Boots Of Castilian Leather / Spanish Flee(ing)

Ho there! It's been a while, hasn't it?

Rest assured that very little has changed at my end, apart from the fact that it's been a while now since I've had a student loan to fall back on (you're welcome, past me, you little shit), so I've ended up stewing in the microbrew Millennial Classic No. 3, So You're Living At Your Childhood Home Until You Maybe Earn Enough To Start Having To Pay Back Those Student Loans. (I like to imagine Nos. 1 and 2 are So It Turns Out Capitalism Is Fucking Bullshit And Who Was It That Was Giving Us The Mythical Participation Trophies Anyway, and Oh Fuck, Democracy And The Planet Are Just Two Things We're Never Going To Be Able To Pass On To The Kids We Can't Afford Or Are Too Emotionally Scarred To Have. Maybe "like" isn't the right word there...)

Oh, there's also the natural stage in the lifecycle of any dipshit French learner (I'm thinking some kind of slime mould that's a bit more snail-y?) where you decide that fuck it, if I can do French (desperately ignoring the decaying state of your French has nothing to do with it, MMKAY?) then Spanish will be a piece of piss, right? You just start pronouncing all the letters you usually ignore and putting accents on everything. Oh, and forget how to do the S sound properly ever again.

My line of work is remote enough that I can do it from anywhere with wifi (I believe that's No. 7, Gee I Guess It's Nice To Have The FlEXiBiLiTy To Work From Wherever, But You Know What Would Also Be Nice Is Fucking Job Or Indeed Any Sort Of Security XOXO) so when I'm not abusing that hefty privilege to live rent-free (or at least in Not London), I can doss around abroad. Hence, reader, I find myself in a generic (to me) part of northern Spain for the month (not in Catalonia, Galicia or the Basque Country, which as I'm still proudly regional I wouldn't refer to as such anyway) with a nice cathedral, winding little streets and a midday sun that heats the cobbles so hot you can hear the English tourists sizzling from fifty paces, and that was before fucking global warming. (It's regularly been over 100°F/40°C, which I gather even the locals think is a bit much.)

Luckily, the standard way of dealing with this (I'm reliably informed by my dating app matches - talking about the weather translates? Score!) is to stay the fuck inside and possibly sleep on the floor at night, when you're not out carousing. So basically, it's a return (haha, yeah, I've definitely stopped doing that in the same way that I have a real job, house, car, spouse?) to my good old chaotic student habits of never going outside while the hated day moon shines except maybe for food sometimes or court summons and going to bed... at some point? Probably?

Minus the stage where you're free to wander about and do crazy things like have the bloody windows open before about 11, that is (seriously, I still have to ignore the daft urge to open the window when it's too hot and then wonder why it's suddenly too hot-er as often as Facebook birthday notifications for people I couldn't pick out of a police line-up and probably wouldn't give enough of a shit about to help get released anyway – I imagine the apathy is mutual).

So how's my Spanish? Well, I believe the phrase is de porquería (crap). Like, I'm actually one circle of Hell lower than even the Gallicist stereotype I outlined above because I make use of my poncey training in Latin and linguistics and all that to guess at what the words should mean, which means I kind of sit there for two minutes looking at signs or when people say stuff to me going "Carry the H, divide by ie, add an -o...", only to go "Oh yeah!" and feel like (even more of) a prick when my actually-Spanish-speaking friend I'm living with tells me the word because it's bleeding obvious in hindsight (sometimes I even remember not to go down a totally pointless derivation rabbithole!).

We've ended up instituting a Fash Cash Jar, by the way, that we put a euro in whenever one of us mentions Brexit, Trump, or the fact that a crudely animated collection of whatever bits of his hair and bodily fluids end up clogging the White (Power) House plumbing that makes my lazy reliance on shaky lapsed Latin look positively Stakhanovite and is largely responsible for item 1 is now the fucking Prime Minister. We've yet to decide what we're going to do with our nest egg, but I suggested resisting the temptation to blow it on enough knock-off sherry/rum to forget the preceding (my memories of Russia are still intact, it doesn't work) and keeping it till fucking Halloween (see what the lizard people did there...) and given the exchange rate, buy a nice portion of Central London with it. Hell, if you can't beat the Brexiteer Schutzstaffel...

Ahem. As you might imagine, neither of us are planning on sticking around under those dark Satanic shills. Sadly I only have an Irish great-grandparent at best, but I live in hope of the UK humans freeing themselves from the Westminster State. Haha, kidding – I'll probably end up in Berlin or somewhere along with the other disaffected Liberal Elite™ dossbags.

