen buckwheat, so I dunno. Anyway, it was way gross. But other than meat patties, that was about it for food. So I did what all good Russians do when they get food that tastes gross: loaded it up with sour cream and salt and tried to think about how much I actually liked it. Which was still a lie, but it was at least edible with salt and sour cream...

So the dinner party. It's always way more fun writing these entries when I'm not on my meds because they're more rambling and I never quite know what's going to come out. All my carefully laid plans for what I'm going to talk about go out the window because I can never remember them. I'm sure they're infuriating to read, but too bad for all of you. Right. The dinner party. Lots of vegetables that were pretty yummy, but I still remain not a fan of peppers or mooshed up yams or squash or whatever the fuck it was. I don't care what anybody says: yams are nasty, and marshmallows are for s'mores. The combination of yams and marshmallows is an abomination that should be sent back to the depths from which it sprang. Along with jello with candied fruit in it. However, this is a separate rant that threatens to derail the entire entry, so I'm going to return to the dinner party, saying only that I didn't care so much for a few of the dishes, but it was overall very good, and they had excellent cheese and chocolate cake.

One of the guests was a professor of Autumn's who is a frequent visitor to Petersburg. He was kinda weird, especially when I mentioned that I'd graduated from Reed. He went there a year in the late sixties and then transferred to one of the Ivies and was very adamant that Reed was not a very good place. Other than that, he was a pretty nice guy. Anyway, I mention him because he's involved in some kind of HIV tracking and prevention program to try and get a handle on the epidemic over here. Alex, I know you're kinda interested in that stuff, and Robert's a smart guy. If you're interested in talking to him, let me know and I can get you contact info.

2006-09-30T03:23:00.000-07:00

I woke up with a wicked hangover, completely forgetting that I was supposed to go to the movies with Jenna at 11, but did manage to be up and moving for the 1pm movie. I also met Jenna's roommate Autumn, who's here on a Fogherty fellowship and doesn't speak much Russian. She seems okay--probably nobody I would ever call up and say "Hey, let's hang out!" but fine to talk to at a party or something. Anyway, the occasion of going to the movies was prompted by the British film festival at Dom Kino (advertised as MOVIES IN ENGLISH!!!!!), and movies in English without horrific dubbing are few and far between. I missed the movie about some kind of festival while I was busy being hungover and talking on the phone with Katie. We saw Kinky Boots, which was much better than I expected. The blurb was something like "A shoe factory in a conservative town in Northern England is saved from bankruptcy by a cross dresser" and didn't inspire much confidence, but it was a cute little feel-good film with really great music. And it was in English. Which was the best part of all.

I hung out with Lena for a little bit since it was her last day for two months. I didn't finish the hat, which makes me sad, but now I can finish it and take a picture. Anyway, I'm sad to lose my one Russian friend.

Then I went home and nobody was home then either. So I hung out for a while being grumpy by myself, and then fed myself and debated calling Meg and saying that I was too tired to go to the concert. But then I decided to go, because I was lonely all by myself watching MTV, and there's only so many bad dubbed movies that I can watch, and they have only have about 20 different music videos in rotation. So I went to the concert. And I was actually very glad that I did, because it was pretty cool. One of Meg's friends, Jennifer, sings in a couple of different bands, and the one that we went to see is called "JD & the Blenders." They do a lot of old soul stuff, like James Brown and whatever. Which is just good music, and watching Russians try to dance to stuff like that is well worth whatever cover they're charging.

Watching Russians dance is really strange anyway, but they haven't really figured out the whole moving the hips thing. They really want to dance to this stuff, but it's just so strange to see them bopping along with their bodies moving as a unit from the hips to the shoulders. Of course there are bad dancers everywhere and I'm definitely one of them, but still... Anyway, I guess all I'm really trying to say is that I'm endlessly entertained watching Russians dance.

Meg also knew some great bar snack that's sticks of bread fried in garlic, oil, and salt until they taste like croutons. Throw some cheese on there and it's about the best drunk food ever. Well, short of the Hot-Cake House, and you should never eat there anyway unless you're drunk off your ass. I feel like half of what I write on here is about getting drunk, or how much I wish I could be getting drunk, and it makes me feel like a lush. And that's not really the way it is. I'm way more sober than I am drunk, and I still don't particularly like being here and having to be responsible all the time. I think it's more the inability to let loose here that gets me, more than anything else.

And being responsible, I had only one beer and went home on the last metro instead of hanging out with Jennifer after her show. I really really liked her. She's an ACTR alumna who ended up staying in Petersburg. She's in her early 30s and she's got her shit so much together, it's cool to talk to her. She actually reminds me a lot of Stephanie, who I babysat for a bunch last year. Good people all around.

2006-09-29T03:08:00.000-07:00

Today was not nearly as much fun because we didn't get to watch any movies. I'm all about watching movies. So instead of paying attention in Politologia, I unravelled the tassels of my scarf that have been scrunched up and nasty for the last year. I'll start paying attention when it starts being interesting. And with the verbal tick that prof's got, you really don't miss much of anything. I feel like a real asshole, but I'm absolutely incapable of making myself care about that class. I really hope I don't have to take it next semester. I don't know how or why it's so boring, but it's so painful. And speaking of painful...

So I'm in the stupid class, which isn't necessarily a bad thing--for the first time ever, I'm in a Russian language class where I actually understand what's going on. This is actually a lie. I understood most of the grammar in third-year, I just couldn't apply it. Anyway. There are four of us in the dumb group. One of the other girls is clicking along about my speed, which is great, but the other two spend most of class sitting there with their mouths half open catching flies. They're so lost. And have horrible, horrible accents. I know none of you (except maybe Alea and Zhenya) speak Russian, but I swear to Christ that if I have to hear "Ya zhi-voo vee ROO-see-u" or "Ya del-AL-a" one more time, I'm going to pop my eardrums. Granted that my Russian's not great, but I can at least read the text and put the accents in the right place. And how do you get out of second-year saying "del-AL-a" anyway? What. The. Fuck.

For the first time ever, things are moving too slow. I never ever thought I'd say that, but it's true. I talked to Margaret about changing classes, and she said that she'd see what she could do. Because it's not really cool that I'm bored. I know the government's paying for most of my tuition, but I'm paying for the rest. And I'm not so down with $6,000 of bored.

I realized recently that this journal thing is getting weird. Not so much the actual writing, but it's the thinking about writing that gets me in trouble. Well, not in trouble, but thinking about what I'm going to say and how I'm going to say it takes up so much of my day, I'm really ashamed. I'm also ashamed to say that I spend a lot of time thinking about how to say my favorite English phrases (like ass-clown and butt-monkey) in Russian. Seriously, the entire ten-fifteen minute walk to the metro this morning was spent like this: "Does ass modify clown? Or does clown modify ass? Can I just moosh two nouns together like that? Does that work in Russian? But what if the clowns like asses? There's some kind of consonant-vowel cluster that indicates that something has an affinity for something else and I can't remember what it is! Why am I so dumb?" I'm the biggest dork ever.

I'm also very puzzled by the kiosks they have here. Kiosks are all over the place, and every single one is like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. I'll come back to this in a minute, and all will become clear, but first, what is a kiosk? It's a small hut type thing with a tiny grouchy lady inside that sells everything EXCEPT what you need. It's really amazing how this works. They also don't really have any windows, and to ask the lady inside for something, you have to crouch down to this tiny window about the size of your palm, located about waist height. The whole dialogue takes place with you in this contorted position, with you looking up at the lady who has some kind of monster stool that she sits on. The dialogue usually goes like this: "Y bas est' ...." (Do you have... insert your noun of choice here). Then you get the answer in a particularly nasty tone: "Y nas niet" (We don't have it), or if you're really lucky, you just get the "Niet." Anyway, kiosks are like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory because even when they're open, they're always closed. There's just that one little window, and I've never seen anybody go in or out. And I've never seen any kind of re-stocking. This leads me to conclude that the kiosks are magical places that always have things, but only things for Russians, and never for Americans. And furthermore, the things that they have for Russians always appear spontaneously. Maybe they have something to do with the grouchy lady. I don't know. This is a great mystery.

Today was also Candice's birthday. Candice is a grad student at UW Seattle in their Slavic languages program. She's pretty cool, even though she's from Texas. She had some typa dinner&drinks thing at a swanky café near the university. I was super cranky by the time I got there and did not have a particularly happy time, although I did eat half of a drunk pear. I'm not sure what a drunk pear is, but it was kinda boozy and tasty. I was cranky when I arrived, first of all, because I took a short nap and woke up totally disoriented and fucked in the head and I had to go out to this party thing. I was tired and wanted to stay home. I was also cranky because I was supposed to go meet up with Lena before I went to Candice's shindig to sign some stuff and give her back some movies that I borrowed, but by the time that I made two metro transfers and went 20 minutes out of my way to meet her, Lena decided that she just wanted to go home and that she didn't want to meet up after all. So I went 40 minutes out of my way for nothing, and I was lugging around all this crap I was going to give her like an idiot. And then the café was expensive, and I couldn't get drunk because I had to get back on the metro, and, and, and, and...

