whoa... blogger completely rehauled their... well, everything. sure, wait until i leave to make things better. pbbbllltt!

last day in st petersburg: i didn't get home until 430 this morning, because jess and justin and i were too busy drinking and talking and drinking and talking and watching the sun set and then rise three hours later for me to go home any earlier. i picked up the last real shaverma ever on the way home, and crashed right at 5.

i was not pleased when my body decided at 830 am that i'd had enough sleep and it was time to get up, but i was unable to fall back into hungover bliss, so the rehydration process began. i had some yummy lemon cake and a banana for breakfast, and then set about packing. hmmm... well, it all fits, but any souvenirs i buy in london and ireland are going to have to be very, very small. oh well.

to avoid thinking about a possible repacking, i then went downtown and had a lovely time watching the gypsies rob unknowing tourists, eating ice cream, strolling up and down and all around, and sitting in a garden watching the world go by. today was one of those perfect cloudless days with a slight breeze that simply makes you forget that there's a world outside of what you can see around you, and one that makes you never want to leave where you are.

after this post, i'm sending some emails and then going home to eat, shower, and gather up the last of my stuff. leaving seems surreal, but then, the past ten months in general have been surreal.

i'll be home july 13, and will be back online shortly thereafter. until then, happy july 4th, happy birthday to kim, and pray that mom and i get home in one piece without having started any international incidents.

i'm gonna miss this place. well, um, da svidanya, i guess.

current mood: mellow again
current music: moby/'why does my heart feel so bad?'
posted by kat thompson at 9:48 AM

alas, myishka is no longer in heat and has taken to swatting at my ankles again. which would be fine if i hadn't already torn them up scratching myself. i think she likes hearing someone else howl for a change.

monday i ate at my favorite cafe for the last time; i was alone, and was able to enjoy fully a hot plate of khachapuri (cheesy bread, but better) and a glass of georgian red wine. yesterday was a beautiful day so i spent most of it outside, laughing at the tourists, as well as waiting in line to get into the hermitage - something i've never had to do before. i actually spent more time waiting to get in than i did inside the musuem, since i'd only wanted to see this one exhibit that opened on saturday. as i was waiting, a very obnoxious kid from milwaukee made my acquaintance and bitched at length about the reasons he hates russia. so, i asked, why did you come here if you don't like it? oh, he said, it's one of those things i just thought i should do, you know, how everyone just has to go to europe or some other far-off place at least once in their lives, as he rolled his eyes and gave me that you-know? smile. i shook my head, no, i don't know, i came here to study and learn and drink a little. (heh heh) it's people like him that give american tourists a bad name - why can't they really just stay home?

last night i saw moby at the ice palace. it was almost as cathartic and seminal as seeing pearl jam for the first time, except moby only played for ninety minutes, which left me feeling cheated somehow. it was a good vibe, though, since everyone in the room had been waiting years to see him - i assume this was his first ever show in st petersburg. according to his website, he was duly impressed by the city. yay. his two best songs were 'porcelain' and 'bring back my happiness', although '18' was a close third.

today i got all my certificates and passport and visa stuff picked up and done with, so now all i have to do is buy some vodka, drink some beer with the boys tonight, pack, and clean my room. my last post from the frozen tundra will be tomorrow afternoon, after three out of those four things are done.

current mood: mellow
posted by kat thompson at 7:51 AM

too funny!

dima's kitten, myishka, is now a cat, as she's been in heat since thursday. this is the first time either dima or tanya has been around a cat in heat, and it's rather amusing since they have no idea what to do with her. the following is an approximate transcript of the conversation tanya and i had on thursday evening at dinner:

tanya: you've got cats at home, right?
me: yeah, two, and they both went through heat before we spayed them.
t: how long does this last?
m: depending on the cat, five days to a week, every month or so, sometimes every other month.
t: [jaw drops] a week?! good lord... (yes, she actually did say 'gospodi' here)
m: maybe. this is her first time, so it might be shorter than that...