Wait, food! I went for tapas and had genuine local ham the other day – it was good, but chewing on the inch of fat on the outside did kind of coat the inside of my mouth with wax for a second each time. Actual Genuine Paella was better, probably because pescatarian flatmate could have half of it so I didn't have to roll away afterwards. I don't know why fairly dense, gloopy food is just what you want in this weather/climate, but it definitely is (see also: churros (worth getting your rolled R down for) with the kind of chocolate sauce I had in Russia too where it's literally just a thick, melted chocolate bar). I've found myself baking a lot of bread and bread-like things despite the only measuring thing we've got apart in from spoons being a measuring jug with *shudder* US cups marked on, I think in a bid to hit the same spot.

We've ended up keeping our bread in the microwave (never used, in nearly appropriate Hispanic style, as I'm told they prefer storing things in the oven and frying everything else, because like emphatically unhurried customer service, some of these notions are based in reality) to avoid ants and buying more kitchen equipment than absolutely necessary considering we're both moving out in a few weeks, but I think it's worth it. Especially when you get to knead/knock back the bread (it rises in about 30 seconds in this weather, and your clothes get bone dry in a similar interval!) and imagine it's the doughy features of any one of our unelected overlords...

Shit, that's got to be at least 3€.

(Potentially) while next time!

Listen Up Y'All It's Sabotage / Tying Up Loose Ends

It was a particularly low blow, all things considered. The bastards had followed me all the way to the outskirts of Paris, probably making use of the paper trail of Russian Standard bottles and cashiers and bartenders who'd been made to listen to the same odious spiel about how any other vodka just didn't cut it. Some had probably even been made to attempt to say "Cheers!" in Russian and fish out some decrepit bar snacks to do things The Russian Way. Or maybe the combination of vodka and Mini Cheddars had mercifully wiped the whole experience from their memories. In any case, they tracked me down.

What I'm laboriously getting to is that my faithful laptop that I'd had since about GCSE year finally bit the dust when introduced to red wine in a particularly vicious sting operation a few weeks after my last post on here. I managed to recover my files at a local computer place, but to all intents and purposes my chronicling activities had to be put on hold (I bet you were so disappointed, eh...) I came back to uni, realising midway through one of my first lectures that I hadn't actually had to concentrate intently on what someone else was saying for fifty minutes in quite a while, and began the slog towards F****s (I'm allowed to say "Finals" once here, otherwise the degree gremlins (also known as the Proctors round here) will fly out of my nose and fine me for wearing the wrong type of socks).

I thought my activities for [REDACTED] were concluded, and I'd be allowed to return to the usual arts student life of pretending to read set texts, staring at reading lists like I expect them to magically disappear, convincing myself that vodka will allow me to learn Russian by osmosis, and living off omelettes and toast; how naïve I was in those heady days! Instead I've found myself being required to take a year off from my studies in order to conduct a series of investigations into the actions of [REDACTED] in a dastardly attempt to set up dill as the English condiment of choice. I get the feeling I should probably be making some feeble joke about the situation in Ukraine, but really, I can't find much to laugh about where that's concerned.

Anyway, I thought that this blog could do with at least some kind of an afterword. Looking back over it I'm actually quite proud of the (ridiculously small number of) posts, in a perverse way. I mean, there were more worthwhile things I could have been doing (like the previously mentioned forty novels, for one thing), but I think it stands up. If it interests you, I recovered drafts for a few more posts to each half, but I think the moment for them has kind of passed. Rest assured the bits that I think are funny will probably be recycled into something else, because for us arts students laziness is quite far ahead of godliness...

As I fully intend to carry on spending time abroad when I've finished my degree you may just see more attempts at insightful pisstaking over here. If you miss getting slightly wonky dispatches from the inside of my head, I've recently started up a new blog under the same profile. I warn you, though, there's a good deal less attempting to be funny and a fair amount of expounding my Deep Thorts on stuff, but the same rambling sentence structure you've probably grown to know and resignedly tolerate is very much alive and limping.

It's been fun, guys.
Tarrah!

