first of all: it's about effing time!

second of all: i could do without elton brown's profound commentary, but this makes me happy nonetheless...

so... my week with kim is [sniff] officially over. i'm pretty darn exhausted, if not only because i haven't done that much walking in a week since i first got here. whew, we saw so much! a brief rundown of highlights and minor disasters:

-first minor disaster: monday night after getting back from picking kim up, going out to dinner, and getting her settled at the hostel, i got home around 11:30 pm with the intent of making myself a cup of tea, taking a nice hot shower and going to bed (seeing as i'd gotten very little sleep on sunday night and had to meet kim downtown at 9 to get her from the hostel to my apartment). that dream was smashed to tiny tiny bits as soon as i walked in the door and saw a table topped with food and vodka. tanya says 'tomorrow's your holiday, let's drink!' [this is what i get for telling her that christmas eve is somewhat of an extension of the christmas holiday itself; apparently she took this to mean 'it's a holiday, so we drink'. agh!] refusal was simply out of the question, so we were up until almost 3 am polishing off said vodka. to say that i was thrilled to be alive at 8 am tuesday would be something akin to a lie.

-second minor disaster: christmas day itself. now, well beforehand tanya and i had agreed that drinking was to be done on christmas, between dinnertime and the time kim and i were supposed to leave to do some disco dancing all night. that was all well and good, until we got home around seven and saw the vodka glasses lined up with everything else on the table (which was very nicely decorated, by the way). i probably don't need to tell you what ensued afterwards, as the three of us plowed through almost a full liter of the stuff. somewhere around nine it became apparent that kim and i were not going to make it much farther than the front door in any pursuit of going out, so we drank more. needless to say, we slept late on thursday.

-first highlight: when kim arrived on monday night, it snowed. and snowed and snowed and snowed. tuesday, it did more of the same. we got a break on wednesday, but i finally got my white christmas nonetheless - hooray! thursday: even more snow. today: you guessed it, yet more snow! total about five inches, i would guess. but i love the snowflakes here - even the tiny ones you can see every little crystallized detail. i want to take them home and keep them, but they keep melting as soon as i get inside [gee, go figure].

-second highlight: last night we went to a concert of operettas sung by up-and-coming opera students from the mariinsky, which was jaw-droppingly good. but i couldn't stop snickering, because the women sitting next to me kept snickering like misbehaving schoolkids, because of the guy sitting in front of them. to start with, he was wearing these glasses with rose-colored frames that were half the size of his face, like i once wore when i was eight or nine. he kept taking them off and wiping his face and eyes, and after almost every performance, he would sit up as tall as possible, clap his hands above his head [note: this is not really acceptable in russian theater-going etiquette], and shriek 'bravo! bravo!' at the top of his lungs [note: this is actually acceptable in russian theater-going etiquette, but not to the extent this guy was doing so]. after a few rounds of this, his wife tried to still him by simply holding up one finger in the air next to his left eye. this actually worked, and he'd settle back into his chair, only to return to his at-attention stance moments later. well, the women next to me started guffawing the first time the finger came out, and it was all downhill every time thereafter. when i heard them laughing and realized just why they were laughing, i started snickering too, and this set them off even more, which set me off even more - it was like being in church with my sisters when we've had a bit too much coffee. good lord.

-third highlight: watching the peacock clock in the hermitage go off at five wednesday afternoon. every wednesday at five, some old guy with the coolest job in the world steps into the glass case the clock stands in, winds it up, and runs the heck away before the fun begins. the owl in the cage in the forefront starts spinning around, the toadstool (the little round thing to the bottom right of the owl) opens up to show the clock's gears and second hand, the rooster (the smaller of the two birds) starts crowing the hours, and the peacock turns itself around and, well, moons the crowd. this mooning elicited a chorus of oohs and aahs from the crowd, especially the horde of japanese tourists behind us. quite amusing, indeed.

-fourth highlight: opening my stocking to discover that it was made almost entirely of candy. i now have enough sugar to keep me awake until my train to finland leaves on wednesday morning. hot dog!

anyways, i had a blast playing tour guide and romping through the snow and minus-20-fahrenheit wind chills, but i think i'm ready for at least twelve hours in bed before i start packing for home. hee hee!

this will probably be my last entry before i arrive stateside, so i want to wish everyone a happy and safe new year now. i'd do some big reflecting-on-the-year-that-has-passed entry, but i think i can sum up 2002 in two words: big changes. some good, some bad, but suffice to say that i'm pretty glad to put this year on the shelf. may 2003 be happy, healthy, and useful for you, and may your hangover be nonexistent.

cheers!
posted by kat thompson at 10:16 AM

opinions please: i'm thinking hard about switching my blog over to livejournal. what do you guys think?

the past week has been a whole lotta nothing for me. i did so much laundry on friday and saturday that i was up to my ears in, well, pretty much everything. i had my last day of class today, and kim arrives later this afternoon, and she'll be staying with me after tonight thanks to tanya's last-minute offer of something amounting to a weeklong slumber party in my room.

thursday was an unexpectedly amusing day, however, as a new classmate arrived - i guess no one told him that holiday break was coming up soon. i can't help nicknaming him the italian stallion, even though only half of that epithet is true (if i tell you he's balding faster than rick and probably approaching thirty-five, will you be able to guess which half?). his name is lorenzo, and his accent is strooooong - although listening to him speak is kind of cool since he has a very lyrical way of accenting his words. plus, he's got his own apartment and has offered to make the entire class spaghetti sometime, so maybe the fact that he's so old isn't but so bad.

speaking of old: i feel very old. emily and grover are engaged. who let them do that? [grin]

speaking of engaged: i really think it's gonna happen to dima and anya soon. tanya had another tanya over on saturday night - this one lives on the 20th floor and her son is igor, who's married to lyuda, who is megan's hostess - confused yet? - and all (my) tanya talked about was how stupid anya is because she doesn't want to go to school and only wants to get married and become a stay-at-home mom. while i find this sort of amusing because it's true (and because it's funny to hear tanya lecture someone other than me on the ways of the world for a change, even though i usually ignore her [mom, are you surprised?]), it's a bit frightening to see this happen all over the country - the latest trend is for girls to get married right out of high school, if not earlier, and become housewives. my only question is, what happens after the inevitable divorce?

eh, enough quasi-sociology for today. onward!
posted by kat thompson at 6:27 AM

if you're a harry potter fan, then you must read this. don't have food or drink in hand!

so... let's see. thursday was russia's constitution day, and unbeknownst to me this holiday involves quite a bit of drinking. i was slightly horrified when tanya called me for dinner - i was in the middle of some homework - and when i entered the kitchen, i saw a table full of zakuski, which can be anything from pickles to meats to breads, usually eaten before dinner as appetizers or while drinking - and two shotglasses and a bottle of vodka. clearly not thinking, i blurted out 'who's coming over?' tanya smiled and said 'no one - we're drinking for the holiday'.
.
two hours and a half a liter of vodka later...

that debacle aside, yesterday was a lot less drunk and a bit more entertaining. i don't know how she manages to find these people, but my former conversation teacher got together a group of american and austrian students to speak to some schoolchildren at a school out in oranienbaum, a suburb about 25 miles west of st. petersburg. i was told we'd be speaking english to them to help them practice, with a bit of russian thrown in for our benefit, so you can imagine my surprise when not once but twice we filed into classrooms and had to stand before these kids (the first group were ten- and eleven-year-olds, i think, while the second group was a huge conglomerate of thirteen- to sixteen-year-olds) and tell them, in russian, all about life in america and where we lived and what we studied and what we did in our free time. note well that i hadn't gotten enough sleep on friday night due to the heinous amount of drinking my classmates and i indulged in that night, and you can imagine my mental state. i did what any sensible, slightly crowd-shy, more than slightly hungover person would do: i forgot almost everything i knew about the russian language. now, when i'm drunk the words flow freely, since the 'think about what grammatical mistakes you might be making' part of my brain gets shut off, but alas, that doesn't carry over to when i'm sober and/or recovering. things improved a bit when we broke off into small groups to talk to the schoolchildren individually, but then, a group of sixteen-year-old girls who want to talk about shopping and britney spears don't present much of a grammatical problem. they must have thought me terribly boring, although when i told them where i was going after the school visit, my popularity shot through the roof. [i went to see a rather popular russian dance/pop group in concert, and i think the average age of the audience was fifteen] all things considered, the outing went pretty well, and the headmistress of the school seemed really interested in giving me a job there teaching english - she practically leapt out of her seat and said 'we've got openings!' when i told the first class that i wanted to teach english to russians. so, maybe there's something in the works there, maybe not; we'll see.

and life rolls on...


posted by kat thompson at 9:59 AM

if anyone can find a copy of this movie with english subtitles, see it now, see it yesterday, have a bunch of friends over and don't touch food or drink throughout. brilliant!