[a little later on]
tanya: ok, so when your cats were spayed, did they wrap a bandage around their stomachs to help the stitches heal?
me: yeah, when my sister's cat got spayed she got the bandage, but when my cat got spayed she had to wear this collar that looked like a lampshade -
t: a what?
m: a lampshade, so she couldn't turn her head and get to the stitches. do they do that here?
t: i don't know. i hope not. i don't want myishka to wear a lampshade around her neck!
m: but it looks really funny. you could videotape it for later...
[at this point myishka, as if eavesdropping, began a fresh round of caterwauling]

i think my favorite thing she does is stretch herself out in front of the front door with her hind legs splayed out into the air, as if she's saying "come on in, i'm ready!" the poor thing has no idea what's happening to her, and she goes nuts every time dima comes home. sniffing his shoes, curling herself around his legs, etc. etc.

the best part of this, though, is that on friday tanya came back from the store with these pills that they sell for cats and dogs going through heat. she showed them to me, and i was amusingly horrified to see that they were called, literally, anti-sex pills. i know more than a few humans who would benefit from the use of such pills, if they existed for us...

yesterday's summer solstice sunshine total: nineteen hours and fifty-one minutes. thank god the days now get shorter!

current mood: extremely itchy (stupid mosquitoes)
posted by kat thompson at 10:26 AM

i spent my afternoon shopping with a friend and sitting in an outdoor cafe on nevsky prospect, sipping tea and giggling at the tourists. they're so cute. i don't want to go home yet....

as promised, the list of things i will miss about st petersburg:

ice cream - real shaverma - people driving on sidewalks - crazy babushkas - crazy people in general, for that matter - bliny from teremok, the best bliny stand in the world - the low standard of living (ie everything is cheap... beer, CDs, etc) - "ostorozhno, dvyeri zakruvayutsa" ("careful, doors closing") - metro service every 1-2 minutes - taking private taxis - the boys at the computer center - the rumble trams make on the road when they pass - drinking tea at least twice a day - the awful tv show "okna" and its host, dimitry nagiev - sitting in my balcony with my flowers and the window open, watching people pass by below - well-behaved stray dogs - hearing garbage go tumbling down the trash chute - being able to eat and drink on public transportation - the complete and utter lack of open-container laws - the neva, its canals, and all the bridges - extremely slack views towards working more than is absolutely necessary - extraordinarily obvious product placement on tv shows - people with gold teeth - the police - "mozhno poznakomitsa?" ("can we get acquainted?") - yummy soups of all sorts - being called "dyevushka" (literally "girl") - dorm parties - hearing the word "gospodi!" (depending on your source, "good heavens" or "good lord!") - seeing nudity on tv - the sounds of neighbors' "remont" ("repairs") (this word is now permanently a part of my english vocabulary) - walking everywhere - flowers everywhere - people starting conversations... everywhere - old ladies with purple hair - my purple plaid bedsheets - watching people run for buses and trams and such - the babushka mafia (tm) - the ever-changing penciled-in eyebrows of my korean classmate, hee-chung - the weather music on channel one - having no knowledge of cnn and the idiotic news from the west - the blind-person traffic signal sound at the crosswalk near the metro - my daily two-word quota with dima, usually 'good afternoon' or 'good evening' - hanging clothes on the hot pipe

...and the list of things i will not miss: (you may notice some similarities with the former)

eating meat twice a day - crappy sidewalks and roads (yay crumbling infrastructure!) - people driving on sidewalks - people with body odor and/or halitosis - washing clothes in the bathtub - not having a dryer! - being hit on by sleazy russian guys - being stared down by russian women - the pointy witch shoes that seemingly all russian women wear - and, womankind's refusal to cut her collective bangs - garlic, garlic everywhere - it being windy all the time - awful pop and rock music - crazy homeless people - dirt flying everywhere - that smell of fish and stale cabbage - expensive tampons - unhelpful staff - street artists/etc who bark at me unsolicitedly in english - completely arbitrary means of getting things done - extremely slack views towards working more than is absolutely necessary - lack of constant water temperature - dirty looks when trying to break 500- and 1000-ruble notes - paying over a dollar an hour for the internet - rotary telephones - "kak mozhno interpretirovat?" ("how can this be interpreted?", my grammar teacher's favorite saying) - places being closed for lunch - pillow feathers stabbing me in the head - being cold all the time - gypsies - walking on ice and through four-inch-deep puddles - people starting conversations... everywhere - people smelling like meat and/or alcohol, especially at nine o'clock in the morning - old people who stand over you and breathe on you/clear their throats at you on buses/etc - the babushka mafia (tm) - having to check my coat everywhere i go - people smacking their lips constantly - metro molesters - not being able to drink the tap water

yesterday was my last day of class. my time here is running away from me like a horse who's just torn the lead rope out of my hand and has taken off down the hill.