Crème Tangerine, Montelimar, Ginger Sling With A Pineapple Heart / French Food, Who'd Have Guessed

Some would argue that this is a fairly obvious post choice for the post-first-post post (post!), and they'd be right. But sod it, apparently people liked the one about food in Russia - ah, those were the days, when the sheer laugh-a-minute realities of being in Russia basically write your posts for you... (I hear it's a fairly common thing for Russia/France years abroad. Poor arts student etc etc quiet at the back ... of the comments section?) Although in all seriousness I was talking to one of my friends who apparently read my blog and she said I should do one on food because that was funny last time. (> tfw you get cited in a blog post but it's anonymous. No trip codes here, mein Schatz.) I think the message is that the groundbreaking, hyperbolic interlude was just too much for some of my audience. Not you, obviously. You're probably the kind of person that smiles knowingly at my random reference-spewing as the affliction of people who've come of age in an internet gripped in the sweaty paws of bloated, Star Wars-loving 80s manchildren who think that pop culture and shoving random slightly interesting facts into the gaping crevasse of their prefrontal cortex like fucking Pepperidge Farm goldfish is the way to anyone's heart with whatever kind of genitalia. As I was saying, you don't mind using Google when I butcher a kind of well-known author and then put them in the tags in an attempt at being (post!) ironic.   You're probably familiar with that little feeling like a wink or a nod when you get a reference (through hard work or chance), that feeling of some kind of a connection with the writer. A connection, however fleeting, that feels real, almost like a physical warmth. Oh yes, you don't have to pretend it's not there - why don't we throw caution to the winds, steal away into the night, rent a room in a decrepit "hostel" that charges by the hour and bitch about superhero adaptations while we both pretend that our opinions aren't just nicked off Reddit- OH FOR THE LOVE OF SATAN, WHY DO YOUS DICKHEADS HAVE TO RUIN EVERYTHING FOR US?

...

Ahem. It's all right, they've gone. I told them there was a semi-ironic guest appearance by Stan Lee in something crushingly pointless and they had a "nerdgasm". It wasn't pretty.

Anyway, where were we? Ah yes, food. In France. In Paris, more precisely. You know what, I'm not going to pretend the food here isn't great. I throw my hands up in despair. I just can't mock French cuisine - you can mock that surly Parisian waiter as much as you like (behind his back, obviously, so you don't get extra bodily fluids in your order), but once the main course arrives you're putty in his hands. It actually is a requirement of French law that they have the menu on display outside any restaurant and offer fixed meals as well, so unless you suddenly decide to upscale on your wine you're probably never going to be surprised by the bill. Admittedly, if you're vegetarian, vegan or like to be particular about your meals you will get a double-nostrilled Gallic huff, but I'm lucky in that after eventually being made to accept that dried pigs ears are a valid thing to be served in a bar my standards are as low as Nicolas Cage's refusal rate on film roles.

It's just all so fucking good. Go to a bistro restaurant, have a modest two-course meal off the menu and it's great, especially with a shot of espresso with a sachet of brown sugar afterwards - ask for "a coffee" and that's what you'll get. In French "café au lait" - milky coffee - is exactly as well-regarded as the translation would suggest. I always feel drawn despite myself to people who like coffee as a culture. I don't mean in terms of a half-roasted-arabica-blend-with-whatever-I've-lost-interest-to-the-point-of-literally-not-being-fucked-to-Google-some-authentic-zzzz, just in terms of having proper coffee being considered a sign of being in a proper place. In our neck of the woods we got screwed from the off because our Dutch contacts got us onto tea instead (as well as that owning-India-and-swathes-of-China thing), so while most of my English friends here have the requisite wall of special tea that threatens to bury you in a crashing, aromatic wave of death every time you open a cupboard to look for pasta, they then usually have a manky jar of instant coffee granules that smell like Bisto on a shelf somewhere. And this is despite the fact that most French flats come with their ace cafetière-samovar thing as a standard!  I get the impression that for a French person, regularly consuming instant coffee is somewhere on the level of a hate crime (like being virulently homophobic and then going on a march about it! Seriously, guys, sort it the fuck out). I personally normally go for instant coffee when at home, purely because I'm a student and my Northern blood starts creeping up when I see the price comparisons. Here, however, where they just don't do reductions on anything (the best you get is the French M&S sometimes does a buy-one-get-one-half-price to appease the rosbifs who've wandered in by accident) my impression is that proper coffee is cheaper. Who knows, I might even keep the habit up when I go back - my girlfriend will be delighted, having been trying to convert me for ages, though I refuse to believe you're meant to keep your ground beans in the fridge. I mean, what.