Anyway, I decided that everyone else could go fuck themselves, and I was going to buy some g&t in a can and get smashed by myself at home. And buying the g&t was quite the experience. I went to the 24 hour producti on the way home and had to wait in line with a bunch of gross men. When it was finally my turn, I asked the lady for two big gin and tonics. She looks at me and then asks if I want tonic water and points at it. At which point, I said as politely as I could, "No, I want two big gin and tonics." She raised her eyebrow and pointed at the cans of gin and tonic and asked "How many?" Just give me my booze, you stupid. Fucking. Whore. I know that I have an accent and that it's mildly taboo for a chick to drink hard liquor, let alone buy it for herself, and let alone ask for two, but I don't need your fucking commentary on how I'm going to go straight to hell, do not pass go, do not collect 200 rubles. Fuck you. Drinking on the street is illegal (even though everybody does it, especially at 9am while walking their dogs) and I was sorely tempted, but I was able to restrain myself until I got home and could have the phone and do long-distance drunk dials to my heart's content. Éva, I'm sorry I harassed you—I was pretty gone by the time I got off the phone with Rob. It ended up being a pretty fun night all alone in the apartment.

2006-09-28T03:06:00.000-07:00

School today was pretty much only bearable because we got to watch a movie in Politologia. For those who are fans of Bulgakov, we watched this Italian version of The Master and Margarita. This is a tough book to read, let alone to translate into film, and I was really impressed. I can't say that I particularly liked the film, but I was impressed by the faithfulness of the adaptation and some of the other artistic choices made a lot of sense. Apparently the same dude who directed The Idiot tv series also did The Master and Margarita last year in a ten hour series. I would love to watch this if I can find it with English subtitles, because I'm not cool enough to understand most Russian conversation.

I do watch a lot of tv, though. Mostly because my host family hasn't been around much this week and it's very lonely in the apartment. They combine VH1 and MTV into one channel, and I watch a lot of dubbed shows and music videos. There's also a soap opera that I really like: it's like the worst of American daytime tv, but worse, because it's Russian and they're still figuring out the whole soap opera thing. It's called Five Minutes from the Metro, and it's got to be one of the worst show's I've watched somewhat regularly since Who Wants to be a Superhero? and I only watched that because it was on at the bar. (I'm not going to talk about the fact that I would go to the bar so that I could watch tv...) Katie, they also have Cash Cab here—it's just called Taxi.

I still didn't have cell phone service when I woke up this morning. I saved my receipt (you have to save all your receipts here, so that when shit goes wrong, you can have something to wave in their faces) so that I could go back to the store and demand that the 200 rubles I put on my account actually be put on my account. I left early for school so that I go to the store before, but the store was closed at 9am, even though the sign on the door said that it opened at 8. This type of situation calls for the typical Russian Ny, shto delat? (So, what are you going to do?) accompanied by a shrug of the shoulders. While I'd like to say that I can be philosophical about these things, I was pretty fucking pissed at this point. It only started working around 3 today, roughly 22 hours after I paid for the service. And as pissed as I was about the whole thing, the only thing that I felt when I saw the service bars was relief that I wouldn't have to go deal with the unhelpful people at the phone store.

Thank God for small favors.

Tonight was also the gallery opening for Lafleur's photo show. It was a decent time: I met Meg's friend Jenna again and hung out a little with her and Lafleur. It was however marred by the presence of Claire. And because I'd had a beer and was just about ready to tell her where she could put her nonexistent boobs (She likes to show off her bra and talk about walking around in her boots and underwear. Seriously...) and her anorexic issues, I spent a lot of time wandering around the gallery, talking to Jenna, and not being around Claire. It was good to see Lafleur again and she seems like she's doing okay, or at least better than I'd heard she was doing before. Which doesn't say much, but anyway... Yeah. I was also expecting more hipster artist types. I'm very curious about the phenomenon of the Russian hipster and I have yet to meet one. They're probably just as pretentious, obnoxious, and as full of shit as the ones on Portland...but they're Russian! The "other" is only cool until you figure out that they're just as lame as you.

All things considered, it was a pretty decent day.

2006-09-27T02:54:00.000-07:00

Today was a boring excursion to the naval base of Kronshtadt, but I took lots of pictures. Kronshtadt used to be a suburb of Petersburg, but now it's part of the city proper, even though it's an island, pretty much in the middle of fucking nowhere. Actually, it's not in the middle of nowhere. It's surrounded by huge blocks of Soviet housing which are horrifically enormous and depressing. It's also just disturbing to me that I live in a city with at least 5 million other people. Anyway, it's a naval base that you can't go see (or we couldn't see because they didn't take us there), so we wandered around and looked at the parks and a couple monuments and some boats. I spent most of the day wandering around with the cool Laura (so that she can be differentiated from the annoying-because-she-tries-too-hard Laura) from Wisconsin, who may turn out to be almost as snarky as me. This gives me hope for the semester. But anyway, yay Kronshtadt! Yay pictures!

And at this point, I have to say again how much I hate this bitch Claire for no good reason. Look at the hat and tapered pants. Isn't that reason enough?

And no, I don't think she knows that I took pictures of her and that I hate her publicly on the internet. However, I discovered some other things that add up to more black marks for her. She reads the dictionary. And she has not only changed her first name to be more Russian, but she also changed her last name. Seriously, what the fuck? You don't get to do that shit for no good reason. You should be in the fucking witness protection program for that stuff. She also has this corset that she wears sometimes. I really hope that one day she'll wear it on a Wednesday so that I can secretly take a picture of it. Anyway, corsets are for people who have breasts of some kind. She doesn't because she starved them all away while she was being retarded and now her ribs stick out more than her chest. There's nothing there! You just look like an idiot! It mostly just makes me irritated that I can't tell her that she looks like a dumbass because she'd probably cry. And I have to pretend to be nice for three more months.

After the excursion, I went to the phone store to buy more minutes. This was supposed to go directly onto my account (and there's really no excuse since they had a computer at the store), and I was expecting to have cell phone service after about a half-hour, but it's been about five, and I'm still waiting. Fuck Russia.

2006-09-26T02:52:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-09-25T02:49:00.000-07:00

I saw a mother and son with matching mustaches on the metro yesterday.
Today, pretty much the only thing of note that happened was that I got a hive on my lip again. As most of you know, I've got this weird auto-immune disorder that basically means that I'm indefinitely allergic to myself and I have hives a lot. This is pretty much all fun, all the time. However, I've been doing much better the last six months, and Russia's been good for my health. Anyway, because I feel like a huge idiot when my lip swells up, I took a picture of it.

And while we're on the subject of pictures, there will very likely not ever be any pictures of me here, since I wholeheartedly believe that digital cameras were invented so that ugly people could reveal to the world how hideous they actually are, and to show those who are at least moderately attractive at our worst. But there will pictures of parts of me (no, Dennis, probably not breasts, but we could discuss...) if they acquire interesting hives or bruises.

I feel like I should write more and put in something amusing or entertaining, but nothing happened and I'm feeling uninspired. Maybe something fun will happen tomorrow.

2006-09-24T05:34:00.000-07:00

So, kids, the way this works is that I'm really cheap and I don't like paying for internet every day. So I only check my email and will only update my blog once a week. However, there will be several entries going up (pretty much about the last week's worth) every time I drag my computer to the café and pay my $4 for an hour of wireless. So. For your greater procrastinating pleasure, you should go back and figure out where my story left off last time. I also threw up some more pictures on some of the older posts.

As it turns out, I didn't actually get to post anything to the blog yesterday because wifi wasn't working. Although, I have a sneaky suspicion that it was actually working at CaféMax, but the lady just didn't want to make any change for me. And I never made it to look for movies. Instead, I bought more minutes for my cell phone, and then decided that I deserved a blin with mushrooms and cream for my hard efforts. Not really, but it was a good excuse. Then I went searching unsuccessfully for wifi. The big success of the day was exchanging the knitting needles.

I'm going to be boring and spend a little bit of time talking about the process of exchanging the knitting needles, because it made me feel awesome about Russia. I spend a lot of time talking about how much everything here sucks and how much I hate it, and not much time talking about the good stuff. Mostly because it doesn't make for entertaining reading or writing, but that's kinda the way it goes. Anyway. So, I went into the shop with my receipts in hand, fully expecting the lady to be like "You want to do what? NO!!!!" so at the very worst, I was just going to have to buy some more needles. But this lady was so helpful and so sweet. I explained that had bought the needles the day before, but they were the wrong ones, and then I got stuck on the word for "double-pointed." This made me feel like just about the biggest idiot ever, because I'd gone and looked at the needles two seconds before so I'd know what the word was. Luckily, she knew exactly what I needed, and even asked me if I needed a different size and was very concerned when she couldn't find ones the same exact size. "Are you sure those are going to be okay? Really?" Yes. Whatever. I'm just making a hat. A half-millimeter size difference isn't really going to make that much of a difference. But it's sweet of you to care. So she let me exchange the needles with absolutely no fuss. It was amazing.

I went to Phoebe's house last night for a Love Actually party. This was expected to be a rather small gathering of kids with some beer and wine, and Love Actually in Russian until everybody got sick of it and wanted to switch to English. It turned into a rather large party, with over half the group--maybe twelve of us--jammed into Phoebe's tiny kitchen with people not being allowed up to the apartment unless they had booze with them. I managed to drink all three sizes of Heiniken last night, along with a gin&tonic in a can. I've been very curious about the gin&tonic in a can phenomenon since I arrived, because it sounds like one of the most vile ideas ever. Contrary to expectation, that was some pretty tasty booze. I'm sure they use the type of gin that makes you blind if you drink it straight, but they mix it up with so much lime that it tastes like you're drinking gin and Sprite. Mmm, mmm, good!