sigh. ::staples hand to back of forehead::

current mood: mischievous
current music: red hot chili peppers/"californication"
posted by kat thompson at 9:52 AM

bit by bit, blow by blow...

weekend: tanya and dima and i went to see babushka at her apartment in a town called siverskiy, about an hour and a half south of the city by train. we got there late saturday afternoon and spent the evening making shashlyk - a sort of equivalent to shish kebabs - and drinking vodka in the forest. and in keeping with the food chain, we served as dinner to more than a few mosquitoes. i've never seen skeeters this freakishly huge, which was the one thing that helped me swat them away before they sunk in for a bite. normal skeeters i don't see until it's too late, but these were huge and therefore shoo-away-able. on sunday the family went out to the town cemetery to lay flowers on dead relatives' graves for trinity sunday, and i was left with a key to the front doors and the address of the apartment, and was told 'don't get lost'. in order to not get lost, i made a grand total of one turn, and that was left out of the apartment complex and down the road. i wanted to see how far i could get in ninety minutes, and then i was going to simply turn around and come back home. twenty minutes into enjoying the greenery, fresh air, and colorful little houses with laundry hanging in the yard, the skies opened up mercilessly, and down came rain and hail. yes, hail. i was without umbrella and in non-waterproof sneakers, so within five minutes i'd been soaked to the bone. looking around during the downpour, i felt like i was in florida, what with all the rain and the wet trees and the water running down the road and the old people... but without the palmetto bugs and the humidity. i turned around and ran back home, and of course half an hour after i'd stripped and changed back into my pajamas, the blasted sun came back out to taunt me. 'you only brought one pair of pants, silly!' it said. 'they're wet now, and you can't come out and play! ha ha ha ha!'

grrrr.

on monday i got a very pleasant surprise in class, as my normal teacher was absent and she arranged for our group to study with the group of one of her teacher friends. the group was about three levels below ours, which was a bit boring, but i opened the door to the room and there was sitting my old republican army pal jess, from last semester's group. yay, someone else to go drinking with this weekend! he's back here for the summer before he goes to study for a year in volgograd - he might finally get his degree at the end of next school year. good for him. but better for me, since his return was totally unexpected and i'm glad he's back. however, hearing him talk about how much he missed st pete really made me think for a long moment how much i don't want to leave. so begins the cycle: i'm ready to get out of here, but i don't want to go just yet. it's just now starting to hit me, that i'm leaving next freaking friday.

last night i went to see dave gahan, who was awesome and amazing and thank the lords lost his shirt only three songs into the show. ;-) he played the entire new album, plus a good mix of old stuff. i was kinda surprised when he played 'personal jesus', and thrilled when he ended the show with an acoustic version of 'enjoy the silence'. it made the waiting through the two absolutely awful opening bands worth it. good times.

i'm presently compiling my list of things i will and will not miss about st petersburg. that post, coming soon, film to follow.

current mood: dirty (only from walking around all day, thank you)
current music: splean - 'moyo serdtse'

posted by kat thompson at 10:44 AM

happy birthday, blog!

born out of boredom, will probably die from consumption... you've seen a lot in your first year. i can tell you right now you're not going to make it to a second, at least not in this incarnation. you've got a facelift coming soon. a present from mommy. :-)

[my god, am i really talking to my blog? sure sign i must get more fresh air. good lord.]

i wish i had a vcr - ntv (as independent a tv station as one can find in this country) is doing a fascinating miniseries on boris yeltsin. we haven't gotten to the drunken speeches yet; i fear they're saving those for tomorrow and friday, when i'm not home... oh well. i can only imagine, i guess.

current mood: celebratorily indifferent
current music: violent femmes/"american music"
posted by kat thompson at 5:39 AM

pssst.... (grandpa, this one was for you)

i passed my test. hee hee! ::continues the happy dance::

i don't know exactly what this means, but i'll soon have a shiny certificate saying that i've successfully completed the TORFL at the second level. resume padding, i suppose.