If you don't want to do the bistro thing (it can get old, and it's not as cheap as some options) there's usually something good about - a "traiteur asiatique" (Asian restaurant), which I usually misread as some kind of elaborate social vigilanteism gone wrong if I've not had my morning café noisette, a kebab place, lots of fun stuff round the Quartier latin (which has been a student/broke people (hoho) hangout for as long as anyone can remember), the usual fast-food chains present and correct, but Frenchified: you can order beer in McDonalds (no, I haven't been while I've been here. This is from when I was on my French exchange a couple of years ago and I wanted to get my brother a souvenir Royale With Cheese box, dohohoho), and Dominos do salad. Hold the bloody phone, yes, they do. Like, I'd spent a day busily flopping on the sofabed-thing and realised my potatoes were all looking at me like Shelob in Cirith Ungol, so I looked at the Dominos site and as I was checking out my order I saw that they had "Salade Dominos" as well for a euro. Intrigued, I coughed up the dough (a familiar experience with Dominos amirite) and waited for the pizza to arrive. And you know, it wasn't half bad. A Caesar salad dressing, a little plastic bowl, and an extra napkin. Just what you want after consuming the equivalent of a deflated tyre. Oh wait, the default base is thin here. It's a most perplexing experience that goes against everything you've learnt previously. Travel indeed broadens the mind.

Now part of this is to do with the French government's mostly laudable attempts to encourage people to embrace La Bonne Bouffe (Grand Scran, I'd have said), resorting to legislature when necessary. But we've got that, corpulent lot of good it does us - I think the French themselves genuinely do care. There's a story that I haven't got the heart to fact-check that when Disneyland Paris first opened it did terrible business for a couple of weeks and was going to close; HQ were aghast, as you would be, but then they asked the locals what was wrong and they said that no green-blooded Frenchman would ever frequent a cartoon character-themed amusement park where they couldn't get pissed at the refreshment stands. Yes, apparently Disneyland nearly folded because they didn't serve wine at those little kiosk things. Hush - don't ask aloud. They're French. They'll just treat you to a Gallic "bof" and wander off, because you will never understand if you have to have it explained to you, like jazz or things being naff. (More on which in a later post!.) And I don't know if it's true, either - but as the Puck said on seeing the premiere of A Midsummer Night's Dream in a field, "It never happened; yet it is still true." Either you read that as telling you about the fundamental creepy creeping alcoholism of an entire nation, or that they care about their vittles on a decidedly Mediterranean level. Your call, you desperately sexy polysemite, you.

This is all very well in theory (always the preferred French domain), but for me, in practice, food in France tends to be a bit more getting a (n admittedly delicious and sometimes still warm) baguette and some cheese from a supermarket and maybe some scouring pads because ours is looking like it's been in the wars than sticking up your index finger like you're going to demonstrate something impressive and going "gah-SONNE!". (Protip: Don't do that. Ever. I know you weren't even thinking about it, but all the same, don't.) For me personally being here has meant I've been able to do more fun stuff with cooking, ie. cooking at all, for the most part. While it's true Russian Mistress (she says hi to you all, incidentally) had a kitchen in her halls, it was... well, a halls kitchen, and then a Soviet halls kitchen. Also, I didn't live there (despite what her roommates must have ended up thinking), so I couldn't really do such a lot, since crossing Scary Russian Landlady in her own demesne would have been a bad idea to say the least. Not that I didn't try a couple of things with Russian Mistress. (Oh, grow up.) Here though, there's a tiny hob with a mostly working oven in the flat I'm renting, and my dear friend Non-Scary Non-Russian Landlady (she picked the name) has a full working kitchen because her and her friends won the second-year-living-out-house jackpot pretty hard. You guys, I made pan-seared duck breast and chicken with green onions and cheesecake! (not together) When both I and Non-Scary Non-Russian Landlady recently got the summer flu (chest infection's back, woo, or else the cast of Shrek III have been taking it in turns to bismark my alveoli while I've been coughing in my sleep), she, as a heathen second-generation-hippie, made ginger tea in the pressure cooker pot. Because there is one. The tea burning through my throat gave me strange flashbacks to gagging on badly-rendered CGI appendages, but the point is this kitchen is incredible. The oven extractor fan extracts straight into the next-door toilet, but you can't have everything.