I also learned that sending drunk people out to buy more booze is pretty much not a good idea. Or rather, sending me out drunk to buy more booze is not a good idea. Because, really, I like to drink. I like to drink a lot. I like drinking really really a lot, and when I'm drunk, I want a lot of booze. Anyway, I bought more booze than I should have and ended up drinking all of it. Which was pretty amazing going down, but I'm hurting this morning. And I really really miss PBR. As gross as that is, I really do. I would break somebody's leg for a PBR. Although I got to go to the grocery store in the basement of the mall with the gun kiosk just inside the door. Would you like a semi-automatic assault rifle with your bread and cheese, sir? We got it all right here!

Hey, Rob! Guess what else I saw at the store last night! BACON FLAVORED CHEETOES.

Anyway, I really wanted to take a shower today, but apparently it's just not in the cards. The gas water heater won't light, and I'm afraid of blowing myself up if I try to light it too many times. I guess I'll just be gross a little while longer.

I've been doing really well with the whole not smoking thing, although the last week has been really tough. I watched this great little movie called Manga about a young and confused low-life dude with a crush on a model and what happens after he climbs in her bedroom window. It was a fun movie, but everyone smoked all the way through, and I've never wanted a cigarette so bad in my life. After that, I've been walking really close behind all the smokers I can find.

I want to go to the internet café, but I have hives on my mouth and I look stupid. I've only had hives one other time since I got here, but I've got them now. But only around my mouth and on my lips. This makes me look like a really demented and much less attractive Angelina Jolie, because usually only one side of my lip will swell up. I'm dirty and I have ridiculously poofy lips. Life is fan-tastic.

2006-09-23T05:34:00.000-07:00

Last night I went out for beers with some of the other American students. I don't particularly like a lot of the other Americans, but I'd only had one beer since I got here, and going out beats sitting at home on Friday night. Anyway, I figured out the hard way that Russian beer has a little more booze in it than PBR or High Life. And two half-liters of beer gets you way more drunk than two pints. It was the most fun ride home on the metro that I've ever had, though.

While I've been catching up on the events of the week, I've been watching music videos, and the one that was just playing showed a couple of girls who get sick of being propositioned/molested/sexually objectified by their male co-workers at the office, so they strip down to their underwear and beat up all the men. There's also a Snicker's ad on tv with a Monty Pythonesque knight and minstrels. But a Bloodhound Gang video just came on. Weird.

Anyway, the agenda for today is to try to find this place that may or may not sell Russian movies with English subtitles and then to try to exchange these knitting needles, and then to hit up the internet café and throw all this stuff up on the blog.

2006-09-22T05:32:00.000-07:00

Most of the time, I feel like I live in a comic book. Life just has that unreal quality to it. I still find it hard to believe that I'm actually in Russia, even though I'm surrounded by Russians speaking Russian, and me, speaking Russian, all the time. I still just find it impossible or unbelievable or something. I dunno. It's getting more real, though. It's not quite as much of an effort to speak Russian all the time, and I still get tired more quickly, but things are getting better. This morning as I was walking to the metro, I didn't find it at all strange that everyone was speaking Russian like I usually do.

Baby steps in the right direction.

I was also able to talk to Meg for at least an hour only in Russian. She talks more than I do, of course, but I can still hold up my end of the conversation. That's progress. Like whoa. At Reed, I could barely string sentences together. I actually surprised myself at the ACTR recording session before we left when I talked a lot to the tester-woman. I'm pretty sure it's the not being on meds. Classes are work now because it's hard to focus and pay attention for that long, but I can actually talk to people. I'm sorry to keep going on and on about all this, but I'm partly still trying to convince myself that coming here was a good idea, and this (hopefully) confirms my decision.

So, I wrote earlier about the bitchy lady from the school cafeteria that the American kids call "Sunshine." The one that doesn't like to give out the omelets? Right. So, there's supposed to be a "party" in the beginning of October for all the foreign students studying at Gertzen to get to know each other. This means that all the Americans, Finns, Germans, and Chinese are going to do skits or some kind of song and dance and then stand around awkwardly. Each group is preparing something in their razgovornia practica class, and we decided to do a skit about what it's like to order lunch in the cafeteria. Although, it was funny, because as soon as we mentioned the cafeteria, the professor's eyes got really wide and she goes, "Oh, they're really evil in there." Anyway, guess who's Sunshine?

I like to think of this as a compliment to my carefully cultivated Russian personality rather than an insult.

After school, I talked to Meg for a while and then went to buy knitting stuff so that I can make this hat for Lena. For those who may have forgotten, she is my fabulous tutor, who is leaving. Not Prof. Lena from Reed. Meg told me about a knitting shop just off of Nevsky, so I headed over and was both unpleasantly and pleasantly surprised. Unpleasantly, because they have all the yarn behind a counter where you can't touch it (or walk off with it, I suppose) and it was small and crowded. However, when I finally got the nerve to elbow my way up to the counter, the woman was super nice. This was a pleasant surprise, because most of the people in the customer service industry seem to take pleasure in being as rude and unhelpful as possible.

So I finally got the yarn that I wanted after a couple false tries. I don't know if it helped that I was standing there with my little dictionary trying to figure out what exactly I was buying or what, but she was really kind (she didn't get pissed, but corrected me) when I asked for a blue yarn and used the word for light blue rather than dark blue. She even put up with me being a tard and forgetting that we're not in the US, and that there aren't US sizes for the needles here, so when you ask for an 8, you get 8mm needles, which are fucking huge. So she brought me smaller ones, and then still smaller ones in a couple different lengths. Anyway, since buying anything here is a terrifying experience, this made me feel really great about the whole thing.

Of course, when I got home, I realized that I bought the circular needles that are 100cm long. So I have to go back and try to exchange them for smaller ones or double pointed ones. I'm such an idiot.

2006-09-21T05:28:00.000-07:00

Today, I met up with Lena again after not seeing her for three days. This doesn't sound like a long time, but we'd been meeting up almost every day, so it was a pretty big deal that we hadn't hung out for a while. Especially since she's leaving. She's for sure going to the Netherlands on October 1. And she'll be gone for two months. I'm going to make her a stocking hat and see if I can find her a Tarkovsky movie with English subtitles for going-away podarki.

We finally made it to the Filonov exhibit at the Russian Museum. Let me just say again how much I love having a student card in Russia. I went to the Russian Museum, one of the best museums in Russia, for 30 rubles. This is roughly $1.15 US. I can go to movies for $2. Awesome.

But the Filonov exhibit was really awesome. I'm not a huge fan of Filonov, but it's always cool to go and actually see for yourself all these paintings that you've seen in books. They had all the Filonov stuff in a couple of dark rooms with the walls painted black, with the paintings spotlighted in white light. There was also "futuristic" music playing in the background; some kinda clanging boinking stuff that made me feel like I was either in space or in a 1920s Soviet factory. Both work. Maybe I'm a heathen and have no taste, but I actually liked most of Filonov's sketches or drawings with pencil and watercolors better than his larger paintings. They were very crisp and looked like the were torn out the pages of some kinda bizarre comic book. Anyway, very cool. I'll see if I can find some pictures on the net. I also found one painting of his that I really really like a lot. I would tell you what it's called, but it's Untitled. I'm going to see if they make prints, but probably not. That's just the way my life works. This is not the painting, but this is an example of Filonov's style:

We stayed in the Russian Museum until it was just about time for the militsia to kick us out and then we went and got food at a cafeteria and hung out in the park until it got cold. Then I went home, did homework while watching tv, and went to bed. I realized recently that the tv has looked so weird lately because they fixed the color tube and everything is now no longer green. And it took me a couple days to figure this out. Wow.

2006-09-20T05:15:00.000-07:00

Today, we went out to Petergof, and I managed not to get lost on my three metro transfers to get to the meeting place. Considering that I get lost almost everywhere I go, this was a major accomplishment. I have to factor in time for getting lost every time I go out somewhere. It's pretty ridiculous and I can't wait until I know my way around better.

Anyway, we went to Petergof; which was the summer palace for Peter the Great. It's modeled on Versaille, and has a fuck-ton of fountains and parks. And a lot of palaces. It was raining, so everything kinda sucked.

I never really know what to say about stuff like this, so maybe I'll just throw up a couple pictures for you guys to look at. They're all outside because I didn't want to pay $4 to take dark, blurry pictures of the inside of the palace.

When I got home, I realized that I still had to do homework for the political science class. Homework here usually isn't that big of a deal--one or two exercises and a half hour later and you're done. The poli-sci prof had assigned us an article to get off the internet and read, and then write a one page response. He said that the article would be 2–3 pages and pretty easy. This essay turned out to be 10 pages (and we're talking Russian pages, not the sissy American 8.5x11) and one of the hardest things I've ever read. I have trouble reading Russian quickly on paper, and I can't read it silently on the computer at all. So I had to sit there reading the entire thing out loud to myself and kicking myself for not at least looking to see if there was an English translation online that I could have checked my understanding against.

I'm pretty ashamed to admit this, but I was so frustrated by reading this article and the fact that the professor lied, that I cried and had to call Rob. It was pretty awful. Politologia has now definitely replaced razgovornia practica as my least favorite class.