::more happy dance::

yay!

current mood: happy
current music: some r&b crap that the goons in the internet hall have on endless loop
posted by kat thompson at 6:28 AM

I'M DONE!!!!

pardon me while i do the happy dance ("doin' the happy dance, doin' the happy dance" - 'baseketball') a little while longer. now i can go back to living my fun, lazy, why-is-it-40-degrees-in-june? life. woohoo!

[btw, the test was awful; i think i only passed two of the five sections. i'll find out on monday, so we'll see]

so... what have i been up to for the past two weeks?

friday the 23rd: i'd read somewhere that there was going to be a laser show that night, so christine and i went down the strelka (the tip of the island i live on, which faces the hermitage and the peter and paul fortress - basically the focal point of most of the 300th-anniversary celebrations) to see what was going on. apparently, several hundred other people thought there was going to be a laser show too, but we were all mistaken, since the cops rode by around 11:30 pm and told us all to go home. christine and i decided against this since we wanted to watch the bridges go up, so we got some beer and stuck around. tip #1: there's a reason no sane person would ever consume more than one can of 9% beer. don't do it. tip #2: deciding amidst this 9%-beer-haze that being on the wrong side of the bridge when it goes up is a good idea is, in fact, not a good idea, because you have no way of getting home since the metro is closed and all nearby bridges have also been raised. tip #3: stay away from young people with guitars. bad people hang around them. anyways, after staying out all night i was dead tired, so i slept most of saturday the 24th, before heading off to christine's farewell party, which happened to double as edward's sauna party. see, edward is this british kid we both know, and his apartment has a sauna in it which he'd never used, so we decided to 'open' it for him. the only problem was that the shower was in the kitchen, far away from said sauna, so the floors were very slippery and we were quite drunk, so... yeah.

[i know, i'm scratching my head too as to why the shower was built in the kitchen. i think the place was only built with one person in mind, but two people live there so edward strung a curtain across the front of the shower for modesty's sake]

[if you've never been to a real sauna, it's quite refreshing to jump out of the heat and into some cold water, and then jump back into the heat. we got it as high as 70 degrees celsius, which was nice and toasty warm]

nothing much really happened after the sauna party. i spent most of monday and tuesday (the 26th and 27th) running around trying to get stuff for my visa processed, but i didn't get everything turned in until three days ago, through no fault of my own because closing times during the birthday celebrations were arcane and generally not posted anywhere. typical russian bureaucracy, but what can you do? [shrug] tuesday the 27th was city day; there actually was a laser show on the strelka that night, so justin and i had dinner and got some beer and headed down there to check it out.

along with, i'm not kidding, 500,000 like-minded people with beer. whoops.

anyways, in such a crowd practically nothing was visible, so about ten minutes into the laser show - which wasn't very well organized, from what i saw on tv the second time they showed it - we decided to head home. we ended up walking, since the traffic was backed up to god knows where. it was a pleasant half-hour stroll, since the weather was nice.

[the weather was nice all week, but it was a sham because the government ordered these 'cloudbusting' airplanes to fly around the region in order to keep rainclouds away from the city during the celebrations. which is why i found it amusing that on saturday the 31st, the day all the heads of state were in town, the skies opened up during the parade down the river neva]

where was i... oh yes. from wednesday the 28th through the weekend to the 1st, the building where my classes are held was closed because it sits on the embankment of the neva, directly across the river from where the ship 'silver whisper' was moored, where the russia/CIS summit was held, among other official hoity-toity events. they closed every building on and parts of most of the streets leading up to the embankment for security reasons, so we had to have class elsewhere. wednesday we went to the russian museum, which was admittedly a bit boring for me as i'd only been there a week before for about the seventh or eighth time, and i've seen basically everything there is to see in there. thursday we took a walk around two islands north of the city, the krestovskiy and yelagin islands, which are favorite places for residents to frolic and picnic and relax when the weather's nice. it wasn't hard to see why, as the islands are full of trees and rowboats for rent and there are even stables on one of them. thanks to my teacher, i finally found the island of the thieving monkeys - i'd read in a guidebook that one of the smaller islands inside the yelagin island was inhabited by monkeys who steal wallets and money from drunken tourists who rent rowboats, end up there, and pass out. apparently it's all some experiment being run by scientists, but i wasn't able to find out anymore about this from my teacher.