'home, where my thought's escapin'/home, where my music's playin'/home, where my love lies waiting silently for me' - simon & garfunkel

[sigh] home... home. home means apple-cider-scented candles, furniture adorned with cat hair, the red felt bows that mom puts on the lampshades every christmas (presumably so that they, too, can become adorned with cat hair, when katrina rubs up against them [yes, i have a weird cat - she rather enjoys rubbing her chin against any sharp object, although in fourteen years she still hasn't figured out that lampshades are round and not square. can you imagine that? square lampshades? feh!]), flannel sheets, star trek ornaments that say 'merry christmas. live long and prosper', hot chocolate on christmas eve after we've come back from midnight mass and still have to wrap a whole bunch of presents, elmo & patsy's 'grandma got run over by a reindeer', the chipmunks' christmas album, and the unfortunate jingle cats album playing on endless loop while we decorate the tree, mom's virgin egg nog, eating dairy queen even though it's twenty degrees outside, basketball all over the tv, bowl games, consistently hot water, my own car, and as many peas as i want. and the ability to belch in the kitchen without reproach.

why do i wax nostalgic, you ask? well, it is two weeks before christmas and it's with some sadness that i realize i won't be around for any of the above. however, at the same time, to quell any and all rumours about my aforeposted big news - i am not engaged, i am most definitely not pregnant, i have not been arrested (although i did come close), i am not about to be extradited, i am not picking up and moving to russia (at least not yet [wink]) - especially not to marry some russian man - and i have not recently joined the russian mafia. sorry to disappoint some of you, but my big news is that i'm coming home from jan 1 to jan 13. it's not a whole lot of time, but it's enough for me. aside from going to nation on the 9th, my only other concrete plan is to visit charlottesville at some point. oh, and to eat lots of tuna casserole. with peas. lots and lots of peas.

getting all that arranged has taken up the better part of the past four days. it's snowed a bit more, the wind has picked up a bit, the new year's decorations are up in full swing, and i've got five days of class left before break starts. not a whole lot going on otherwise, although i am rather happy to report that thanks to my mom i now have my own mini christmas tree, complete with mini ornaments and a string of stars. and an angel. have i said before that my mom rocks?

i think the funniest thing from making all these travel arrangements was when i was on the phone with joanne, one of american airlines' 'international experts', and she asked me where i was coming from. i told her st. petersburg, and that i only knew of an american airlines office in moscow, and she laughed and said 'yeah, that's about it, we don't fly to the ukraine!' have the maps of russia and the cis changed since i left home in august...?

oh well. point of the story is, i'm coming home! [wide grin]


posted by kat thompson at 9:05 AM

i can't not post the following, because it's too amusing. chris, my apologies, and if you want me to remove this, then let me know and i'll oblige. maybe. [grin]

a bit of background first: on the last day of fall semester, the pep band gets together and watches 'the grinch who stole christmas' at a band house, but we make it interesting - we make it into a drinking game. every time the word 'hoo' is heard in the movie [in case you haven't seen it in a while, that's a whole lotta times], a drink must be taken. and during cindy-lou-hoo-who-was-no-more-than-two's speech, some form of chugging must be done. [at least that's what i remember from hazy years past, although it generally just disintegrates into general drinking as you please] once the first viewing is complete, drinks are refilled and the movie is viewed again. and then, we all go out caroling around grounds, usually to the ire of anyone and everyone within earshot [hey, we're a band, not a choir!]. collectively, this evening of merriment is called 'grinching'.

anyways, last year i had the foresight to make a wicked batch of cider for grinching, which involved a couple of gallons of apple cider mixed fifty-fifty with a rather toxic mixture of captain morgan's spiced rum and goldschlager, and some cinnamon thrown in for taste. the problem with the first batch was that i mixed it so well that even that much alcohol couldn't be tasted, and by the time the first viewing was through, the eight or nine of us who'd taken drinks from that batch were stumbling around like idiots. i myself was barely cogent enough to make it to the bathroom. basically, the recipe was a success. so when chris emailed me a couple of days ago to ask me for this recipe, i gladly obliged. here's what came out of that:

"KAt!!! I'm writing tyou from Cocke hall, and le6 me tell tou , your cider recipe ois fabulous! At first, Alex put in tpp mych Goldschlager, (qow! I can spell Goldschlager, but not too!) and it was nasty-ish, so we "boroewd" some fo Em Reuschenburg's un-tainte cider ad mixed it uin with the nasty Goldschlager-osh stuff. And you can now see the resuylt :-) Layra is laughing at me, so I think I should get some water maybe and og to bed 'cause that sounds fgood abouyt noew :-) :-)} Yeagh. Hope Russia isn't too cold for you, I'll write a sober email once I relize I sent this one [smiley face]"

heh heh heh. i think the last sentence is my favorite. all in all, it's good to see that the drunken semester-ending traditions in charlottesville are carrying on in my absence.

potentially big news coming up... but i'm not going to say anything about it until i'm absolutely sure it's going to happen. so wait! [grin]



posted by kat thompson at 7:10 AM

i cut my hair on saturday. i intended to only snip off an inch or so, but about three inches and two hours later... the consequences aren't as dire as they sound, nor is the job that bad. i kind of actually like the length right now. and my split ends are gone, which is a nice thing.

memory can play some weird tricks on you. today i saw 'red dragon', dubbed into russian of course, which means it was necessary for me to concentrate more than usual on what was being said, as i can't read lips well enough to decipher any english. so, at the beginning of the film, i'm getting into it when a latecoming girl swishes past me, passing behind me to her seat, and in her wake is left the faint scent of whatever vanilla perfume she was wearing. almost instantly, i'm distracted from the film and i realize how chilly it is in the theater. for some reason, the combination of cold and vanilla conjures up the time my high school buddy theresa and i went up to ellicott city (a small suburb of baltimore) for christmas shopping one day after school. it was cold, she had the windows down and the heat turned up, and the stereo blasting per usual. she always had one of those tree-shaped air fresheners in her car, and more likely than not it smelled of vanilla. anyways, we drove around downtown for a while, parked, and got huge cups of coffee and scones at a little cafe somewhere on main street. i remember buying hordes of scented candles for my friends, and poking around the craft shops to see if i could find anything for mom or the sisters. towards the end of the trip she pulled me into a palm-reader's parlor, telling me that her christmas present to me was a free palm reading. i'd never done anything like that in my life, so i shrugged and obliged. all i remember from that visit is that i was told i'd be traveling near water soon [i was due to go to italy four months from that time] and that things would soon get interesting with whomever i was romantically interested at the time [which they did, and almost immediately thereafter got super-hyper-weird. long story {grin}]. happy, i got back in the car with theresa, we drove around for a while, and then went home. but my mind didn't stop there - it went straight on to the stone temple pilots concert i went to with theresa and suzan and catherine, where i did donuts with her mom's station wagon around the parking lot of the patriot center while suzan was hanging off the front [not exactly bright, i know]. i had been rather sick that day, because it was the day after thanksgiving and i ate way too much the day before and threw it all back up at three am the day of the concert. i insisted to mom that i'd be ok, and proceeded to consume nothing but bread and ginger ale for the next thirty-six hours. it didn't matter, though, since we got spots right in front of the stage, and the bass player [on whom i had an enormous crush at the time] threw me his towel, and although some other girl caught part of it and tried to fight me for it, we agreed that it would be ok to just rip it in half and call it even. and after the show we went to a mcdonald's drive-through, the wrong way - which brought me to the time theresa and i ran to seven-eleven after school one day and she was circling around the tiny parking lot the wrong way, and ended up hitting some guy head-on; it was at ten miles an hour, and was so ridiculous that we just laughed it off - and then we went back to catherine's dad's house to spend the night. and it was cold in the basement, so very cold. and from here my brain went on to the post-winter ball sleepover that theresa had at her house, when none of us could sleep so at six am we went for a walk in the woods near her house. there was this river that was completely frozen over, and the sun rising over it was beautiful. out in the middle of the river was a giant rock, and i have this picture of my date, jerry, sitting on that rock, draped in this stupid green cape that he wore everywhere - all you can see in the picture is this cape billowing over the rock, and his nose sticking out over the water. that stupid big nose of his, that always somehow got in the way.

it was at that point that i was jolted back into the movie by some loud music and a knife through edward norton's abdomen, and i told my brain, 'no more, we've got a movie to watch'. that seemed to do the trick, and while i know i missed some dialogue, the action of the film was such that knowing what was going on wasn't completely necessary. that, and i remembered very well what i'd read of the book about six years ago - and then i remembered who was the only person i ever lent that book to, and the precise reason for my doing so, and how i had to sneak over to his house on a warm spring afternoon to get it back. and then, finally, i told my brain enough, for the last time.

but good lord. all that from a whiff of vanilla.
posted by kat thompson at 12:18 PM

so, i've learned that when koreans say they don't like apolo anton ohno, they really, seriously mean it. how do i know, you ask? well, yesterday i was at the opening day of the short track world cup, which i'd skipped half of class to go to with the koreans (ok, and two taiwanese) from said class. it was awkward enough being the only obvious non-asian sitting in the group of, oh, a few hundred of them, but when ohno first came out and the boos and whistles began - yeah, suffice to say i wanted to hide under my seat. however, when he took the ice, the russians started chanting "u-s-a!" in response to the koreans' booing, which alleviated the situation a little bit. things got ten times worse when ohno won his race after the winner was disqualified, and even more so when he accepted his medal during the ceremony. the group i was with kept apologizing, saying 'we're sorry, we don't hate him!'no big deal - i can certainly understand, and it was actually kinda funny, in a way.

quick thanksgiving update: there was no turkey, as i'd suspected, but there were three roasted chickens in its place. we had plenty of everything else, to my surprise, and dinner turned out quite nicely. not so nice, however, was the extremely rapid temperature change that thanksgiving brought about, as the thermometer read minus fourteen when i woke up on friday morning. in fahrenheit, that's about six degrees. today when i woke up, it was minus seventeen, which is about two degrees. right now it's five degrees fahrenheit, with a wind chill of negative eight. i don't think i'd be so ruffled about the cold if it had come gradually, but to go from fifteen to two overnight? yikes!

i've also caught my first cold of the season, surprisingly early. of course, i can't actually utter the words 'ya zabolyela' ('i'm sick') to tanya, because she'll probably prescribe some loony home remedy like wearing a beheaded chicken around my neck for a week until my nose stops running. i think i'll do better just to stay in bed for the rest of the weekend with bunches of tea, my flannel pyjamas, and a good book. or three.

tomorrow's december 1 - does anyone know where the last three months went? good lord!...
posted by kat thompson at 6:44 AM

first of all: kim has returned to the world of the blogging! hooray!

second of all: in case you miss the link on her page, you must see this. it might be somewhere in my archives, but i'm too lazy to look it up right now. my apologies to, well, pretty much everyone.

third of all: i think that my absolute most favorite russian word has to be "gospadi", roughly translated "good heavens". it's extremely useful - it can be used as an exclamation of surprise, as when you just barely avoid slipping on ice and cracking your head open, or as an exclamation of frustration, as when you discover that dinner's burning while you've been chatting on the phone, or as an exclamation of delight, as when your son's kitten does something cute like pee on his shoes. but i think the thing i like best about it is the way it's said - the word is pronounced with the stress on the "o", and the way it's said around here makes it sound very much like a new york "o". it's hard to explain, but it kind of sounds like "gaw-spadi", only the "aw" is more of an "o-ah" than an actual new jersey "aw". of course, if you've never heard a new york accent then that explanation was useless to you, but get me on the phone sometime and i'll try to demonstrate.