*Gross warning. Skip this paragraph if you don't want to hear about my infected nose.* Anyway, my nose piercing got infected, or, rather, I didn't take care of it and a bump of nast built up. This is super gross. I wasn't sure what to do, but when I had to take my piercing out for graduation, the dude at Black Hole who put it back in said that re-piercing (sticking the needle in again) cleaned shit out. So. I lanced my nose ghetto-style with a safety pin. And it was seriously nine different kinds of gross. But now the bump is smaller, although my nose looks disgusting. Oh well. It'll heal.

2006-09-19T05:12:00.000-07:00

Sorry about that last entry; i just read over it and it's not even "well written" to make up for the lack of exciting content. But man, that was such an unsatisfying experience at McDonalds. That still makes me slightly angry. Fast food is supposed to be satisfying everywhere. I guess I'll just have to adapt myself to un-crispy chicken sandwiches with super sweet mayo.

So because nothing interesting happened today, other than my being sick from eating something wierd. I think this was from the soup that I had at the school cafeteria. So I stayed home and then went to the internet café. But anyway, because I have nothing really that cool to talk about, I'll do a little discriptive writing.

Somewhere in the last couple days, I realized that I forgot to write about the experience of trying to buy a metro card for the next month. I was successful--after a while, but it was a puzzling experience. So, being a student in Russia is about the coolest thing ever (other than in being, you know, Russia) because you get crazy discounts. At museums, movies, the metro, whatever--you can usually get in for free or about a third of the adult price. So anyway, there are student cards for the metro, and theoretically, even as a foreign student living in Russia, I'm eligible for a student metro card. So I tried several times to buy this student card. And there usually aren't any problems. You show them your studenckeski billet and your passport, and then they give you your card. However, because my passport is not Russian, my passport has too many numbers for them to enter into the computer. This resulted in much confusion, both on my part, and the part of the poor metro ladies, who were actually pretty nice to me. However, when they determined that they couldn't get me into the computer, and nor did they have any record of me in the computer, they would give me the phrase "eto nevozhmozhno," meaning, "it's impossible" and followed this with an incomprehensible list of things I had to do and documents that I had to take to a certain place at a certain time of day. So I said fuck bureaucracy, caved, and bought the normal non-student metro/avtobus pass.

And talking to Meg later, she said that Gertzen doesn't have that student arrangement with the metro. Or, rather, that Gertzen does, but our program doesn't. So I can't get a student metro pass after all. Bite me.

This also seems like a good opportunity to talk about the metro. Forgive me if I'm repeating myself, but Russia has just about the deepest metros in the world. This means that at any given station, you have at least a two and half minute ride, maybe three minutes, down from the top of the station to the trains. I calculated that I spend at least ten minutes a day standing on the escalator. This is just if I go to school and back. If I go anywhere else, that's another ten minutes. This is a long time, and there are not a lot of options for entertainment. The most popular, in no particular order, are: making out or being "cute" (barf), talking on your cell phone, texting on your cell phone, talking to friends, staring at the wall, and people watching. I usually choose to people watch, but it's a very peculiar kind of people watching because it involves the three most important Russian facial expressions: the disinterested stare, the disinterested glare, and the glare of death. Reed schooled me well in all three.

Anyway, for people watching, you have to cultivate the disinterested stare, which is the one where you look straight at people but manage to look like you're looking through them. Then, if you accidently make eye contact with someone, you need the disinterested glare, which is the one that says that you're mean and unapproachable. If you get a smile, then you have to break out the glare of death that says, "if you even think of talking to me, you and all your nearest relations will die Chechan style."

The metro is also a great place for observing Russian style, and feeling fat. The Russian men usually have some type of mullet, which is way in fashion, and carry purses. The women are very fashionable, and all have legs about the size of my arm. And I'm really not kidding. It's gross, but it still makes me feel like a cow every time I leave the house. Although they also favor the kind of hair colors that you know only come in a bottle. I also look at body piercings. A lot of the men have one or both of their ears pierced, but not a lot of them go for plugs. Women usually have their ears pierced, and sometimes their nose (almost always on the left side), and the lip piercings up by the nose or down by the chin are really popular with the kids. But another word on the nose piercings, because I'd only seen a couple unattractive ones until I came here. The Russians haven't really figured out where to put the screw so that it's attractively positioned--it seems to just be jammed in on the side of the nose somewhere, whatever. It also doesn't help that most of the chicks go for the nose bling rather than something small. Unfortunately, instead of looking good, it looks like they have some kind of bizarre glittery growth on their nose. I guess it just makes mine look so much better in comparison. Or something.

Another interesting fact about the metro escalators: the hand rail moves faster than the step part. I'm not quite sure how this works, or why they would be on different speeds, but they are.

I forgot to say yesterday that I met one of Lena's friends who gave me a great compliment. I like that Lena doesn't automatically tell her friends that I'm American, but lets them find out the hard way when I look at them blankly after a particularly fast and slang-filled burst of Russian. Anyway, this girl exchanges names with me and then asks where I'm from. After I have to admit that I'm American, she looks at me and goes, "Really? You don't look like an American..." I'm not quite sure what that means, since she could tell that I wasn't Russian, but at this point I'll settle for not being an ugly American.

Tomorrow we're going on an excursion to Petergof, so there will be pictures.

2006-09-18T06:02:00.000-07:00

I spent most of yesterday trying to get myself out of the house and down to the Metro station to do errands like buying laundry soap so that I can have some clean clothes and food for lunch next week, and going into town to do things like check my email and post inane ramblings to my blog. The only really exciting thing that happened yesterday (other than dropping food on myself) was looking for a place to buy knitting supplies and then having it not exist. That was it.

Today, Lena and I were supposed to go see the Filonov exhibit at the Russian Museum, but it was closed. Again. So instead, I met her way to the south and we went to the airport together so that she could check on tickets to Amsterdam. This was really boring. I was already fried by the time we were supposed to meet at the museum, and I was really not feeling the having to stand in line to go through security to sit in one of the plastic chairs for a half hour while Lena argued with the ticket agent.

But then we went to McDonalds. Which was an experience. Pretty much the only thing that was the same about it, other than the fries, was the experience of feeling stuffed and disgusted and greasy. There's a feeling in your stomach that only McDonalds can give you, and it's not exactly a pleasant one. I was dying for a diet coke, but I forgot that they don't serve any drinks with ice here, because you can't drink the water. Well, you can drink the water, but you'll get sick like whoa. So all in all, it was not a very satisfying day.

2006-09-16T06:01:00.000-07:00

Today I defined the word androgynous, explained how birth control works, and described the Native American Indian reservations. In Russian. I win.

To be a little more specific than that, I went and visited Lena in Pushkin, the town formerly known as Tsarskoe Selo. Pushkin is a suburb of Petersburg, about a half-hour to the south, on the electrichki, the electric trains. Lena told me to get off at the first stop, which would be called "21 kilometers." Too bad that this was not actually the first stop, as I got off at the third being very confused. Then she told me to get back on the train and go another twenty minutes. I'm glad that she puts up with me being such a tard because I got lost after I got there too.

She told me to go to the left, and look for a building with a green roof like a castle. I didn't see it, but figured that maybe if I kept going to the left, I'd run into it eventually. However, eventually turned into a shoe store and a bus station, so I had to walk back a while the way I came. I found it eventually, but found out that "go to the left" and "go up the street on the left-hand side" are the same thing.

At Tsarskoe Selo are two palaces (the Catherine Palace, and the Alexander Palace) and two parks (the Catherine Park, and the Alexander Park). Imagine that. The Catherine Palace is the blue one with the Amber Room and the Agate Room that all the tourists, like myself, want to go and see. But when we got there, the Catherine Palace was closed for repairs. So instead, we walked around the park and talked about our families, and fashion, and more serious subjects like the Indian Reservations in America. This is the Catherine Palace, Lena, and the lake in the park.

We also went through Pushkin's dacha. Which was surprisingly large, considering that most dachas today don't look like they have more than two rooms, maybe three at the most, but I guess in comparison to the palaces, and Pushkin being the national poet, maybe his dacha wasn't so big after all. It was cool to look at his books and papers. I'd forgotten that he mostly wrote in French (which was stupid of me, because everybody and their mother wrote in French then), but most of his books were in French too.

We headed back to Lena's apartment for lunch and I met her mom and her grandfather. We hung out for awhile and talked about music and showing pictures of friends, and I saw some stuff her boyfriend had done. He seems like a super good guy, and it makes me really sad that Lena may be leaving in October. If she can get a ticket.

2006-09-15T05:56:00.000-07:00

Thursdays and Fridays bite a lot of ass. Mostly because of Politologia. The prof has this weird verbal tick that causes him to repeat the last word or phrase of a sentence several times. He also uses a laptop and projector, but then puts everything up on the projector in fonts that are too small to read. I'm also not a fan because we had to do presentations the first and second days of class, which he videotaped, for us to watch on the last day to "see how much we've improved." Which is actually both a scary and depressing thought, not to mention embarrassing.