So there you have it: I can't really can't fault French food at all, surprise surprise. Though actually, as it's very hard to make anything sound threatening in French, I dumped a load of "piment de Cayenne" on my tea tonight and only after a couple of mouthfuls (when I could no longer feel my mouth) remembered that this is ground Cayenne pepper. PEP-PER. It's got two aspirated unvoiced bilabial plosives, for God's sake, it literally sounds like the word's sPitting at you or Punching you in the face. And though the French clearly has a P in it as well it's just not the same. Try this - "Attention: pylônes électriques. Danger de mort." If you hear it spoken in French it sounds like a come-on. I dare you to read "Danger de mort" and not imagine Julie Delpy's sekh-see breathy Franch Rs. Bonus points if you're familiar with the slang connotations of "death" in French, hoho.

This post! has gone on for quite long enough now, so I'll take my leave and go back to Three Colours: White or maybe Killing Zoe. (Pandering to the Gen X instead of Gen Y? Sure, I'll take it.) Remember to pay attention to my subtle, subtle subliminal running gag set up a hyperlink to the very page you are reading on your timeline wall! (I don't want to mess with the timeline. What if I end up in the wrong 2085 and Michael J. Fox is President? Ugh, back to Gen Y it is.) At least I didn't go on about how they love snails (tourists only) and garlic (actually, no night-crawler can come within 200 miles of Paris on oral fumes alone). Wait while I actually run out of ideas...

While next post!

This is a cafetière-samovar. Or cafetière italienne, if you must.
I prefer my term. You put water and beans in the bottom,
stick it on the hob and wait for the magic...

Chicken Sandwiches And Cornets Of Caviar / Guess What, I'm In Paris

"Well that's quite enough of that," I muttered to myself as I slammed the door on the suspiciously blacked-out car, adjusted my fedora, and wheeled my battered kit bag to the irritatingly code-locked Parisian apartment block. I've often had occasion to remark on how all the streets in Paris are eerily similar - the Chic police rule with an iron fist round here, making sure that the same vaguely mock-Italian architectural style drapes itself round the whole Ile de France like a charmingly minimal fabric shawl.

Of course, at the time I was actually shouting after the car in slightly slurred Russian, "And next time you want someone to go to [REDACTED] and check up on your [REDACTED] for you, tell [REDACTED] to shove it so far up his arse he'll be choking down his cabbage soup twice!" That bit of lushly overdescriptive prose was just to set the scene.

I wish I could tell you, dear readers, what I've been up to in the interlude between my last post, in which I thought I would be leaving Russia imminently, and the anonymous Parisian suburb which I have so effortlessly conjured before you - I dearly wish I could. However, if the agents of [REDACTED] at the [REDACTED] intercept this post, the very best I can hope for is some clumsy censorship and the caresses of a length of rubber hose. Also, I'm turning it into a film script that I'm going to make millions off, and I'll be fucked if I let yous lot get your dirty internet paws on it for nowt.

All I can say (pending my script being picked up/me disappearing in a puff of flavourless herbal condiments) is that my incoherent vitriol towards certain aspects of Russian life made me ideally suited to be tapped for wild [REDACTED], moderately paced expository [REDACTED], breaking into and spending the night inside a carousel, strangely erotic [REDACTED] and foiling the biggest dill distribution ring within at least fifty miles of Petrozavodsk. And I sincerely doubt I would be able to stump up the enthusiasm to do any of it again.

The long and short of it, folks, is that I'm back and I'm in Paris, and now in a position to have internet on my rapidly ageing laptop. Also secret agents have completely lost interest in me now they've seen what my spy novel prose looks like. Honestly, I'd like to see you come up with John le Carré on Dan Brown-level material.

The French connections (I'll get my coat, shall I) that I've been making have mostly been on a conversational basis. Whereas in Russia I was happily enrolled in a uni course I think I've been kind of meaning to get a job here or something. You've got to remember I'm a particularly lazy arts student, so this gainful employment thing isn't something I'm used to. I discovered this when I had a couple of phone interviews and the eagle-eyed intern-scavengers (picturing them as buzzards, the cold, dead eyes clawing through the flesh of the desperate undergrad-wannabe-intern is about right) tore their way through the carefully constructed tissue of waffle that was my CV in a matter of minutes to reveal that I've never really had a job doing anything.

