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