Anyway, I was really going to talk about lunch at school. Because it's really funny to me that people get so worked up about the same old shit every single day. So here's the deal. Because we only get 50 minutes for lunch, it doesn't really make sense to leave the school, so we go to the cafeteria. However, the lady that takes the orders is a pretty heinous bitch. It's the kinda thing where you'll go up and ask for an omelet and she'll tell you they don't have any, but the next kid who asks for an omelet will get one. Getting change back is a real hassle and she always acts like she's doing you the most enormous favor to give you back ten rubles. After two days of that, I figured out that I could eat better and cheaper and not have to deal with the bitchy lady if I brought my own lunch.

Everybody else still waits in line and then gets worked up about how rude this woman is. I don't understand. These are all reasonably smart people, and there are 24 hour grocery stores all over the fucking place. I dunno. Maybe it's just for the sake of having something to get worked up over. And it's a really good excuse to talk in English. Lexi is counting the days until her Russian is good enough to bitch this lady out. Whatever. This just confirms what I already knew: people are pretty much dumb as rocks.

After school, I went with Lena to get my SIM card fixed (again). This actually went pretty smoothly, except for the waiting around for half an hour for the disappearing and uncommunicative sales clerk part. Anyway, the long and the short of it is that my SIM card works and my cell phone works so that if the police want to take me away, I can say, "I think there's some mistake. Let me call my consulate." Then comes the part where they smash my phone, put me in the car, and I'm never heard from again... But looking on the bright side, I can now harass Meg 24/7.

With a working cell phone in hand (or backpack. Whatever.) we headed out for an art show that was opening. But when we got there, it wasn't ready and wouldn't be ready for awhile. So we checked out the gallery upstairs which was pretty cool and then split to get to the theater. And I figured out that what the Russians call "theatre" is pretty fucking broad. When I think of "theatre," I'm going to a play. But this was modern dance. And Indian dancing. A lot of Indian dancing.

Let me explain. So there's this dance and music festival, and the Indian consulate somehow got involved and ended up inviting a troupe of traditional Indian dancers. And their two musicians. Which was really cool and interesting for about forty-five minutes. But then they kept going. And going...and going... and there was finally an intermission after two and a half hours. We went back in, thinking that we were going to be done with Indians. But no. There was more Indian dancing. But then there was an awesome Russian modern dance troupe that alternated with them. And the Vertical troupe was pretty cool. They had one piece where they were dressed in black suits and shaved heads, and they're all super pale because nobody here ever sees the fucking sun, and they came out of the back of the audience and did this lurching-falling-climbing-crawling type thing all the way to the stage. It was really uncomfortable to watch, but it was also super cool. However, this was way cooler than their next number which also involved the lead Indian dancer (who was gay and had really funny English and some fantastic interactions with the interpreter) and six men in white thongs.

It was a very long performance.

But walking home from the metro, I had a really positive experience with a Russian dude. Nobody has talked to me on the street here, other than to ask for directions once, and then another time to say "fuck your mother." So this was pretty cool. I was walking back from the metro and it's late, about midnightish, and it's dark. I'm going down the path (thankfully the streetlights are on this time) and I hear somebody behind me. Normally this doesn't really freak me out, but it's dark and it's late, and there's nobody else around. It turns out to be this guy who just wants to make a little conversation. And it was totally normal conversation. Like "Wow, it's really cold tonight..." "Yeah, it sure is." "Are you from somewhere warm." Uh.. "Actually, I'm from America." (Because it's always warm in America...) "Wow. America! Where?" "The Northwest." "Really? I'm from the north too! Do you know where Korelia is? I'm from Korelia! It's like we're countrymen!" Yeah, sure, okay. And he wasn't creepy, and he didn't ask for my number or anything. It was awesome.

2006-09-14T07:54:00.000-07:00

The title of today's rant is either "Russian Bureaucracy" or "Inconsiderate People." If I was smart or a writer, I'd think of some clever way to combine them. Luckily (or unluckily for you if you're reading this), I gave up almost all of my pretensions to some kind of literary merit a long time ago.

After school, I went with Lena to try to get the SIM card stuff straightened out. It's registered in her name, apparently because there are less hoops to jump through, but all the other Americans got their cell phones okay, so it probably was more of a hassle than it needed to be. Anyway, we started out by going back to the place where I bought the phone because Lena didn't believe that there was something wrong with the SIM card. The guy at the phone place pulled out my SIM card and put his in, and the phone worked fine.

Then we went back to the place where we bought the SIM card. They told us that they didn't know anything about it, and that we'd have to go to the Megafon store down the street. We go to the Megafon store and wait in line, and wait and wait and wait. When it's finally our turn, the girl looks at the computer, and says that everything looks okay and that it should work. Lena says that she knows that everything looks fine, because that's what they told her on the phone last night, but the SIM card doesn't work. So the girl does some more digging on the computer and consults one of her coworkers, and then finally tells us that when the people at Ultrastar were writing out the contract, they didn't match up the right phone number and SIM card. So we have to back to Ultrastar for them to fix it.

When we walk in to Ultrastar, the seventeen year old in charge of customer service looks at us like we're nuts. Then he finally looks at the phone, looks at the contracts, looks at the phone, and finally acknowledges that the SIM card does not, in fact, actually work. So he disappears for a while, and then looks at the computer, and then disappears again, and then reappears and starts writing out a new contract. As he's doing this, his phone rings, and he proceeds to fill out the new contract while talking on his cell phone. He finishes the contract, and makes us wait while he finishes his call. Then he has Lena sign the contract and tells us that the phone should work later that night, and if it doesn't, to come back tomorrow.

So all in all, we went to four places, spend most of the afternoon waiting in line or waiting for something to happen, only to find out that nothing will probably actually happen and we'll have to go through the same thing again tomorrow. Welcome to Russia.

I had to hustle home a little bit because we were having a little dinner party. Lydia Borisovna is very concerned that I haven't been spending any of my time with the other Americans in my group. I'm not very concerned, because frankly, I don't really like most of the other Americans in my group. Or I like them fine, but I don't particularly want to go out of my way to spend more of my time with them. Anyway, she was super worried, so she wanted to invite them over for dinner. So I invited Emily, Laura, Lexi, Clark, and Eric. Emily and Laura were on time, and Eric said that he'd be coming later, but Lexi had texted Emily saying that she was going to be a little late. Clark had called Laura about five minutes after we were supposed to meet to say that they'd be there in about fifteen minutes. Forty-five minutes later, still waiting at the Metro station, we discover that Clark and Lexi had decided to walk. It takes about an hour to walk from downtown to my house. Why they didn't call to let us know not to wait, I couldn't tell you. However, inconsiderate people. Yeah. Between waiting at the Metro station for an hour and dealing with the SIM card stuff, all I could do was laugh.

Anyway, everything was fine, and my phone still doesn't work. Back to Ultrastar again tomorrow, I guess.

2006-09-13T07:54:00.000-07:00

Wednesday is excursion day and no classes. Yay! Today's morning excursion was actually pretty lame. On our Excursion List, it said "American Consulate," which everybody took to mean that we were going on a tour of the American Consulate. Which actually sounds kinda interesting and like it could be cool. However, this was actually just a lot of walking to have Meg be like "Look! There's the American Consulate! If you ever get in trouble, there's where to go! Okay, free time until 1:30!" There was one of those looks of disbelief passed around, you know, the one that's like "What the fuck? I just walked for forty-five minutes to look at the outside of a building?" Yeah. Pretty much.

I had lunch with Meg and we had sushi. It was really good, although expensive. I guess you get what you pay for though, because it was tasty and I didn't get sick. I'm always totally sketched out by the fish here. I'm sure that most of it's fine, but I'm not eating anything raw that looks or smells like it wasn't caught that day. We got a boatload of sushi (I'm not kidding--it came in a boat) and had seaweed flavored green tea. Yum.

In the afternoon was a canal trip. We all piled onto one of the canal boats and got an hour tour of the canals and the Neva, with a guide pointing out the major sights along the way. The weather was really nice (it'd been raining for a couple days before), but it was sunny and pretty warm. Lydia Borisovna told me that'd I'd freeze, so I brought a sweater, and my scarf, hat, and gloves with me. And my zontik, just in case. So because I'd brought almost every warm article of clothing I own with me, I only needed to button my jacket. Then I had to schlep everything else around in my ginormous bag the rest of the day.

After the boat tour, I met Lena to go buy a cell phone. Because I'm cheap, I didn't really want to buy a new one for an arm and a leg, when I could save a little money and get a used one. There's a bunch of used Nokia's around, and I found one with some kind of guarantee for a month or something. I figure that I'm not actually out more than forty-five bucks if it breaks though, which is the good news. And when the kids who are only here for a semester leave, I could take one of their phones if it turns out that mine's a piece of shit.

Phones here work the way that they do everywhere else except America. Meaning that here, you buy a SIM card and the phone, either together or separately, but you only buy as many minutes as you need. You pick your carrier, but there's no monthly plan. When you run out of minutes, you go to the store and buy more. SMS's (text messages) are usually a ruble or less, with all incoming calls from any carrier free. Outgoing calls are more expensive, usually 4+ rubles a minute, depending on who you're calling and all that stuff. It's a convenient system, unless you run out of minutes when all the stores are closed.

So all was well until I got home and put the SIM card in the phone and tried to get it to work. The phone would accept the pin number, but then it would say that the SIM card wouldn't register. This made me less than happy, to say the least. I spent some time on the phone with Lena, trying to make everything work, but it didn't. Tomorrow we'll have to meet and go back to the store where we got the SIM card.