Actually, the worst was when someone hadn't actually read my dossier and asked me to take them through my experience (in French). I was so taken aback by this no-bullshit tactic that I ended up regaling her about the time I helped my mum with filing work when I was sick off school, which, to her credit, she answered only with a curt "so where is this on your CV?". Icy, dear readers, icy as the grave. A grave that has been filled with ice, or perhaps is located in a part of the world where there is lots of ice for some entirely feasible reason. Shit, these dramatic simile are tough. Never again will I laugh at Robert Ludlum's glassy-eyed word cruft as I work my way through The Adjective Noun because literally the only alternative is to do something productive with my life.

Ahem. So yes, being in Paris. What can I say? There are delicious and mostly reasonably-priced French bakeries everywhere, the people are as French as you'd expect, though occasionally less so, the streets and especially the metro smell of piss all the time, but the ravages of the Chic police really do come together to create quite a pleasing whole. I'm probably biased because I've been here before and my French is much, much better than my Russian, and I know a fair bunch of people, but y'know.

I'm here while the end of August, so I'm sure I'll find something interesting to write about. Also, I have to read roughly twenty full-length French and Russian novels (ie. twenty of each) including War and Peace for an essay (did you forget? I fucking wish I could) that's apparently due in in less than a month, unless as I sincerely hope someone has hacked into my Google Calendar in retaliation for the [REDACTED] incident and moved all my Year Abroad deadlines six months closer than they really are; all I'm saying is that unless recording a lightly fictionalised version of my exploits here magically turns into my procrastination crutch of choice (don't flatter yezsen) it might be a while. Well, I'm going to pretend you'll be upset.

While next time, and for the love of [REDACTED] don't touch [REDACTED] after the 28th of May!

I just typed 'french' into Google and this came up.
I'm guessing it's also going to be haunting my
(and possibly your) nightmares too. Sharing!

If You Should Go Skating On The Thin Ice Of Modern Life / Let's Talk About The Weather

So I was walking to the bus stop with Russian Mistress the other day when she casually mentioned it was -20˚C. As in, twenty degrees below the point at which water freezes can happily exist as a solid, liquid or gas (rounding to the nearest whole degree)(Hah! Thought you had me there, didn't you, scientists! Rest assured, in Russia you can see this kind of shit first-hand! Up yours!), a temperature that I previously thought only existed on the inside of conical flasks. Like, negative Fahrenheit, the zero point of which was defined as the point at which brine (aka the sea) freezes. Picture the fucking sea frozen solid and you're not far off.

But no, it really is that cold here. On my last night in Russia in the world (for this time, fuckers! *massive scream*), I was thinking of doing a last post on something fairly Russian before hopefully summing up my impressions when I get back, once a merciful film of rose tinting has descended over my stay here like the first methanol-induced sheen over a Russian tramp's eyes. Maybe by talking about the weather, I thought,  I'll get fewer teeth knocked out by angry Russians who think I used them as the example in that last ill-chosen simile. Let's face it, though, it could legitimately be anyone here -  the Russian for "this is alcohol" and "this is an alcohol" is exactly the same (no articles, natch, which is why they say things like "you step out of queue" and "you give bribe" and of course "you mention in blog and I remove teeth in reverse size order" (whoops)), so if you forget and end up with something other than ethanol slurring your case endings so I haven't got a fucking clue what you're talking about, you might have a legitimate excuse.

Ah, yes, the cold has definitely improved my demeanour towards this charmingly insane country. It's so cold out that my fuck-it-I-need-all-the-layers-I-can-get moustache and what-you-call-that-a beard routinely freeze within about three minutes of me leaving t'warm, so I end up walking about with icicles hanging off my face. I can only assume passers-by think I've taken to fellating snowmen to pay my rent. You can't really tell because the Russian permascowl actually is frozen on in this weather, so if they want to break it to have a good guffaw it'll take ten minutes making out with a radiator before they can manage a wry grin. This must be how the famed Russian death-glare evolved.

It first started snowing in October, which is apparently early even by Russian standards, then gave it a rest until late November-ish (maybe the start of December - when it gets light at 11 and dark at 4 days get blurry), when we got the joy of powder snow and snow-storms going down the street. The first batch was the kind of wet, snow-ballable type I remember from my childhood in the freezing North (in retrospect it might have been a little less freezing if my mum, in one of the many ways Northerners and Russians are united, didn't refuse to turn the heating on until the water froze in the taps), and the second was that powder stuff that meant I realised that all of E. H. Shepard's drawings of the Hundred Acre Wood in the snow are actually accurate. The snow kind of insouciantly drifts on the aforementioned blizzards and piles up against things instead of on them like it seriously can't be bothered to form its own layers, duh.