lastly, i'd like to wish everyone a happy thanksgiving. i skipped class to sleep in today, and when i woke up i was tickled to see snow on the ground again [yesterday's rain washed all the previous snow away]. i think it's the first time in a long time that i've got a white thanksgiving. it remains to be seen whether or not i'll actually get a turkey, since the boys left in charge of preparing it seemed surprised when i told them they had to let it thaw overnight... in any event, a bunch of us yanks are having dinner together tonight over in the dorms, potluck style. i decided to make lefse - it seems weird, but brian's family makes it every year and megan convinced me to try to make some this year since i wouldn't be able to get my yearly supply from his mom. i made the first batch yesterday, and suffice to say i had to throw away the first six or seven of them before i finally figured out what i'd been doing wrong. i went to a pseudo-thanksgiving dinner last night with my former conversation teacher - there's a group of students and young professionals who get together a few times a month to practice english, and they're always looking for native speakers to practice with. i admit i was swayed somewhat by the promise of turkey, but when i got a glance at the bird on the table, it looked more like a cornish hen [which reminded me of the first thanksgiving that gini hosted - she called mom early in the afternoon and said 'is the turkey supposed to shrink when you cook it?' mom's baffled reply: 'um, no... how small is it?' 'really small, like a chicken' 'do me a favor and check the packaging that the turkey came in' - and it was then that my sister realized that she'd bought a cornish hen, and not a turkey, with which to feed six or seven people. whoops!]. it wasn't bad, but i was a bit crestfallen. i'm hoping that things will turn out a little better tonight, though i'm not exactly counting on it. as i usually say, 'pasmotrim' - we'll see.
posted by kat thompson at 5:28 AM

ok, so i lied: there's one more thing i'd like for christmas. i swear that's it.

i haven't really been up to much since my last post. classes are getting a bit boring, but i think it's only because the light at the tunnel is getting brighter. four more weeks until i get my break, and kim comes out to visit. it's snowed a few more buckets since tuesday, which means that sooner or later i'm going to break something after falling on the ice. i advise you to start taking bets now on what body part that will eventually be.

dima and anya got a kitten last week, which incensed tanya beyond belief. one night on the phone i heard her berating anya: "you don't have any heat! why did you waste four hundred rubles on a kitten when you could have bought something that will keep you warm? kittens don't keep you warm! all they do is eat food and scratch your furniture!..." however, her anti-kitten sentiments did a total about-face yesterday, when the kids stopped by for a visit with kitten in tow. i crept out of my room to take a shower before dinner, and i saw dima crouching near the bathroom, apparently trying to get the kitten to use the toilet. he moved back about six inches, and the kitten took off and headed straight for my room (the door was shut, however). he flipped on the light to find her and ran after her - and oh lord, she's absolutely adorable. big green eyes and a calico coat and a slight mohawk. anyways, he got her back into the bathroom, at which point tanya came out to observe the proceedings, which involved much cursing on dima's part and a whole bunch of mewling on the kitten's part. after five minutes, dima finally gave up and spat, "someone get me a cigarette!" i tell you, nothing like a tiny bundle of fur to reduce a man to a babbling mess... [grin] after my shower, as i was eating dinner, the kitten came in to say hi, and not two minutes later had used my leg as a way of clambering up onto the couch. she curled up behind me and promptly fell asleep, and when tanya came in and saw this, she practically purred "what a smart, adorable cat!" i still think the whole toilet- training of cats here is odd - it's certainly convenient, i guess, but i know my cats would shudder at the thought, to say the least.

speaking of shuddering at the thought: last night i witnessed a high form of sacrilege, as the bartender of the place megan and i resorted to after our other plans tanked served these two women beer - with straws. maybe i'm a beer snob, but no no no no! i'll do whatever i can to fit in here, but i draw the line there. no no no! about our plans tanking - last night there were a whole spate of free concerts around the city as part of this annual festival called "noch musiki", or night of music. apparently, anyone who's not actually appearing in said concerts is trying to get in, which leaves on average a crowd of about two thousand people mobbing each other to get into a space that can safely hold only four or five hundred, at best. if you got anywhere near the front of the line to get in, the line disappeared and turned into a sort of amorphous blob of people mashing up against one another. megan and i waited in one of these mobs for about ninety minutes [we were turned away from the first concert we'd wanted to see because there was no room left] before we gave up - i was also sort of afraid that my dinner was simply going to be squeezed out of me and projected onto the poor babushka to my right - and went out drinking instead. we found sixty-six-cent beers at a restaurant near the metro, so all was relieved - except for the whole straw thing. oh well, nobody's perfect.

one last bit of advice: when your waiter mishears you and brings you an entire bottle of beaujolais nouveau instead of just one glass, do your head a favor and correct him. don't suck it up and drink the entire bottle over the course of two hours. and for the love of all things holy, under no circumstances should you then go out dancing all night. that is something i won't do again for a damn long time...


posted by kat thompson at 3:17 PM

move over wally: i have a new hero!

why is it that old people here smell like leather and vegetables? and meat? ok, the leather i can see, since old men here like to wear leather jackets until they're so worn that only duct tape will save them. but the vegetables and the meat? maybe they all work in markets. maybe they spend all day at markets. maybe they just like bathing with food - you know, that reminds me of a jerry springer episode, but i won't elaborate - i don't know. i've noticed that each age group has its own particular smell. children smell like ice cream, even if they haven't been eating it; most of the adults here smell like some combination of cigarettes, alcohol, an overkill of cologne or perfume, or acute halitosis [and i've decided that it's a given that he/she with the worst halitosis will as a rule stand right before you on a crowded bus, so that you not only get the fumes but also a close-up study of every nose hair and skin pore]; and old people smell like leather, vegetables, and meat. occasionally you get the drenched-in-dog-urine scent, too, but that's usually reserved for babushkas being pulled out the door by a mastiff four times their size, whose urinary functions are least among that which said babushkas are able to control about said mastiffs. [holy crap- was that english? sorry about that...] i have to ask, what are those tiny old women doing with such big dogs, especially in apartments that really aren't fit for anything larger than a housecat or a chihuahua? maybe they feel protected. but if i were a potential thief, i don't think i'd really want to try and rob someone who smelled like leather, vegetables, meat, or dog urine, or any combination thereof.

that's a hard act to follow, so i'll conclude here...


posted by kat thompson at 11:55 AM

whoops!

so, the only two things i want for christmas are this book and this cd. you've got fair warning! [grin]

you know, the snowflakes in petersburg look rather nice when they're all conglomerated on the ground, happily crunching under everyone's feet. however, i don't find them quite as charming when they're swirling around in the air, taking on reconnaissance missions up my nose. rather disconcerting, if not downright scary.

"sometimes i have everything/yet i wish i felt something" - nin


posted by kat thompson at 10:04 AM

so... so! the report on the great volgograd adventure. first, let me introduce you to the tallest woman in the world. three times as tall as the statue of liberty, and visible from just about anywhere in the city. photos cannot convey her sheer enormity - i was astounded. of course, i still took at least a dozen pictures of her anyways, because i could.

let's see. so the first thing to go wrong was on tuesday before we left for moscow- our train tickets were mailed from boston about four days earlier, so needless to say we didn't get them by closing time tuesday afternoon. [today i found out that they arrived on wednesday - of course!] so we had to buy new tickets, and because i wasn't there, jess had to bribe the ticket seller to give him two (you need a passport to buy a train ticket in russia, and he sure didn't have mine at the time). on top of that, we almost missed the train to moscow because jess hadn't packed before 11 pm, and he had to literally run home and grab his stuff. that's the short version of it.

so, wednesday morning we arrived in moscow. i hadn't slept a wink, but i had a meeting with someone at moscow state university at 11 am. we met our guide at the train station, and he was stoned. wonderful! so we wandered around red square for a bit - it looked beautiful in the sunrise - and got some breakfast at a mcdonald's - i had a mcflurry - and then we lumbered over to the university. a whole bunch of time passed, and finally i had my ten-minute meeting, and after that, we met up with the other students going on the trip. there were six - stephanie, my eventual partner in champagne; john, the nice ucla alum whom jess was railing on the whole weekend based on the fact that he was from california; chanda, kim, and jenny, three completely weird and crazy girls who did exercises and dances as we walked anywhere to keep them warm; and matt, the sidwell friends-yale graduate who thinks the world owes him a million favors [as soon as he told me he was from potomac, all sorts of warning bells went off] [and to top it all off, he was a dead ringer for my ex of the same name - i never thought i'd find that awful haircut anywhere else, but there it was on his head!]. we got on the train around 2, and off to volgograd we went.

to make a long train ride (20 hours) short: sleep, homework, a lot of bread and consumption of the food-packets that the conductors handed out to everyone, listening to matt rant about how russia is still the soviet union, in loud and obnoxious english with other russians in earshot [yeah, i'm sure none of them understand a word you're saying, buddy], and downing more champagne than should be legally allowed while eating and conversing with a whole group of russians. thursday morning brought not only a nice hangover but also a lovely shower as we arrived in volgograd and went straight to our hotel, which was brand-new and supernice. it had just snowed in town, so it looked a whole lot like this. gorgeous! we then went to see the museum of the battle of stalingrad - since volgograd's old name was stalingrad - which was fascinating. i think i spent at least four hours in there. the highlight was the panorama upstairs - it's lost a little on the webpage, but it's a painting of one day in the battle of stalingrad on this huge circular wall. really cool - words can't describe it. after the museum we walked around town a bit, found the obligatory lenin-hailing-a-taxi statue, and found some food.