2006-09-12T07:53:00.000-07:00

School is school. Nothing is very exciting about it. As I'm sure I already said, I'm in the stupid class. Which was fine with me until today. Because today, in the practical speech class, one of my classmates attempted to explain the inner workings of voting, the Senate and the House, and the Presidential veto. This wouldn't have been so bad if he had actually been a somewhat competent speaker, but he's not. I had to feed him the word for "important" six times and the word for "power" three times before one of the other girls yelled at him to write them down. And this went on for twenty-five minutes. Meanwhile the professor was sitting there with a vaguely quisical look on her face, which only encouraged him. It was really awful and made me want to die.

After school, I met up with Lena and we were going to go to the Filonov exhibition at the Russian Museum, but it was closed. So instead, we toured the Church on Spilled Blood, which is the one that looks like St. Basil's in Moscow, but is all blues and greens and golds on the outside instead of lots of red. It was super beautiful inside and had just recently been restored.
I'm not sure how many of you have ever seen the inside of a Russian Orthodox church, but typically, the inside is covered with frescoes from floor to ceiling, including the columns, which are usually square. On the back wall near the entrance, is a painting of the last judgment. On the ceiling, the main dome is always Christ the Pantocrator, with his hand raised in benediction (you can tell how old the church is by whether Christ is giving the blessing with two fingers or three). If the church has smaller domes, those also have pictures, and are usually Christ as a young man, Christ as Emmanuel, John, and the Virgin Mary. If it's a working church, the alter (where the transubstantiation happens) is hidden from view by an iconostasis: a big folding wall with icons set in it. In a working church, the doors of the iconostasis are closed, but if it's a museum, they're usually open.

The Church on Spilled Blood is built on the site of where Tsar Aleksandr II was blown up by a terrorist group in 1881. Inside, they have a little mausoleum type thing that houses the part of the street where he died. Since it's a more modern church, all the frescoes are done in a very western style. The frescoes are also distinctive because they're actually mosaics, rather than paintings. The colors are absolutely amazing, and are actually overwhelming, just because there's so much going on everywhere you look. I can't even begin to describe it. I may go back with my film camera and pay the extra money to take some pictures. I'm not a big fan of the westernization of Russian icon painting--I really like the very stylized and not-true-to-life look. I'll look on the internet and see if I can find some examples. Anyway, it was still really cool.

After the church, we met up with her friend Philip, who looks like a slightly more gangly blond Darren Platt. There was a sort of familiar grubbiness about him that was very comforting. I know that's gross, but it reminded me of home, and Reed in a good way. We walked around and a guard let us into the Hermitage garden even though it was closing time when Lena and Philip pulled out the "but she's American" card. It was pretty cool. Part of the building is arranged in a square, making a mostly enclosed courtyard. In the middle is a circle of grass with a big fountain and some benches and you can look up and see all these bronze statues on the roof of the Hermitage. Then we crossed six lanes of rush hour traffic in the Russian way (not in the crosswalk, going whenever the fuck you feel like it) and sat in the park across the street.
Then I went home for dinner, read in English for awhile, and went to bed.

2006-09-11T07:53:00.000-07:00

School, and then home. I really like the grammar class, and the professor is really nice. Actually, all the professors are really nice. I just like some of the classes more than others. I'm not a big fan of the practical speech class, but I like phonetics.

Tonight, Meg came over with Natasha, the homestay coordinator and gave me an explanation in English about how to use the gas water heater. She had to go around and do this for everybody so that we know, in English, how to not blow ourselves up. Lydia Borisovna had already showed me and made me practice how to do it, so I did fine. Lydia Borisovna was so proud: "and she even knows how to work the stove!" My parents have a gas stove--that shit's not rocket science.

After that, I went out with Lena and her friend Ivan, and we walked around the city for awhile. They looked for a rooftop to sneak up onto and sit, but all the ones that they knew were locked, and all the ones that were open required a ladder. Ivan is tall and gangly, mumbles, and has bad breath, but seems like an okay guy otherwise. We walked around for awhile and then Ivan got bored or something and wandered off. Lena and I walked on and she showed me the oldest railway station in Petersburg and ran into a dude named Philip that she hadn't seen for a couple years. The station is super old and really beautiful, and they've kept all the decor in the art-deco style from the last time it was remodeled. They've also got some really amazing stained glass windows.

Then it was late and I went home and went to bed.

2006-09-10T07:52:00.000-07:00

I had some major culture shock last night, I guess. Oh man. And it didn't get any better when I got up this morning either. But one thing at a time. Last night I went to a going-away party for one of my tutor's friends. I was tired and nervous and not really feeling all that into meeting and interacting with a bunch of new people in Russian. I didn't want to drink, and I didn't want to get high (which I'm technically not even supposed to be anywhere near), so I sat in the corner and listened and drank tea. I met this Russian-American girl who was really drunk and really wanted to be friends. Which was sort of unfortunate because it was loud and I was tired, and I could only understand about every 10th or 15th word. Then Lena peaced out early and left me in the care of the incomprehensible Russian-American. It ended up okay when she switched to English when we left the party. She had moved to St. Petersburg six months earlier and had lots of good tips about how not to get mugged or harassed, such as "don't dress like a whore and go out on the street at night by yourself." Anyway, when I asked her about the dogs, she said that the dogs were fine--it's the people that you have to watch out for. Great. Thanks.

So I went to bed last night telling myself that everything would be better in the morning, because it usually is. But I woke up and was unexpectedly all by myself in the apartment, and I started to bawl. When I calmed down a little bit, I tried to call Rob, but the phone card didn't work. Which resulted in another round of frustrated tears and a 10am call to Meg: "I'mhavingacrappytimeandIwanttocallhomebutIcan'tbecauseIcan'tgetthephonecardtoworkwanhwanhwanh." She was pretty cool about it and told me to just go out and buy another phone card. Which I did, and then I figured out why my other phone card hadn't been working. Russian phones have the peculiarity of being both rotary and tone dialing, and are automatically set to be rotary dialers. If you have to enter a pin code, you have to press the star key to toggle to tone dial. It said all of this on the Russian phone card (in English). But anyway, I was able to make my very important calls to people who probably don't miss me as much as I miss them.

This afternoon, I tried to take my computer with me to use wifi and post some pictures and all these rants to a blog. But when I got to the internet bar, wifi wasn't working. Maybe in an hour and a half, they said. I didn't want to wait, so I paid for a half-hour on the public computer and dicked around a little bit. So everybody will just have to wait for updates and pictures and all that other fun stuff.

School again tomorrow. Blech.

2006-09-09T07:52:00.000-07:00

Oh my god, I've only been here a week and there's still nine more months to go.

2006-09-08T07:51:00.000-07:00

Catch up time, I suppose. I have to say that the first week of classes has gone pretty quickly and that I feel like I'm speaking better. However, it's slightly discouraging to know that this is only a temporary state on the "W adjustment curve" and soon I'll feel like my Russian has actually regressed and that I never should have come. So I'll take the feeling of accomplishment while I can. Being forced to practice and speak all the time has actually done a lot for vocab retention and even just general facility of speech. Cases and occasionally tenses are still problematic, but even those are getting better.

I guess I should probably describe school for the rest of all y'alls at home. The program that I'm on has its classes in one of the Herzen University buildings behind Kazanskayia sobor, a huge cathedral in the middle of downtown Petersburg. It's an old, pretty run-down building that also has the dorms and university hotel in it. Like most buildings here, it's arranged in a square with a courtyard in the middle. This is actually hugely inconvenient because in order to go to class, I have to enter through the hotel, show my studentchesie billet, and then go outside and through the courtyard to get to the classroom section of the building.

I've got class from 9:40 to 3:10, with at 50 minute lunch break. The way that Russians serve food, this means that by the time you get your food at the cafeteria, you've got about five minutes before you have to be back in class. Anyway, I haven't had this much class all in a row since high school, let alone that many hours of class in another language. I have trouble concentrating for that long when the classes are in English. The whole situation is even worse since I discovered that I can't speak Russian when I'm on my meds. So I've been trading my concentration for speaking practice. Whether or not this is a good bargain remains to be seen, but I'm hoping that it'll work out okay.

I've got five classes: practical speaking, grammar, phonetics, politics, and film. I successfully switched out of the language/culture class, and hopefully the film one will be better. I go to class four days a week, and on Wednesdays, we have "excursions" around the city. This week, we had a brief tour of the university and an incomprehensible tour of the small university library. Then we went to the EuroMed clinic to have blood drawn for the HIV test. Apparently the test that you get in the states to get your visa doesn't actually count in the eyes of the Russian government, because you have to get another one when you arrive. Yay. At least I don't have to worry about being deported. I tested out okay in the states and I haven't slept with too many sketchy guys since... Anyway, this clinic is where Meg has to take me if I get sick or hit by a car, or break my arm or something. They gave us a tour, almost like they were trying to show us that even though this is Russia, the clinic practices Western medicine. "Here are all our machines! Look! It's just like at home! You're totally safe here!" Whatever--I still got a big-ass bruise from having my blood drawn. I'm not sure why they had to use the inside of my arm--it's usually a finger-prick. Whatever. I've given up trying to use logic on most situations I find myself in.