Then it got icy. I've realised that everyone that has their own tolerances, and I realised that when I was concentrating on a) not breathing on my moustache-icicle collection so that it got even bigger b) not slipping over on the ice that has the charming habit of hiding under a thin layer of snow and and then tripping you up because SURPRISE, FUCK YOU! c) avoiding standing under the really-genuinely-razor-sharp real icicles that collect around buildings and are just waiting for some stupid foreigner not to notice that no-one here walks directly under roof ledges here so they can go SURPRISE, FUCK YOU FROM ABOVE! d) actually getting to wherever I'm going on time, which will frequently involve taking my gloves off to count out the right amount of change in advance (no difference really, because with or without gloves my fingers freeze because NICE TRY, FUCK YOU) (even after paying 23R for the bus literally every day I've been here I can't assemble the right change under pressure), that I've personally reached my own personal Russia tolerance. I like to think it's slightly above the LD50 for "being in fucking Russia", a habit at least twice as deadly as recreational codeine use. [Note: this implies that 400mg of "being in fucking Russia" is fatal for the rough majority of the population. Sounds about right to me.]

The worst fucking part is they don't get Christmas at all. For one thing, they celebrate it in early January because of Epiphany and no-one's bothered telling them that the Julian calendar was decommissioned a few hundred years ago (and the fact that they get to have New Year twice and thus get even more horrifically plastered than usual on two occasions clearly has NOTHING to do with it at all). For another, what with the Soviets not being so keen on the whole Christianity thing, the big cultural winter festival is New Year. Only New Year. It's fucking endemic - even the bilingual Pringles cans have "Merry Pringles!" on one side, and the Russian for "Happy New Year!" on the other. They don't even bother trying to translate the pathetic attempt at a pun! I mean, for the love of God, it's not like it's even a real pun in the first place - some master wordsmith clearly looked out of the window at a billboard one day and saw that someone had taken an ordinary phrase but replaced one of the words with another word and IT'S FUNNY GUYS BUY OUR PRODUCT and thought, yes, that oughta hold the little SOBs. I mean seriously, that's a level below deciding that the word "punny" not only exists but is a valid piece of humour. I had thought that the only redeeming feature of its existence was that it represented the absolute zero of humour; turns out I was wrong, and I have Russian Pringles to thank for it. (Sorry to go off on one there - once you pop open a can of mocking Pringles' pathetic marketing, you just c- Oh fuck it, even I'm not that low. TAKE NOTE YOU MARKETING BASTARDS)

It's not like making real puns is very difficult in Russian. My level of Russian is currently back to LOLcat level (on which more in the next post), and I've still managed to make a couple that drew the familiar do-you-expect-praise-for-mutilating-the-language-like-a-toddler-that's-tried-to-draw-on-its-face-with-baby-food-with-the-excuse-that-it's-a-fucking-toddler (that... is still eating baby food) look from Russian Mistress so familiar from similar dazzling wordplay at home. Or maybe I just sounded like a tosser. It's hard to distinguish the cause and effect in such situations, you know.

What else about Russian not-Christmas? Well, they have Grandfather Frost instead of Father Christmas, but they seem to be fairly interchangeable - though there's one enterprising lot that've put on a New Year (grrrrr) show called "Santa Claus goes to visit Grandfather Frost" with St Nick happily taking tea from a samovar opposite his blue-clad (I see what you did there, palette swap) opposite number who totally has a different hat and a longer beard *coughFreudcough*. I actually quite like it as a symbol of Russian cultural plurality - I think it bodes well. Obviously since multiculturalism has failed back in the UK (source: the guy with a shakier reason to be at the top than V. V. Putin) this sort of tommyrot would never be allowed.

Don't mind me, though - I suspect the only reason I'm really grumpy about the Christmas-ness that I'm missing back home (don't worry, "New Year" starts in October here, too) is that I don't have an advent calendar. But wait, one or other of the pair of people reading this who aren't me in fifteen years shaking my head in disgust at how I squandered the Best Debt-Acquiring Years Of My Life (thanks for the loan, champ) is being ventriloquised to say, why can't you just buy yourself an advent calendar? Maybe even a chocolate one? Well, convenient sock-puppet interested reader, for one thing the best chocolate they have to offer here (even in the purported second capital) is Milka, and for another, I'm 21. Like, legally an adult. (Christ help the world.) While there are many things that I'm quite happy to do that seem completely childish, buying myself an advent calendar, chocolate or otherwise, so that every day until Christmas (or probably fucking New Year round here) I can open a little door and see what shape the little chocolate is/some incredibly dull and hackneyed rendering of the Nativity or something, seems a bridge too far. *finishes off bag of Haribo-that-were-on-offer-at-the-supermarket-or-I'd-never-have-got-them-honest*