on friday we went back to the war musem and also went to see the lady pictured above. her real name is 'mat rodina', or mother russia, and in front of her is an eternal flame dedicated to those who lost their lives in the battle - something like 7000 names were chosen at random to be inscribed on the walls of the memorial hall. there are also a whole smattering of gravestones and statues and monuments. i took a ton of pictures, so eventually you'll be able to see what i'm talking about. that took up most of the afternoon, and the evening was spent eating at an italian restaurant [wasn't my idea, the guide took us there!] and finishing off champagne and some brandy in the hotel.one of the cutest things about volgograd was the underground trams - they don't have a metro (after all, only a million people live there!), so the only forms of public transportation are trolleybuses, minibuses, and these two-car underground trams that actually run overground as well. maybe i'm just a giant public transportation dork, but i thought the trams were neat.

anyways, on saturday we left volgograd at noon and spent twenty more hours on the train back to moscow. that was basically more of the same as the trip down, only without the group of russians and with tons more food. oh, and much more of matt's blithering. we arrived in moscow at 8 am on sunday, whereupon jess and i were whisked away by a different guide for the day. and by "for the day" i mean until 3 pm. however, we saw alot in those few hours - and it had just snowed over the weekend, and it was snowing even more while we were there, so everything was pretty pretty pretty: red square, the kremlin wall (all the palaces were closed), st. basil's, lenin's tomb [he's really creepy - he's shrunken quite a bit over the years, so it doesn't look like you'd think he would. i wanted to go up and tap the glass to see if he'd wake up or something, but i knew the guards would throw me out of there faster than you could shout 'nyet!', so i decided against doing so], the alexander garden, gum (the big ol' state department store), most of the chinese quarter - which was a whole smattering of pretty churches, the fsb headquarters (the fsb used to be the kgb, and no, there weren't any snipers on the roof), the outside of the pushkin art museum, the cathedral of christ the saviour, where a wedding was taking place, a ton of metro stations, some giant hotels, the noviy arbat (think fifth avenue in new york), and, out of morbid curiousity, the theater where the hostages were taken a few weeks ago. it was creepy and surreal - there were bulldozers out front doing construction, and two signs posted on a billboard outside the theater, which i assume used to advertise show times and whatnot. one sign was a poem written in memory of the people that died there, and the other was a sign from the theater company that simply said "from oct 23-28 we were unable to present our show, nord-ost. lives were lost. forgive us". sad - but weird, in a way.

after that we straightened out the last bit of the ticket fiasco by lying to the stern lady at the train station and telling her we'd lost the original tickets and paying a fee for the loss of said tickets to get new ones. and then our guide left us, and we sort of just wandered around for a few hours, had some dinner, gawked at the snow and the mafiosa, and had more than a few beers before the train back to petersburg left. here came a critical point in the forming of my character, as our train left at 11:55 pm and we finished drinking around 10 or so. at 10 i knew i wasn't going to make it until midnight without using a bathroom, so i decided to use the one in the train station. now, jess had warned me that the men's bathrooms were mere holes in the ground - which is ok because, as we all know, men can pee anywhere without worry - and that they weren't too bad. this gave me hope, so i waddled down to the women's toilet - without toilet paper, because here the definition of a 'nice' toilet is one that has tp in it - threw down my eight rubles on the table (yes, you have to pay for toilets here), and ran into the stall area. needless to say, i was a bit taken aback when i opened the stall door and found, mounted on a platform as if it would make things any better, a hole in the ground. and, of course, no toilet paper anywhere in sight. what followed was an amazing feat of beer-fueled acrobatics - you have no idea how hard it is to position yourself over a hole in the ground without peeing all over your jeans - but in the end, i got the job done. i know i didn't smell rosy fresh when i got off the train in petersburg monday morning, though.

so, all in all, i had a wonderful time, ticket snafus aside. i'd like to go back in warmer weather- not only to see the mat rodina amid green grass, but also to check out some museums and exhibition halls i know we missed. i spent most of yesterday doing laundry and catching up on sleep, but now i'm back into the daily grind. or something.

for the curious, there's no news on the dimitry/anya front. i gather it was a fairly quiet week in my absence, which i suppose is good. anyways... dinner calls. ciao!
posted by kat thompson at 10:43 AM

heh heh... dave barry rules.

so do the drunkards responsible for this. my favorite is the following quote, which i am sad to say describes a good deal of my college career: "it's the kind of thing that happens periodically, when you mix very large groups of people with very large amounts of alcohol".

so, fallout from the weekend: on sunday, i came home and anya was pandering around in a bathrobe, but i didn't find out until later that dima was also home. the three of us ate dinner together, and everything seemed normal. they gathered up some stuff and left together, presumably to go home. i don't know - when i got home this afternoon, anya was there again making pizzas with tanya (rumour has it that i'm to have one for dinner tonight). maybe she's pregnant or something. wouldn't that be grand?in any case, as i said, everything seems normal, although 'normal' around here tends to last no more than twelve hours at a time, if that.

rest of post recently deleted - see the next entry for details...
posted by kat thompson at 9:58 AM

so i found out why we're allotting three days to volgograd on this upcoming trip: apparently it takes *twenty* hours to get there by train from moscow. needless to say, i'm buying plenty of beer and a pack of cards before we leave, to make this as painless as possible. good lord.

anyways - put away any food or drink before reading any further. kids, let me tell you a story. it's called, "tatiana has a birthday".

our characters: tatiana, my host mom; nadia, her older sister; natasha, her best friend; dimitry, her son; anya, dimitry's girlfriend; "babushka", dimitry's grandmother; larissa, another friend of tatiana; volodya, her drunken husband with more chest hair than should be legal; and various others, including myself.

the setting: the den of our apartment, which consists of two huge, long tables covered in food and drink. at least four bottles of vodka, three bottles of wine, and two bottles of cognac. i'd say there were thirteen people there in total. so, dinner was scheduled for five, but we ended up waiting for dimitry to arrive, which he did at five- thirty. in russia, "dinner at five" means "we start drinking vodka at five". as soon as he sits down, dimitry makes a toast, and down goes the first round of drinks. about five minutes later, he gets up to make another toast, and down goes the second round of drinks. now, he's sitting next to me, and as soon as his rear end hits the seat, he bursts into tears. not just quiet sobs - he's bawling. everyone gets really quiet and sort of just looks into their laps, and finally he gets up and leaves, and natasha and babushka follow. nadia then leaves as well, and volodya, like the good man he is, pours a round for the rest of us. here's where things get absolutely surreal, as for the next two hours the "party" consisted of various people going in and out of the den, shots being poured about every five minutes, even more food being brought out, gossip flying around the table, and dancing. apparently it's a good idea to crank the music channel on the TV up to, oh, seventy or eighty and dance in the foyer. volodya took a fancy to me immediately and decided that every time i got up, it meant that i wanted to dance, so he'd accost me in the foyer. i humoured him for about three minutes, and then sat back down. this procedure repeated about four or five times, and i decided that i'd had enough after he asked me "so how many sex shops have you been to in petersburg? do they have sex shops like ours in your country?" he didn't seem to believe me when i told him that i had not, in fact, been into any of the sex shops here. i know where two of them are located, but i haven't even gotten close to the stairs leading to the door. [side note for those of you who like to joke about me and my "old men": it's really not funny anymore. i think i'm cursed to have men absurdly older than me take an interest in me - good grief, why?] things got visibly less awkward when he left, but got awkward again when larissa arived to replace him about thirty minutes later. now, tell me, why can't a husband and wife be at a party together? what on earth could he be off doing... hmmm... anyways, someone told her that volodya had taken quite a fancy to me, which of course embarrassed me to no end, but larissa just laughed and apologized to me. ok, fine. and after all this, the dancing and drinking went on until about 1:30 am, after which i gave up and went to bed.

this morning i hear voices at 10 am, and realize that not only is tanya awake, but she's got company. seems that nadia, babushka, larissa, and anya all crashed here last night. so we had lunch together, and i had to refuse wine - ok, wine at noon isn't bad if you're at a wine festival, for example, but when you've consumed the sheerly inhumane amount of vodka that i consumed last night [i lost count after nine of the little shot-glasses were tossed back], all you want is water and/or tea. i, of course, made it my mission to find out what the hell happened that made dimitry burst into tears like he did. from what i gather, one of his friends is in the hospital, for some unknown reason, and i think that he proposed to anya and she freaked out and said no. which is funny to me, since they went and moved in together three weeks ago. i don't know how long she'll be staying with tatiana and me - tatiana herself doesn't even know. the situation is so messed up. but, after the outburst happened at dinner, i really felt like i was in a movie - i've never seen "my cousin vinny", but it was all i could think of. i was sitting there looking around, trying to catch any snippet of conversation that i could understand, and the men were pouring shots, and babushka's just sort of sitting there licking her lips, and anya, the typical melancholy seventeen-year-old, is staring off into space, not eating, drinking, smiling, or laughing, and you can tell she just wants to get out of the room and be by herself for a while... it was so surreal. i did have a good time, and lunch with babushka and nadia and larissa was great fun since they're such nice people, but i have a hard time believing that the last twenty-four hours actually happened.

oh, and masha flew behind the refrigerator and got trapped back there for about twenty minutes last night. i really thought she was going to be stuck back there forever and eventually die, but like a phoenix rising from the ashes, she somehow managed to get out. amazing.

well, we'll see what the fallout from last night brings - i can definitely say that life here is never boring. i just wonder why it can't be a bit less chaotic at times...
posted by kat thompson at 10:17 AM

let's see... the last week has been kind of bland. i survived my first russian hangover in good order, by sleeping it away for thirteen hours. amazing! on sunday i went to a tennis match, which was really cool since i've never been to one before, not even when the legg-mason classic was in my backyard for who knows how many years. afternoons this week have been spent buying stamps, trying to figure out how to get this box of christmas presents i have home, and walking around looking for landmarks.
i found a rather amusing statue of lenin on the road to the airport - it looks like he's trying to hail a taxi. fun stuff. have i taken pictures of any of this stuff? no, because i'm a dweeb and i constantly forget my camera before i leave in the mornings. oh well.

oh - i'll be out of touch for most of next week since we finally get a break from class. november 7 is a national holiday, so we have both the 7th and the 8th off. this means that i'm going on a trip! another student and i are going to moscow on tuesday night, staying there wednesday, and then taking a train to volgograd (way south of moscow) and staying there for three days. we're coming back to moscow on sunday, spending the day there, and then coming back to petersburg monday morning. to make a long story short, don't expect to hear from me between november 5-10. [grin]

happy halloween!
posted by kat thompson at 10:16 AM

ah, crap.