saturday the 31st brought the visit from bush and the running-around of all the heads of state around the city, which meant that many streets were closed. i went downtown to watch a military parade, but because i got there late (not my fault, i got bad information) and because of the thousands of people yet again, i saw nothing. i ended up standing behind some french tourists and for some reason i found it cute when they bumped into me and said 'pardon' - it must have been the novelty of someone actually apologizing for having done so. anyways, after that i ended up back on the embankment in front of the university to watch the parade down the neva - the strelka was closed off for 'security reasons' because all the heads of state were sitting directly across the river in front of the hermitage, watching the festivities - which actually really sucked, because apparently all the cool stuff was only visible if you were a head of state or family member of said head sitting across the river. the parade consisted of a reconstructed model of peter the great's old boat, the shtandardt, a bunch of boats decorated in colours and coats-of-arms of local families of yore, and 45 rowboats representing the 45 countries whose heads of state were present for the party. [and even though the press would have you believe otherwise, turkmenistan's dictator was indeed present in all of his benevolence] there were fountains timed to colors and music from speakers nearby, and fireworks, and a laser show - but none of this was visible from where we were, so i went home and decided to catch the rest on tv, which was a fine idea since i was able to see everything and it wasn't raining.

on june 1 everyone left for france, and the party was considered officially over. and all the residents living within a five-kilometer radius of the center breathed a huge sigh of relief.

i think overall everything went well - i didn't hear of any major incidents or of anyone dying, although that could be because negative press was probably sternly warned against before everything. it seems that most stuff went off without a hitch, although a whole lotta people were disgruntled - at the streets being closed at random times, at not being allowed to go certain places, about the anniversary celebrations being only for the heads of state and not for the people of the city itself... it's hard to agree with that last bit, but it's also hard to disagree. what it comes down to in the end was that a whole lot of good was done, but most of it seems to be on the surface - major stuff like fixing the metro and building the ring road hasn't received any attention or really progressed, but the outsides of the buildings sure do look nice!

so... yeah. that's my past two weeks, in a sort of big nutshell. i've got three weeks left here to run around and see stuff - it's happening pretty fast. kinda unbelievable. but, kinda cool. i think i'm ready to come home.

current mood: content
current music: live/"lakini's juice"
posted by kat thompson at 11:44 AM

argh. i've been duped!

last night i was served my favorite rice salad for dinner, after a really yummy mushroom soup. about halfway through the salad - which has garlic, eggs, onions, rice, and corn in it (it's better than it might sound, trust me) - i bit into something soft and chewy that didn't quite taste like egg, nor quite like garlic, but kind of like... fish. i looked at my salad a little more closely and felt a sudden, gnawing horror upon realizing that it looked a darn lot like the crab salad that christine made at edward's sauna party two weekends ago. (that itself will be explained later this week) i fished out another soft and chewy piece that was colored red at one end, put it in my mouth, and then the connection was made clear. i've been eating crab salad for the past six months without any clue whatsoever. i had no idea that the soft and chewy pieces of food were crab - i can hear this now, "what did you think they were?!" - but i had no reason to think that they were crab, since a) i hate it and i never eat it, ergo i don't know what it looks like when it's in processed form and b) i told tanya from the start that i don't like seafood...

oh, but wait. no. i only told her i don't eat fish. crab, apparently, was fair game.

this [blooorrrrrgh] is the sound of me retroactively trying to purge six months' worth of rice/crab salad out of my system and memory. note: this episode does not mean that i will now eat crab. if anything, i hate it even more than i did before for sneaking up on me like that and infiltrating my tummy thusly.

anyone giving me crab-related things as gifts from now on - i especially have in mind that stupid shirt on sale at all maryland rest stops that says "leave me alone, i'm crabby" - will be hurt. i mean it. i've probably just given certain people some ideas, but this is no joking matter. this stuff scars people for life.

shudder. twitch. shudder.
posted by kat thompson at 7:18 AM