I live on the eighth floor of an apartment building on Vassilevsky ostrov, one of the islands at the mouth of the river Neva (with the accent on the "ah," please) and the Gulf of Finland. I have about a ten minute walk to the metro, maybe seven if I'm really booking it. Anyway, about a half mile each way. On the way, I have to pass through a vacant lot that's undergoing some kind of remont (remodel) that seems to be stalled. The entire city is forever na remonte. In this vacant lot is a pack of dogs. I'm not sure if they're wild or quite what the deal is, but they definitely live in the lot. Now, as most of you know, I don't really like dogs. I'm not an animal person in general, but dogs kinda freak me out. Some dogs are okay, I'm cool with Lennon's dog and Isaac's dog, but that took a while. So having to walk through this vacant lot with a pack of dogs is probably my least favorite part of the day. Especially because these dogs seem to be multiplying. At first there were only four. Today, there were six. That's a lot of dogs. I know it's irrational, but I'm seriously afraid that they're going to attack me one of these days.

Also on Wednesday, we met our Russian tutors. These are people that the university hooks us up with to (heh heh) "use however we want." But with the caveat that the tutor program is not a dating service. Anyway, the tutors are supposed to talk with us and help us with homework and stuff like that. Basically, they're getting paid to be our friends. My tutor's name is Lena, and I actually really like her. She's about my age, maybe a year younger since she still has one more year of university. She's an only child living with mom, and is dating a 38 year old artist, who's divorced with a kid. I should be so lucky. She's pretty cool--she's really into literature, very well read, and speaks good English (but not with me). Some of her friends (which I found out later was actually just one) were putting on some kind of music festival, so we went to a club yesterday and saw a couple bands from Rotterdam. The opening act, Ella Bandita was awesome. Kinda like Peaches and Sara Lafleur. But from Holland. She was endlessly amused by the word narcoman, since it sounds like some kind of superhero, but is actually a drug addict. Anyway, she was cool. Rob, I think you would really like her. If I remember right, her first album is called "Love Juice," referring not to sperm, which tastes nasty, but to female ejaculation. Yay Holland! The second band, Feverdream, was billed as noise, but it was not quite what I was expecting. I dunno. When I think of "noise," it pretty much just means that shit that Eric from Commons does and a lot of screaming. These guys were pretty okay--much closer to whatever crap it is they play on NRK these days. There was a little screaming and jumping around, but nowhere near as much as I expected.

Today, we were supposed to go see a play together and we were going to meet at the metro station at 6:30. But, one of the other of us was not in the right place (probably me), so at 6:50, I decided to try to find this place by myself. But I went the wrong way and got lost and then it started to rain. Not just a little rain (which would have been unpleasant since I forgot that before snow, you get RAIN and didn't bring a raincoat), but a lot of rain, and really fucking hard. And because I'd been in a hurry to get out the door, I'd forgotten my zontik. This is one of my favorite Russian words because it sounds funny. Also galstook (neck tie) and skripka (violin). I'm pretty much opposed to zontiki to begin with, being from Oregon--c'mon, a little rain's not going to kill you!-- but I was fucking soaked by the time that I realized that I'd gone the wrong direction entirely, and that by the time I got to the theater, I'd be 45 minutes late if I could find it at all, and being cold and wet, I decided to go home.

It was not a good adventure.

But it does make a good story, and I even knew all the words so that I could tell my host mom what happened without any help. That may not sound like much, and I feel like I'm back in kindergarten, but it's a pretty major accomplishment for me to be able to tell a story. Of course, my speaking ability depends a lot on how much I've thought about what I'm going to say and how tired or hungry or distracted I am, but it's getting better. And despite still being maladjusted and most of the time not being able to understand what people are saying to me, it makes me feel a little better about my decision to come. Especially since given the right circumstances (that thankfully never arose...) I would have stayed in a heartbeat... But I'm moving on with my life, I think at this point I've more or less successfully picked up all the broken pieces of my heart and glued most of it back together. I'm happy that I feel like I'm going somewhere with my life, that I'm coming closer to doing what I want to do, that I'm not stuck in Portland still working 70+ hours weeks at two or three crappy jobs just to make rent and have enough money to drink myself stupid every night so that I don't have to think about how miserable I am... I'm out of all that. I know I left a bit of a mess behind, but I'm out, and I'll be gone long enough that it should take care of itself before I come back. And if not.... I'll cross that bridge when I get there. Nine months is a really long time.

2006-09-07T07:51:00.000-07:00

Subjects for another time:
1. The wild dogs in the vacant lot on the way to the metro.
2. Mineral water.
3. Again, people that walk slow. Or, the St. Petersburg shuffle.
4. Our excursion to the medical clinic in which they tried their best to convince us that they were legit and offered the best of western medicine.
5. My tutor, Lena.
6. Zontics.
7. Davai na clube. And Ella Bandita. Who is pretty awesome.
8. Why razgovornia practica may be my least favorite class. Mostly because I don't think the professor likes me.
9. Why do people think I'm Russian? I don't look Russian at all.
10. Surprise! The food here is really fucking good.

2006-09-05T07:50:00.000-07:00

So yeah. Today was a hard day. I woke up to go to the bathroom around 2:30 and never really went back to sleep. Then it was the first real day of school. Classes were pretty much The Suck. I'm definitely in the dumb kid group, but that's cool. I guess I'd rather be at the top of the dumb kid class than the bottom of the smart kid one. I hate being the only one to not understand things. And actually, my first two classes went pretty well. I felt like I understood 90-95% of what the professors said, and I knew what was going on. I misspoke plenty, but that's cool. I could follow along, at least.

The last class was a bitch and a half. I signed up for this linguistic-culture class, which sounds super cool. We look at fairy tales, poetry, music, tv programs, etc. and look at the way that culture influences language and vice versa. Unfortunately, Claire (remember the obnoxious chick?) is also taking the class. And not only was the class fucking hard, she had to comment on every single fucking thing and know exactly what was going on. I'm not sure what made me more mad: not being able to understand what was going on, or the fact that she did and I didn't. So. After sitting through one class, I decided that there's just no fucking way I'm going to be able to make it through the semester without shooting her or myself. Or maybe both.
I talked to Meg after class and explained the situation, and it seems like it should be cool if I switch to another class. Which isn't ideal because I really want to take the class I'm signed up for, but if I have to sit there with Claire, even if it's only for three hours a week, I'll kill her. What made everything even worse was that she kept looking at me like she wanted to be friends. Which just made me want to scoot my chair away in the other direction.
Why is it so hard to be nice to other people? Or rather, why have I not yet adopted the Russian mentality of being outright mean to people I don't like?

I hung out with Meg during her "office hours" and then she took me to the supermarket so that I could buy things like a trash can and lunch stuff. Eating at restaurants every day gets expensive really fast. And is also a good way to get food poisoning. Yay Russia! Meg also introduced me to her friend Jenna, who is still living in Petersburg after finishing her Fullbright. I liked her a lot--she's nerdy and dorky in the same way that most Reedies are and is totally into doing her own thing. She seems like a good contact to have, and I need to meet some people outside this group.

I was going to write more about today and all the stuff that I hate about Russia so far (culture shock, anyone?), like mineral water and people that walk slow, but I'll save my tirades for a day when I have more energy.

2006-09-04T07:49:00.000-07:00

Today, I finally worked up the courage to plug my laptop into the wall. I was afraid that the guy at the Apple store had lied to me and that my laptop would explode. And going a year in Russia without any of my music or any of my other "important documents" would have sucked a lot. But anyway, it didn't explode, and it seems to be charging.

There seems to be a pressing need to do some catching up. But there's so much for me to talk about, I don't even know where to start. Maybe with the group and orientation? Sounds good. Scroll down if this is boring, but I can't promise that it'll get any better.

So, da. Orientatsia. Washington D.C. Walked by the White House. Killed some time in the Smithsonian. Like every other educated tourist, I pondered the incredibly amusing fact that most of our nations greatest monuments are phallic symbols. Nothing very exciting. I (re-)pierced my nose at some sketchy little hole in the wall place I picked out of the phone book because it was in walking distance of the hotel. This actually made me really angry. I paid $40 for the piercing (Black Hole does it for $20), and it was in some dirty little back room. The dude didn't sterilize the inside of my nose, even after I asked him about it, and then jammed the needle in. Then, without taking the needle out, he put the jewelry back in. "Wow. You're sure bleeding a lot." Yes, thanks, dickwad. Maybe you should take the needle out of my nose before it pokes my eye out. And they didn't give me anything for aftercare. So, yeah. If you're ever in D.C., don't get pierced or tattooed at Fatty's. And despite being dipped in disease-ridden St. Petersburg water, it seems to be healing okay.