not only have my archives seemed to have disappeared [this is what i get for correcting the name of my blog in accordance with actual russian grammar, instead of what i just assumed it should be], but the band in the cafe next to the internet-club has decided to slander the good name of the band radiohead by covering 'creep'. this would be fine with me, if a) they weren't playing it in the completely wrong key and b) they knew any of the words besides the chorus. i never thought it would be so painfully easy to mangle "i want a perfect body/i want a perfect soul", but these kids found a way. shudder.

things could get more interesting, or they could get profoundly worse. i don't think i want to stick around to find out, however.
posted by kat thompson at 2:45 PM

IMPORTANT!!

sorry for the shouting, but these two snippets of info are pertinent.

first, if you ever at any time emailed me using my virginia address, well... quit it. uva is finally deleting my account one week from today - that's october 30, so after that date, all email should be sent to my alumni address, which happens to forward to my aol account, so you could always email me there, too. i know, i'm also very sad that they're removing what has been a source of mostly joy for me for the past four years, but i guess they've gotta make room for next year's fresh meat. ah well.

second, if you've recently sent me an instant message and i haven't responded, don't despair - i'm not ignoring you! - chances are high that i'm actually not there. see, the computers in the internet-club that i frequent don't tend to understand when i try to disable the auto-logon feature, and my screen name keeps getting signed on when i'm not around. so, if you send me a message, and i'm there, i will definitely respond - i want to talk to you, whoever you are! if there's no response - it's not me! mmkay? [grin]

so today i overdosed on roman and greek antiquities at the hermitage. i think all the marble gave me a headache, though. it was kind of fun to see how many statues i came across whose noses hadn't obviously been glued back on after having fallen off. and every room i went into was nearly empty - does this mean that russians aren't interested in, or don't as heavily emphasize in school, greek and roman mythology? before anyone says 'the rooms were empty because you went on a wednesday afternoon', let me point out that the rooms of flemish, italian, and french paintings are chock-full no matter what day or time of day it is. it's a shame that no one sees some of the more interesting stuff that's there, but i admit that the quiet is kinda nice.

factoid: did you know that only eight percent of russians have ever used the internet? i would bet that that's the same number of americans who haven't used the internet. the sociologist in me could go on a really long (and probably boring to everyone but me) rant on the ramifications of that, but i'll resist the temptation.

i'm constantly amazed how undeterred people here are by construction. i mean, entire streets have been dug up and demolished, with equipment and dirt and nastiness everywhere, and people just walk (and drive!) around barriers and through the mess like it's nothing. simply amazing. back home it would be a huge deal to close off all the streets they have, for the length of time they're to be closed for, but here - more and more, it's "vsyo ravno" ("all the same").

oh yeah! i almost forgot - if anyone's awake around 5:30 on sunday morning and can find it anywhere on television, i'll be at the final of the st. petersburg open tennis tournament. granted, i'll be way up in the $5 seats, probably with the rest of the city, but i'll wave if i see any cameras pointed my way. i'm so excited!

and, saving the best for last - happy birthday to my wonderful, sainted mother, without whom i wouldn't have a lot of things (like existence, for example). love ya, mom!
posted by kat thompson at 10:54 AM

ok, so i take back two of the things i wrote about in my last post.

first of all, today can be marked as a semi-tragic day, as while i was washing clothes, dimitry and his friend sasha came in to take the television out of my room. in its place now stands my mirror, which is great, because now i can, erm, stare at myself while i'm studying in bed. ok...

second, i think masha (the blue bird) must be on some reconaissance mission after flying into the wall last week, because when i went to eat breakfast on saturday morning, he divebombed my head as soon as i entered the room and missed me by mere inches. it could just be that this bird has no bloody sense of direction, but i don't really know *what* to think anymore.

anyways, i find it ironic that not 48 hours after i write my mother an email saying that i feel safer here than i do in washington [in response to the post's recent 'article' about st petersburg being russia's "crime capital"], some gypsies try to rob me at a metro station in broad daylight. fortunately, i keep nothing in my pockets and bury everything of value far away from the prying fingers of children, and i also realized what they were doing in time to start yelling at them to get the f*ck away from me in russian, otherwise things could have been a bit worse. it pissed me off, and you can bet i won't be using the entrance to that particular metro station again. bastards.

megan and i were accosted by an old, drunk guy and his equally old, drunk, and unattractive friends on friday night at a bar - they really wanted to buy us drinks and sing karaoke with us, but i think they got the point when i shotgunned my beer, pushed one of them away, muttered 'da svidanya!' ['goodbye] and led the way out the door. i've decided that russia's not a place for the shy, as it can take a good deal of convincing to let people know that no, you're really not interested. i love it!

oh, and happy belated birthday to keith, wherever he is...
posted by kat thompson at 8:49 AM

last weekend's lessons learned are threefold:

one, when a russian newspaper tells you that a band plays "goth rock", don't believe them, because chances are very good that nothing could be further from the truth. unless, of course, by "goth rock" they mean "moaning, wailing postpunk four-chord guitar noise to which no one is dancing and whose sound not even four beers can improve". well, at least i only spent seventy rubles on admission.

two, when you're at a club in russia and you're offered the choice of three bathrooms [i think the male/female labels on the doors are a mere western formality] - men's, women's, and the mysterious 'number three' - under no, i repeat, no circumstances should you choose number three. even if it's the only one free, no matter how bad you need to go, no matter whether or not the men's room is just a hole in the ground - in the words of ace ventura, do not go in there! if anyone's seen the film "trainspotting", think of the worst toilet in scotland - add a little more graffiti, remove the dead flies, and there you have it. good lord.

three, if you're returning to a hotel with someone at two in the morning and you're female and obviously under the age of 40, you just might be mistaken for a prostitute. not that this happened to me and brian on saturday night, and definitely not that we got busted for trying to pay the single-person rate for two people. whoops! the goons at the door must have been seriously bored, though, since we'd been going in and out all day and i know that at least one of them had to notice that. maroons. grrr!

the big big news from the last several days is that dimitry is fully out of the apartment - seems that wednesday was the big day, so on tuesday when i came home from galavanting, i was greeted by the sound of duct tape [wrapping things up, you perverts] and hammering. tatiana then rattled off a whole string of words at me, and the only ones i really caught were 'television' and 'taking out of your room later'. i shrugged, said, 'ok', and went about my business, figuring that at last, the hallowed day had come when my life would not be poisoned by the magic box in the corner of my room. so you can imagine my complete and utter surprise after dinner when i was starting my homework, and tatiana and dimitry came into my room and took out the television stand and the refrigerator, and brought in another small nightstand and began to rearrange the bookshelves and armchair. this didn't bother me one bit, as my homework didn't require too much concentration and it was actually amusing to watch them try to squeeze the refrigerator out of the room [i offered to help, but was told that it wasn't needed!]. after all was said and done, i suddenly had a lot more floor space, and the television was still sitting in its corner. i'm still holding out and waiting for dimitry to come back and get it one day, but as megan joked yesterday, perhaps i've made a clean break with this one. it's a mixed blessing, though, as it's ok for watching news but not a whole lot else. i don't know. also, it was weird this morning not to wake up at six am when dimitry's alarm would usually go off, and i have to admit it's kind of nice not to have to wait for him to get out of the shower at night. but i almost feel like it's a "and then there were two" situation - just me and tatiana. although, maybe hanging my unmentionables in the shower won't be quite so embarrassing anymore.

about the birds, i've decided that kyesha must be the mastermind of the whole operation, because while i was eating breakfast on saturday morning, masha saw fit to leave the cage and then fly smack into the wall next to me. i, of course, was looking the other way, didn't see it coming, and jumped about a foot out of my seat when i heard the noise - it was loud! - and the bird just sort of hopped around on the floor for a little while and then returned to the cage. sometimes, i wonder.

that's it for now, really - we've been having wet snow for the past two days, and i went to a concert for two pianos at the jazz philharmonic last night, which was thoroughly entertaining. the music was great, but the group i was with was even better - myself, megan, a brit, three swedish girls, two french girls, and of course, a russian girl. interesting, indeed.

"i'm waiting for the night to fall/i know that it will save us all" - depeche mode
posted by kat thompson at 5:27 AM

first of all: brilliant, sherlock!

second: hopefully it'll still be light out by the time most of you are able to access this but i want to show everyone proof of why today is one of the happiest days of my recent life. in case the webcam shows naught but dark, suffice to say that it was snowing buckets when i woke up today, and it's continued to do so since. unbelievable! i'm in seventh heaven - this is way better than cranberry-heaven, because you can't make snowballs out of cranberries. there, that's my profound statement for the day.

oh, it's come to my attention that some of you may not know who this 'megan' person is that i keep referring to - she's probably the best friend i have here; she's from fargo, north dakota (the accent is slight, don't worry) and she lives on the 21st floor of my building. and her family situation is even more whacked-out than mine! briefly, she lives with a 47-year-old woman, lyuda, and her 27-year-old husband, igor, whose mother lives on the 19th floor and talks to igor all the time, but apparently is a bit chilly towards lyuda. they have a cat, stisha, who is losing her hair on her rear half for some unknown reason. i'm jealous because there's only one door to get through to their apartment - not three, as in mine. the inner door has been sticking lately - i really do think this apartment knows that i'm not a native, and just doesn't want me to get in, especially when i really have to use the toilet. i also truly think that kyesha (the yellow parakeet) is dad's old bird, a.j., reincarnated with a mission against me. let me explain: while i was eating dinner the other night, alone, i heard this tapping above my head. i figured it was just kyesha tapping her beak on the counter above the cabinets, but i looked up and she wasn't there. oh no, she was merrily hopping all over the glass chandelier above my head, which has these little glass bells hanging off the bottom that swing rather wildly at the slightest breeze. i had visions of them toppling off and piercing me right through the brain, all the while that damned bird is happily cackling and carrying on, like she's claimed some victory over mankind. or at least hapless foreign women. if i have to start wearing a helmet to dinner... well, i guess i draw the line there.

brian's coming to visit this weekend, so don't expect any updates for a little while [grin]. now, however, i'm off to take pictures of the snow! hooray!
posted by kat thompson at 5:29 AM

so, i'm not sure if i should laugh at the wave of paranoia that this has set off, or thank the lord i'm not anywhere near home right now. that's a little more than creepy.

four things on today's plate: snow, cranberries, a new teacher, and the hermitage.

first, snow: i wish i was kidding, but yesterday (that's october 3 for the calendar-impaired), i saw snow for the first time. it only lasted two minutes, but the fact is that there was snow on my jacket. in october. unreal! i love it!

second: cranberries. tatiana bought at least five pounds of cranberries, and they're everywhere - but this is way better than pickles, because she makes juice and jam out of them, and pastries filled with them. i'm in heaven. i don't think i'll ever get tired of them - famous last words, i know...

third: new teacher. so we now have a 'reading' class on fridays, which is fine with me because it means i'm finally reading 'classics' untranslated, in russian, which is an area in which i know i lack severely. the problem is that we now have a third teacher who doesn't believe in the goodness of the pereriv, or break. usually about an hour and a half into class we take a ten-minute break to get food, use the bathroom, etc. etc., but not today - oh no, she wants to go for three hours without break and end early! i'm not sure how i like this - it's hard for me to concentrate on one thing for three straight hours (certain things excepted, like basketball, football, and the first season of 'oz').. but, we'll see.

lastly, i spent a boatload of time in the hermitage on tuesday, and the highlight was definitely this great exhibition. unfortunately, the best pieces (in my opinion) aren't represented on the webpage, but it's a fascinating exhibit with an even more fascinating background story.

that's it for now - oh yeah, happy ten-four!

posted by kat thompson at 4:55 AM

first: i'd like to wish a very happy 22nd to my dear friend melissa. mwah!

second: this is so very, very true (it was borrowed from this blog): "no amount of waxing poetic about the poetry and beauty of baseball is going to make her give a shit whether the cubs win today." there you have it. the rest of sour bob's blog is pretty amusing and thought-provoking [of course it is, or else i wouldn't have linked to it!], so have a look around.

so... major gossip for you fans of the dimitry saga! i found out from dave on saturday night [he apparently knows more about my host family than i do, since our host moms talk to one another] that dimitry is *moving out* of the apartment - and moving into another apartment with anya, his girlfriend, who is sixteen, not seventeen. apparently the place they're moving into used to belong to her parents, and if i understood tatiana correctly (i broke down and asked her yesterday), it doesn't have hot water, or heat, or windows that work too well in blocking cold air. i'm not entirely sure where this place is - it's either around the corner near the dorms, or about a thirty-minute bus ride across to the neighboring island. in any case, what i do know for sure is that dimitry's taking the television that's currently in my room with him - which makes perfect sense, because the room i'm in used to be his own bedroom. it's probably for the better that the tv is going with him, but i'm going to miss my daily news dose. if all else fails, i guess i'll study more {gasp!]. sigh.

i didn't realize until yesterday how thin the walls in the apartment building are - i was able to hear the guy who lives *three doors down* drilling a hole into something (i don't know exactly what was going on, only that the drill he was using sounded like a person with explosive diarrhea - who knows, maybe he drank the tap water?), and as i was doing homework i was serenaded by the sounds of the kid downstairs playing the supremes' "my world is empty without you" on the piano for the better part of two hours. just the chorus, over and over - seems he got the piano for his birthday, and he's just now starting to play it. he's not bad, but a little variety might be nice...?

oh, yeah: so dave's also got this russian girlfriend, whom he met through a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend. she works at a casino and knows no english, which is amusing because dave happens to know very little russian. it's kind of cute, since they're not technically dating yet according to him, but what irks me is that he refers to her as his "proto-girlfriend". what is she, a robot? "pseudo-" i can see, but "proto-"? that sounds fishy to me, but then, what do i know?

today's craving: green onions. sooo tasty!


posted by kat thompson at 5:35 AM

first of all: you guys know i can't do math, so i hope you'll forgive me when i report that i just realized that seventy rubles is more like two dollars and change. still, heck of a deal!

today's brief anecdote: i've finally been hit on by the token sketchy drunken russian guy! megan and i went to a 'small party' in the student dorms last night - justin, who was throwing it (ie bought all the beer and most of the food) estimated that about twenty people would show up, so i'm sure he was surprised when over twice that number came. whoops. anyways, this guy andreii who introduced himself to me by spilling his beer onto my pants leg then thought it a good idea to go through about a third of a bottle of vodka and try to carry on a conversation with me. that didn't get too far, though, since he was so creepy that i thought it better to move away. far away, to the other side of the room, where i met this indonesian kid named enrique [yes, he knows it's a spanish name, and he admits that his parents are weird], and we talked about america and globalization for a long time. definitely an odd evening, but i won't be opposed to attending another such gathering.

for the curious, i've finally washed my jeans so they wouldn't get up and run away. you know, washing jeans by hand isn't so bad - they're actually almost dry, about twenty-four hours after the fact. i think i could definitely get used to this!

that's all i've got for today - on the off chance that danny isaacs is reading this, happy birthday, old man! [wink]
posted by kat thompson at 9:03 AM

well. today's source of amusement, from yesterday's edition of the st petersburg times, can be found here. this guy is a genius! do a google search for chris floyd, and sit back and watch the trainwreck. also amusing was the story of miss universe's recent sacking - not only for the fact that the author used the word "sacking" [where are we again, a monty python film?!], but also for the fact that this girl is on this month's cover of "cosmopolitan st. petersburg". it's like the sports illustrated curse!

anyways - so tonight i went to the st.petersburg philharmonic to see a concert celebrating shostakovich, conducted by his son dimitry. it was amazing, in a word - the acoustics in the bolshoy zal (where the philharmonic plays) were outstanding. just - everything was great! we had seats in the seventeenth row, at the great price of seventy rubles, or about a dollar and ten cents. unbelievable! granted, i was a little taken aback at the clueless american woman behind us who not only asked her poor companion who was playing tonight, but then proceeded to tell him that she had been looking so long for (in the words of dave barry, i swear i am not making this up) "a good philharmonica". i think her search might go on a bit longer than she hopes.... oy.

oh yeah: i got good news about my potential niece or nephew today, in that the situation appears to be turning out for the better. keep thy fingers crossed!

today's random tidbit: did you know that when new cars are made in russia, orthodox priests bless the cars before they roll off the assembly line? i love this country! [grin]


posted by kat thompson at 2:36 PM

oooooooook.

first things first: no matter how good of an idea it may seem to be, don't use your teaspoon to stir up your cherry yogurt and then put the spoon back in the tea. the resulting flavor will be closer to liquid menthol than actual tea, and you just might spit it across the table, as i nearly did the other day. whoops. also, if there's a photo album lying out in plain sight and you can see that the first picture contains an unknown girl, do not, i repeat, do not pick it up to peruse said album to try and find out who she might be. otherwise, you'll find out that she's one of dimitry's ex-girlfriends and that he's taken the liberty of photographing her, and other females, in very skimpy underwear. this is what i get for being curious, apparently.

so, the weekend: i saw the botanical gardens on the petrograd side and went back to the peter and paul fortress with megan and dave, all on saturday. at the fortress there was an exhibit of post-sept. 11 photos from new york by this guy whose last name escapes me at the moment - it's a traveling exhibit and at some point it's going back to the u.s. pretty neat stuff. the gardens were nice - the air was fresh, and what was still in bloom was pretty. better to go back in the late spring, though.the entire petrograd side that we saw was pretty nice - quiet, less congested, not a bad place to live, methinks.

jesse's misadventures have been continuing in class - thankfully, there's another american who just came into our class who offsets him nicely. his name's justin, he's from nashville, and he's going for a phd in economics and he's over here just to learn the language, i guess. he's the perfect southern gentleman - opens doors, says 'ma'am' and such, and has that inimitable way of speaking that renders his russian almost unlistenable. right now it's funny more than anything else, and i know i'm not one to talk since my pronunciation will always be far from perfect, but still...

speaking of class: i feel like i'm eleven and have just been told that we're moving across town for some arbitrary reason - my class was plucked from the nice, warm haven of our previous building (where all my friends have class! and there's a nice cheap cafe on my floor!) and plopped into a not-so-warm, prison-like building where the philological faculty is located. it's about a twenty-minute walk further from the metro, and class starts at 9:00 sharp, not 9:30, which means i have to wake up earlier, yadda yadda... argh! today wasn't bad, but my normal conversation teacher has been sick for the past week and today we had the pronunciation nazi (tm) who, when correcting our speech, drew out her vowels in such dramatic fashion that i started to think i was being taught by an owl. for example: the word "nastayashi" (which means 'real') became "nastayaaaaaaaaaaaashi", so that the actual utterance of the word went from taking two seconds to about eight or nine. after a while, this became more amusing than annoying, but i couldn't help thinking she was going to swoop and pounce at any second.

one note about pronunciation: i really feel for the asian kids who are here studying russian. i hope i don't sound callous or prejudiced, but i've noticed that they have a really hard time with the sounds 'tee', 'dee', 'vee', 'ts', 'ch', 'shch', and 'r'. when some of the kids in my class try to talk at a normal rate, their words come out sort of jumbled and i can't really understand them. i guess a native russian speaker would be able to discern what they're getting at, but it really must be hard for them to work on pronouncing those sounds. again, my pronunciation is far from perfect, and sometimes i find it hard, so i can't even imagine what it's like for them. oy.

this week's idiosyncrasy of the apartment: the front door. when i came home on saturday and pieces of the door were lying in the foyer, i figured that maybe tatiana had finally fixed it (from my room i later heard much sawing, drilling, and cursing). now that i've gotten the 'how to work the door in cold weather' tutorial, things are ok, but i can't exactly say that the door has been fixed. the thing hates me, i'm convinced; it's as if it knows i don't quite belong!