The group of kids I'm with seems to be mainly from the mid-west. Which amuses me, but I'm not quite sure why. There's nothing particularly funny about mid-western people, other than the fact that I date them. Well, okay. There you go. Anyway, most of them are either from the mid-west or go to school there, which amounts to the same thing. They seem mostly okay except the girl from Grinell. I saw some weird people with some fucked up or nonexistent social skills at Reed, but this chick is right up there. Oh man. There's no way that I can do her justice. Everything about her irritates me, and I've known her less than a week. I try to to think about nasty ways of killing her. Maybe pushing her out in front of a marshutka. Or the trolley. Maybe we'll have a group excursion on the metro. Anyway, this chick. On the first day of orientation, remember, we haven't even left the states yet, she insists on introducing herself by her "russian name." This is the name that she picked because she doesn't like the way "Claire" sounds in Russian. Not only this, but she refuses to speak in English, only in Russian. This wouldn't be so bad if she was comprehensible. But she's not. And it's not because she speaks badly, but because her intonation is so weird that you can't follow what she's saying because you keep looking around for the cat being tortured in the next room. Shall I continue? (I know that this is quickly descending into bitching, but I'll think up a clever punchline at the end to reward you.) Everything this chick says is affected. Not pretentious, affected. Like, "I would be in ecstasy if I got an internship at the Hermitage." Translated from Russian, of course. The is complete with fanning hand motions around her chin and cheeks. Dude. IN ECSTASY. Stick in knife in me, mommy! Maybe the most bizarre example (this one's for you, Katie) is as follows. A group of us are in one of the hotel rooms after a misunderstanding about vacating some of the rooms (more about that later) and we're shooting the shit, talking about what our host families are supposed to be like, where we had lunch, food, whatever. One of the girls in the room has some weird stomach condition, so she needs to eat a lot of small meals. Then Claire chimes in (in barely comprehensible moo-speak) that the doctor says that it's better for you to eat small meals anyway, and she knows this because she's anorexic. The room goes silent as every one does the mental "Uh... wait. What the fuck?" After about ten seconds of silence, the general consensus was to change conversation topics. Thanking God for small favors, everyone else hates her too. Heh. I typed "tool" first. I realize that there's absolutely no way that I can even begin to represent the full extent of her obnoxity, but this girl is driving me up the fucking wall.

Anyway, there seem to be a few others that I'll want to kill next week emerging from the woodwork. By which I mean most of the rest of the group. Yeah. Today was a little trying and I doubt tomorrow is going to be much better. But onward and upward!

There was lots of talking at orientatsia and most of it was boring. Surprise! Although I did find out from Margaret that not only do I have a good chance of catching herpesyphilaids from even touching a Russian man, I can also contract some sort of mollusk disease that humans don't get anywhere else in the the world. And probably aren't supposed to get, but hey! It's fucking Russia! We'll get bored and drunk and fuck whatever! Hey! Good times! (Meanwhile, Margaret regales me with tales of exploits.) Whatever. This is my journal. I can be as snarky as I want.

Meg seems to be doing more or less okay. She's not pining for her russkii soldat, so that's good. And contrary to all bets, he actually looks pretty cute. At least from the photo I saw. However, as we all know, good looking men can look like orcs in photos, so I'm sure orcs can do the same. At least her track record's getting better. Although after Aaron R., I'm not sure there was anywhere to go but up.

Anyway...

I'm probably just jealous that she hasn't asked me to hang out with her in Russia yet. Whatever. I'll make my own friends. Although if group members see this, it certainly won't be with any of them.

The flight over was pretty okay. There were only a couple of screaming children and the guy next to me didn't really want to talk, so that was pretty cool. Seeing as we're only going to be going to school with each other for the next year. But that's okay. There's plenty of time. Although I did realize on the way over that I need to get my head straight. Or quit hanging out with easy dudes. One of the two. Granted I was really tired, but I had to keep reminding myself that the dude sitting next to me probably really didn't want my head on his shoulder. Yeah, really probably not so much. So I restrained myself. But it was fucking hard and I felt like I at least deserved something nice to make up for it, but all I got instead was motion sickness and then some kind of weird stomach bug that made me explosively barf up shit-tons of stomach acid. Which was kinda cool, but only because stomach acid is bright green and I'm always amazed that my body can make something that color.

After arriving in Petersburg, we went to the school's hotel which turned out to be some kind of bizarre cross between dorms and a hotel. We got money, and food, and internet on the first night, and I'll tell you that I'm really fucking glad that they took us somewhere with an English menu on the wall because after that flight I could barely remember that I was actually in Russia, let alone read Cyrillic and figure out what foods were. And I rediscovered that pancakes and meat are really gross. But the money changing place is super excellent. The one that we went to is close to the school/hotel/whatever, but it's across from one of the chocolate museums. And, this, being Russia, the land of the politically correct, has a black dude in a period costume standing outside to entice people into the museum. Seriously. How many other countries would this fly in? Although, I have to say that I've seen more black people since I've been here (all of what, three days?) than I did in the two weeks I was in Russia before. However, with one exception, they've all been doing door-man jobs. At the chocolate factory. Or dressed up in the giant asian person costume outside the sushi bar. Yay for whack shit.
We had Peterburgskaia orientatsia on Saturday. This consisted of getting the low-down on our host families (or nothing that we couldn't have gotten from reading their letters to us), and having a "tour" of the city. This really meant that Meg walked us up and down Nevsky prospeckt and pointed out restaurants, internet cafés, and then showed us how to use the metro, because we're obviously too retarded to figure it out. Granted the signs are in another language, but seriously. How hard is it to look at the map, find your stop, and then match the name of your stop to the sign that has the name of your stop on it and then follow the fucking arrows? Christ. Then we had free time, so I played on the internet for half an hour, had dinner, and went to bed.

Sunday was eventful for many reasons, not the least of which being that we got to meet our host families. However, we were supposed to have free time until three o'clock. So, being jet-lagged and having been awake from 4 to about 7:30, I decided that since I was getting sleepy, I'd actually try to sleep in. However, at exactly noon, we (being my "suite" mates and I) were rousted by the peculiarly Russian stomp and official knock. The woman on the other side of the door demanded that we be out of our rooms immediately. Uh... And where are we to go? A shrug, and a thoughtful comment that perhaps we could leave our baggage in the lobby. Super. After calling Margaret, it turns out that it was only our set of rooms and one other that were needed and there had been some arrangement made way before time that nobody bothered to let Margaret (or us) know about. But life is full of such trials and tribulations, as Mary reminds us daily... We packed up and schlepped our crap all the way around the hotel to another room where Claire made her astonishing revelation and revealed herself as the true idiot she is in all her glory... I'm so cranky. But then, why should I bother to be pleasant here? I have to be nice everywhere else.

I met my host family. They actually seem pretty cool. Lydia Borisovna reminds me a lot of my gramma. She's a good cook, and likes to sit around and talk about the past a lot. Which is cool and super interesting, but my brain gets tired of focusing on difficult vocab after an hour. Her husband, Boris Vasiliych, reminds me of my dad. He's a professor of physics at the university, so he doesn't seem to be around much. When he is, he definitely seems like he wants to be nice and make conversation, but doesn't quite know how. Which is unfortunate that my vocab and speaking ability is so limited, because he knows a lot of cool shit. Otherwise, he works in his room or putters awkwardly. Aw... just like dad! This is my room:

I had expected things to be really super awkward and horrible and that I'd just want to kill myself and get it over with. But it was actually fine. They were super nice, and they've had a bunch of other homestay kids, so they kinda know the drill. They know that we're going to totally retarded and not very interesting for the first couple months. Hopefully, since I'm staying all year, I'll be able to be more interesting for longer. But I've never been very good at tricking people, particularly into thinking that I'm cooler than I am, so I'm probably shit outta luck.

Today, we had testirovanii v shkole. That's tests at skool to the rest of you. It was pretty much the suck. I took some adderall to rock the written part, not realizing that there might also be some speaking involved in this testing. And I also hadn't realized that taking adderall totally fucks up my ability to speak. This is quite the revelation, and I'm not quite sure what to do. Because it's going to be real fucking hard to get anything done if I'm not doped up, but on the other hand, I'm pretty much a gibbering idiot. Not that I'm not usually, but the meds seem to make it worse. Go figure. And being drunk doesn't seem to be an option either. Although they do sell cans of gin and tonic here. I have yet to try this concoction in a can, although I'm very tempted. I've been on the straight and narrow since leaving Portland. And surprisingly enough, it hasn't been that hard. And considering the amount of drinking and smoking I was doing before I left, I was expecting a real uphill battle. Well, the first couple days without a beer were pretty awful, but after that, it's been okay. I'm hoping that I can kick the smoking for good this time. This probably means another week or two of staying out of the bars. Which means that Dennis won't get his T-shirt for a very long while.

I walked home by myself today. (This after being escorted to school by Russian mom. It was like kindergarten. I'm not kidding. All the way to the lobby.) And it was a long walk. A couple miles along the river and through the island (did I mention that I live on an island? And the bridges go up at night? And if you're not on the island when the bridges go up, then you're fucked until about 5am?) with maniac drivers and angry looking babushkas and Russian dudes exuding varying degrees of creepiness. I made it all the way home, and then couldn't get the door open. But I'm going to blame that one on the keys. I have some seriously medieval looking keys.

But yeah. Every time I stop and think about it, I still can't believe I'm actually here. I had wanted to come to Russia SO BAD and then it didn't work out, but I wasn't all that upset about it. And then it was thesis, and I had to figure out something for this year. So I applied and I got that grant, and now I'm here. It's so unreal to me. I know I'm here, and I'm speaking a lot of Russian, but oh my god, I'm actually doing this. The other part that amazes me is that I can actually do this. I can't carry on a great conversation, but I can ask questions and get people to talk about a variety of interesting topics and I get about 60–75+% of what they way, depending on what they're talking about and how fast they're going. Which gives me a little bit of confidence that I can do this after all.

Which will all be smashed once we start classes tomorrow.