oh yeah: the heat in our building was finally turned on last night! hooray and rejoicing! granted, i couldn't really tell last night apart from putting my hand on the pipe to ensure that it was, in fact, warm, but the point is that the cold spell (hopefully) is over.

final tidbit: i'm not sure why, but this amuses me. how much you want to bet it was an inside job?
posted by kat thompson at 5:30 AM

erm... well, this is comforting...

so... yeah. there's a bit of a complication with gini's pregnancy, about which i won't know more until after the weekend. i hope and pray that things will turn out for the best, and i wish i could be there to offer some comfort in person. really, i'm speechless beyond that. dang.

what's new: i bought laundry detergent and softener, so hopefully my underwear won't be so stiff the next time i do laundry. it rained all day wednesday and thursday, which prompted me to go straight home after class and curl up under the blankets with my homework and, yes, i admit, with my russian "cosmopolitan". i can't understand much of it, but from what i do, i gather that it's about as profound and thought-provoking as the english edition (ie, not at all). perfect! the clouds broke up on thursday evening and today it was fairly nice, although when i woke up this morning it was 0.8 degrees outside. that's roughly 34 degrees by fahrenheit standards. that's fine with me, even if they haven't turned the heat on in our building and probably won't for a while - as long as there's hot water, it can be 30 below for all i care. let's see... i met another american who lives across the street from my apartment; his name is dave and he's from the san francisco/bay area, although he grew up in the lovely suburb of oxon hills, maryland. but hey - he knows where 270 is! he's a computer programmer, and you can kind of tell because he has this sort of desperate, needy, not-so-good-with-socializing edge to him, although he is really nice. not sure how old he is, but he can't be older than 30. if nothing else, he's someone with which to converse in english, when our russian fails us.

speaking of failing russian: so there's this kid in my class named jesse; he's 21, from ohio, and of the staunch republican "our country is the best" mindset. [note: i have no problems with republicans, when they have the good sense to keep their darn mouths shut [wink!]] he's also rather full of himself, which is surprising coming from someone who went to the army before college. anyways, he used to be in dave's class [dave is in the beginning level] but decided that it was moving too slow for him, so he moved into my class. upon hearing this last week, i thought, "great, he's gonna upstage the rest of us and make us look like bumbling fools", but that was not the case, as he soon settled into the same mistake-making pattern as the rest of us. i thought, ok, fine, he's right where he belongs. well, today we finished the book we'd been working on, and, logically enough, we're moving on to the next book on monday. today jesse decided, in front of everyone else in my class, that we as a group weren't ready to move on because we hadn't yet mastered the grammar in the current book. [this being based on the fact that we had some problems with a particular grammatical point yesterday, and class went kinda slow today] he then proceeded to point out that both myself and the koreans in the group were all making mistakes, and while he did at least admit that he, too, was making mistakes, he decided that this was basis enough for a) us not to move on yet so we could review more, and b) him to pull one of the koreans aside and tell him how badly he spoke. my poor teacher, bless her heart - she is so nice and so patient with us, even when we do dumb stuff, and she was defending us and saying that we'll be ok to work with the next book, and that if jesse wanted more practice, he should study more at home, and that we would probably get bored with repeating more of the grammar that we'd just finished reviewing - all of which i agree with, but couldn't quite express, as i just wanted to get out of that room before i smacked the kid upside the head. i felt like telling him that if he wanted to re-review the grammar, he should go back to his original group. i could see his point, i guess, but i see no reason to hold back and then berate the entire group just for one person! the nerve of some people... really. sometimes you need a bit of a push to improve your language skills, and if this kid doesn't see it that way, then he should find somewhere else to learn, in my opinion. ugh. sorry for the rant there.

i caved in and ate lunch at a pizza hut today - mind you, the russian food i'm eating is excellent, but i just had this awful craving, and they had hawaiian pizza. unreal!

i found some great kitschy old soviet postcards in the university bookstore, so those should be hitting the mailboxes stateside at some point. keep thine eyes peeled.

for those in charlottesville: happy homecoming! enjoy the toga party...




posted by kat thompson at 10:51 AM

today's quick post: it's raining buckets outside and it's cold, so as soon as i send this i'm going home to have some tea and do my homework. and snuggle under the covers... perhaps with the october issue of 'cosmo' in russian. hee!

so, the ballet last night was fantastic! i couldn't believe how good it was. we got great seats for only $6, so i think it goes without saying that i'll be seeing a lot more stuff there in the future.

that's all for today, i guess. did you know that in japan, if a woman gives a man a necktie as a gift, it means she's agreed to marry him? i didn't know that either. interesting.

do svidanya...

posted by kat thompson at 6:14 AM

first of all, i hope this isn't the first time anyone in my family's hearing this: my sister gini is pregnant!! words cannot express how excited and happy i am...!! hoooray! we'll find out on thursday how far along she is. this is too cool! congrats!!

anyways - so there was a rather funny article in the monthly magazine published here called "pulse" about the four types of russian men that can be found in petersburg. i wish it was online, so i could link to it, but it's not - in any case, it was so hilariously true, and seeing dimitry tonight reminded me of that article and i almost choked on my cabbage soup. [yes mom, you read that right: i'm eating cabbage soup and liking it!] he's the quintessential quasi-euro-trash-discotheque-going young russian man of today:
he owns almost exclusively black clothing, most of it a size too small, yet he insists on wearing snow-white sneakers and a white jacket every time he goes out. it's all good, until he puts the shoes on. i fail to understand this in any way. he's been talking to me more, but i suspect that a barrier was broken between us last thursday when i did laundry and hung my bras in the bathroom to dry - i know he saw them at some point, since they took a couple of days to dry and i would hope he went into the bathroom to wash his hands at least once over those 48 hours. and before anyone asks, i would have hung the bras in my little sunroom, but all of my underwear was already out there. i don't want to go imposing my panties on these people - not yet, at least.

laundry, speaking of, was this weekend's great adventure. i've figured out that in addition to the powder detergent, it is necessary to also add a sort of "clothes-conditioner" to the wash basin so that one does not have the cardboard underwear i ended up with on saturday. i wash all my unmentionables by hand, and tatiana washes my shirts and pants in the washing machine. everything dries by hand, but that which is machine washed tends to be a little more soft than that which is hand washed. it's an interesting system, but at least it works, for now. it's all part of the big adjustment...

so back to dimitry: the girl who's over all the time is, in fact, his girlfriend, although according to tatiana this definition seems to change on a daily basis. her name is anya, she's seventeen [what a cradle-robber he is!], i don't know if she goes to school, and she's one of those slightly hysterical girls who wears too much silver eyeshadow, even in the middle of the day. granted, that's not abnormal here, since it seems that most women have to put on four pounds of makeup before they run to the corner market to pick up some toothpaste. mind you, i'm not complaining; i'm just relating how it is. perhaps the eyeshadow is preventing her from thinking clearly, because i can hear her sobbing hysterically and throwing things (!) one minute and then laughing - shrieking is probably a better term for the sound that emanates from her mouth - the next. i'm completely clueless.

so, the weekend: didn't amount to much. thursday was spent at the zoological museum, which was huge, full of every stuffed animal you can imagine and more, and more than a bit creepy. but hey, it was free! on friday night megan and i went out drinking, which simply involoved some beer and some vodka, both of which were very cheap, very good, and did the trick nicely. on saturday i got a whirlwind tour of the peter and paul fortress and cathedral, and st. isaac's cathedral, both of which merit repeat visits. in one museum of the peter and paul fortress there's an exhibit of photos from a new york photographer from sept. 11 that i want to see, as well as the space and rocket museum and more of the cathedral. st. isaac's is crazy inside - the word 'opulent' doesn't begin to describe it. and, the view from the top looking out over the city is incredible - on a clear day, it seems you can see forever. bla bla bla. on sunday i meant to get up and go see a show jumping competition on a nearby island, but i overslept and missed it. whoops. i went to the alexander nevsky monastery today and saw the graves of many famous people- tchaikovksy, dostoevsky, and the like. pretty neat.
and tomorrow, i'm going to see the ballet 'swan lake' at the rimsky-korsakov conservatory. whew!

anyways... it's odd, but the two things i miss most right now are goth clubbing and driving my car. not that i went clubbing all that often at home, but i've yet to find a place here that plays that sort of music - the techno here barely passes for listenable as is. and while i wouldn't say i miss traffic at all, i do miss the physical act of driving stella, although there's no way you'd get me to turn her loose on these streets. also, i don't know why i didn't bring my portable cd player with me - i have my cd's, but nothing to listen to them with [the cd player, along with the playstation, grrr!, is in the den where the family sleeps]. not even headphones. it's odd - there's plenty of american music to be heard if you know where to go, but i kinda miss my cd's keeping me company. i mean... i can only hear eminem's 'without me' so many times in a week...

that's it for now - more at the end of the week! p.s. hi gordon, and everyone at the asylum - i miss you guys!


posted by kat thompson at 3:17 PM

ok, so my football withdrawal is apparently so bad that a couple of nights ago i dreamed that i was on uva's football team. granted, so was everyone i used to live with at the asylum, and we were the most ragtag bunch of misfits one's ever seen at doak campbell stadium (of course we were playing fsu!), but it was still a bit disconcerting.

let's see... i went to the hermitage on tuesday. suffice to say, i'll need to return about four hundred times to soak in everything that's there. i only saw one floor, and it was mostly italian, spanish, flemish, and dutch paintings, with a few state rooms thrown in for good, opulent measure. absolutely amazing. it was sort of convenient when i went back there yesterday with a tour group from the program i'm here with - too bad that we were supposed to do a city tour and they changed the itinerary at the last minute, so we're doing the city tour on saturday and we did the hermitage yesterday. only two of us got this memo, so it was a small tour. but, it was still rather informative, and it was nice to be with someone who knew where she was going.

yesterday there was a memorial service at the kazan cathedral. the usual orthodox incense, and chanting, and singing - kind of haunting, but i like listening to it - by the time megan and i got there after class, it was mostly over, but we lit candles after it was over. and cried. i thought i'd be ok, but i was wrong. it wasn't made into a huge deal or anything in the city, but that didn't surprise me too much. before we went in, however, a cameraman with the 'rossiya' channel accosted us and interviewed poor megan, who did exactly what i would have done: panicked and forgot almost everything useful to say. thankfully, they didn't want to talk to me, but still... you know?

the weather's gotten nice and chilly - from 22 degrees to 12 in one day! that's equivalent to going from the 70s to the 50s overnight. good thing i've got all these coats to wear.

emily has graciously volunteered to put up a web page of my photos from russia when i get them sent home - i'll let everyone know when that happens. could be awhile, since i have yet to finish the first roll. or buy more film. hmmm....

well, i'm off to write some more email and then check out the zoological museum. an entire floor of insects! here i come! =)
posted by kat thompson at 6:06 AM

so.... the liver has exacted its revenge. it must have read my post about me not liking it, and it showed up again in last night's dinner. and made me sick for most of last night - not throwing-up sick, but stomach-cramps-that-keep-you-up-all-night sick. needless to say, i wasn't entirely thrilled when the alarm went off at 7:30 (for those of you back home, that's 11:30 pm - when most of you are either starting your homework or thinking about going to sleep).

speaking of food again - let me go off on a slight illustratory tangent. anyone who watches 'malcolm in the middle' - do you remember the episode where dewey was terrorized by the evil elf lawn ornament; everywhere he turned, there it was staring at him? well, i'm experiencing the same thing with these damned pots and jars of pickles and gherkins around the kitchen. i open the fridge - there they are, leering at me. i go to open the door to the sunroom - there they are again, looking up at me from a pot on the windowsill. i'm very much afraid of what they intend to do, such as show up on my dinner plate one night. most things i can suck up and eat for the sake of politeness, but pickles absolutely are not one of them.

anyways. so this past weekend i went to peterhof, which is peter the first's palace and surrounding park that he built about 30 miles west of petersburg, on the coast of the gulf of finland. absolutely beautiful out there - the fountains were all amazing! the rooms in the great palace were breathtaking - it must have been nice to have that kind of money. i think next is a trip to pushkin, to see more of the same. that was saturday; sunday i did a whole lotta nothing. you know, it's rather difficult to not have football to watch on sundays anymore - i read two entire books yesterday, and only went out in the evening, to buy a card for the metro and find the beach at the end of my street. by beach i mean small deposit of sand that has been taken over by some trash, people having bonfires, and a couple of beer stands - but the sunset view over the gulf is pretty nice.

hey, speaking of water: i've had some interesting shower experiences of late. i learned the hard way on friday morning that if tatiana ever asks me if i want hot water on a thursday night, my answer is to be 'yes', because on the first friday of every month, they turn off the hot water in our building, for reasons completely unknown to me. this past thursday our conversation went something along the lines of 'do you want hot water?' 'no, thanks' *shrug* 'ok, have it your way'.... fast forward to friday morning and me doing my best not to scream as the frigid water is running down my back... mmm, yeah. not doing that again. kinda makes me wary of showering on any friday at all. and today, the light in the bathroom was broken, so i had to shower in the dark. i'm blind as a bat as is, so this didn't help my situation of not being able to see. i got it right, mostly, but it was an odd experience.

today i went to the russian museum after class, which was interesting. i think i liked the icons and the wooden toys the best, although karl brulliov's "last day of pompeii" was pretty impressive. it definitely warrants another visit when i have more time. i got in for free, which helps. tomorrow, i plan on starting my conquest of the hermitage, into which i also gain free admittance. this makes me very happy.

oh, by the way: dimitry has his own tapochki, so i must be wearing an old pair of his. ...or of his deadbeat dad's. that's a creepy thought, no?

this weekend's moment of zen: "american pie" dubbed into russian. almost as good as "police academy 4"... almost.

dinnertime!
posted by kat thompson at 9:44 AM

if you've emailed me in the past day or two, hang on a bit for a response - for some reason i'm having trouble accessing my email right now. sorry guys.

mmm.... so i woke up today to the pervasive stench of smoke, and wondered what exactly was for breakfast. as i found out by looking out the window, one had nothing to do with the other, since the air was thick with smoke from forest fires from nearby towns - it just happens to be blowing this way. it's kinda cool because you can't see a damn thing (ie from the university, you certainly can't see st. isaac's or the hermitage), but at the same time, it's making breathing a little hard. although, it hasn't deterred anyone from being outside, really, oddly enough.

today i finally got my student id card - i'm official! yay! this means i can now get into museums for uber-cheap - for example, today's venture into the kunstkammer (peter the great's ethnological and anthropological museum) cost a mere 20 rubles, or about 75 cents, as opposed to close to 200 rubles (about $6) for foreigners. i love it! the museum itself was wacky- there are rooms full of neat stuff on indigenous peoples of asia, africa, indonesia, and native america, which are really cool, but everyone goes to see the freaks and derelicts, most of which are lovingly preserved in jars of formaldehyde. truly astounding.

so, some more about tatiana and dimitry, for the curious ones of you: i think that dimitry resents me because a) i think i'm sleeping in his room, which i think has been occupied by a foreign student for the better part of the last ten years [i think this is the major supplement to his income, which supports the family, because as far as i can tell. tatiana doesn't work during the day]; b) i'm also fairly sure that i'm using his tapochki, or slippers that one puts on when one enters a russian home so as not to track dirt in the house - the ones i'm using are far too large for me, but tatiana has told me that she's going to teach me how to sew my own - !; and c) whenever i'm around he sort of disappears, and vice versa. he's always got some girl over who laughs a lot - i assume she's his girlfriend, but who knows? interesting. tatiana smokes, which doesn't much bother me since it's only her that does it, but she's got this godawful ashtray that she uses - it's a dog's head, and to open it to get to the ashtray part you have to unhinge the dog's head at the jaw, thus splitting its face clean in half. i don't know why this bothers me, but it does. also, we've got this sort of ritual now - there's a really bad talk show called "okna" [windows] [think jerry springer, in russian, and with a little more audience interaction] that we usually watch together while i eat dinner. kinda funny.

the birds are still one of my favorite things about the apartment - they remind me of aj, that stupid parakeet that dad used to have. i remember he would always fly around and land on your head, and usually dig his claws into your skull while cawing victoriously. he met his fate by divebombing into an open crockpot - while it was cooking something, mind you - and even though i know these two birds are smarter than that, i still wait for it to happen. oh, i was wrong about the names - one is masha, but the other one is kyesha, not kisha. in any case, it's odd to have bird feathers swirling around rather than cat hairs, but i kind of enjoy their squawking and such.

well, dinner calls. more after the weekend, probably...


posted by kat thompson at 10:58 AM

well.... today finds me dirty and tired, but that's only because i've been walking around all day. i found alexander park and, inadvertently, cafe salkhino, which i'll have to check out soon per dr. herman's recommendation.

a few observations:

-everyone here uses cell phones, much more so prevalently than in the united states. yet for some reason it's not such a bother here, at least to me - maybe it's because i can't understand sorority-speak in russian, if there is such a thing. let me tell you, btw, it's sooo nice to not have a greek system of any sort here - it remains a totally foreign concept. thank god.

-all the guide books i read noted that the roads and sidewalks here aren't in the best shape. that's simply because the drivers here bloody kamikazes - yet they're all good enough drivers that they never ever hit each other. a car's more likely to break down and then get fixed by its driver than get hit. and sidewalks are merely suggestions for where the road ends and the pedestrian area begins - crossing streets here is not for the faint-hearted. neither is the metro, whose escalators are steeper than the one at rosslyn. speaking of the metro - what a grand clusterfuck. if i ever need reminding that there are over 5 million people living in this city, i only need to take the metro.

-outdoor weekday weddings apparently are rather popular. or at least by the bronze horseman and the nose of the strelka (which is the tip of the island on which i live, near the university - i spent a good amount of time there today in a lovely little enclave called birzheny sad [garden]). the bronze horseman i can understand, since it's supposedly good luck for newlyweds to kiss under the statue - or something, i'm ashamed to admit i've forgotten the custom - but at the tip of the island? well, it is lovely, but still... in any event, the sheer amount of broken glass lying around both sites is amusing [at russian weddings it's customary for the bride and groom to each throw a glass behind them after all is said and done. so if someone invites you to a russian wedding, i guess, don't stand right behind the wedding party]

-rammstein is *hugely* popular here. please, don't ask me to explain this. i had to do a double take this morning when i passed a man driving what looked like a motorized horse-and-carriage type thing, except there was no horse in front of it and in the back, where presumably one would sit, there was a blow-up doll wearing full winter gear - anyways, out of this man's car was blaring some rammstein song, whose name i don't know - but he did, as he was enthusiastically bobbing his head along.

-i've grown accustomed to eating meat at least twice a day - you can imagine the damage that's doing to my digestive system. at least the pipes are being kept clean...

-speaking of pipes, i darn near broke the toilet at home the other day when i pulled the knob to flush it and the knob popped off - the lever was still up and the water just kept coming and coming and... ack! i finally gathered my wits and got the wherewithal to push the lever down, and thankfully it wasn't too late, but it was a bit disconcerting. other things i've done wrong include not knowing what the word for 'liver' was and indicating at the supermarket that yes, i did indeed like "pechen", only to find out the next night at dinner that no, i don't much like liver, not at all, in fact. the smell reminded me of the incense they use at church back home. so, that was an interesting meal.

-speaking of meals again, it's kind of odd - i don't really miss american food, although i wouldn't mind getting a shipment of tuna casserole in the mail. [wink] i'm getting used to having tea twice a day, and this morning i had it with jam [no, i'm not in england, not yet at least!]. i'm also starting to have to like cucumbers and tomatoes, since they appear in almost every meal. see mom, i'm eating my vegetables!

-i've seen the evil twins of so, so many people since i got here. to name a few: jrc, gorski, christine owen (sorry guys, only kim gets those), huey lewis, aunt dot [one of tatiana's friends looks exactly like her - i almost fell over when i realized who she looked like!]... i'm sure there are bunches more, but i forget them almost as soon as i see them. considering how many people i see in a given day, that shouldn't be too surprising.

that's it for now, i suppose...
posted by kat thompson at 11:02 AM