Ahem. So, Russian weather. It hates you as much as the rest of the country and most of the people. If I was desperate enough to put in a Narnia reference, I'd go "always winter, never Christmas", but I'm clearly still in control of my faculties enough not to st- Ohohoho (happy new year!), I see what I did there. I trust that isn't going to have disappointed you as much as it has me. Or something like that.

But never mind, at least I've moved from abusing Dick Van Dyke to abusing science when I run out of ideas!!! (This may be the catalyst for you leaving the page and going to a humoristically ACTIVE SITE, geddit?) (Fuck me, half of AS Bio actually came in handy for something...)

Erm... it's been a long few months. I am, however, setting off to the land of salt-and-vinegar-flavour-fucking-anything around six tomorrow (and then I arrive to change in Germany at half five because crossing time-zones magic!). And then it's Christmas! Like, almost as soon as I get back! I'm sure I used to wish that would happen when I was little. Spend a few months in an ex-communist country trying to speak the language and not choke on watery pelmeni, then get back just in time for the anniversary of Christ-not-being-born-on-that-date-at-all-but-let's-take-over-the-solstice,-guys and giving the kind-of Apocalypse a miss - just the ticket.

What a strangely precise imagination I had as a young fishy*.

Happy New Year!

* This is how Russians actually refer to kids. Well, unless you're Russian Mistress' dad, who used to call her Little Rat. Awww.

Pictured: I'm not sure if this is self-parody or an index of Russian baby sign-language.
Hope he checks there's two carbons in each molecule he's swallowing...

Hold You In His Armchair / Coughs And Sneezles

Christ, I thought, this country is actually trying to fucking kill me.

No sooner do I kick one bout of being incapacitated from an averse reaction to "Surprise, fucking Russia!" then my fucking cough comes back and I get to be bent over double wheezing in what must sound very dramatic to my landlady's daughter next door. Actually, she's probably used to lesser Westerners getting a cold and turning on the melodrama by now, considering her family have been hosting clueless English speakers for the past five years or so. I mean, I don't even get yelled at for not wearing slippers round the flat or whistling indoors.

Further to my previous research, it turns out from some class notes I noticed artfully strewn across the bottom of my rucksack that if you whistle indoors somebody's going to straight up die. What the hell? Why do the Slavic house spirits (they totally exist, by the way. No, really, ask anyone.) hate whistling that much? Did they get run into Dick Van Dyke when he was pretending to be a Corkney? Did Dick Van Dyke even get to the Soviet Union? Did the KGB bring him in to record special vignettes deemed too awful even for the Dick Van Dyke Show / Diagnosis Murder to help crack particularly unyielding dissidents?

Actually, scratch that, it's completely ridiculous. Anyone who's exposed to a one-on-one rendition of "It's a jorly orlidie with Mary" will disappear into so deep and primal a part of themselves they'll be left an empty, gaping husk that even the most sadistic of government-endorsed torturers would take pity on, probably rightly fearing its animal retaliation if they do otherwise. I know that if our hypothetical dissident doesn't have an idiomatic grasp of English that far he's unlikely to appreciate the true awfulness of Dick Van Dyke murdering the Cockney tongue in his own inimitable-under-the-Geneva-convention way, but I like to think that on some kind of subatomic level you can just sense how hellishly wrong it is. Y'know, like when you see kids in the street here with mullets.

Look! I brought it back to Russia! I apologise for basically comparing Dick Van Dyke to a comedy Dementor, by the way - I don't want the Dementors suing for defamation. They've got a way of sucking every last penny out of you. (Is there Dementor slash fiction?... Oh for the love of God. Moving very, very swiftly on, before I get the urge to check for Dick Van Dyke X Dementor slash fic and Rule 35 myself.)

Still here? I would take that as an indication of my current levels of sanity after spending a week or two away from classes. On a practical life-in-Russia note, I thought it might be interesting to describe my experiences of Russian healthcare, as I'm still pretending I've got a series of theme for each post, though considering this'll make about three I don't think there's technically enough data points to make any kind of a trend. Oh well, what the hell! (... I don't plan on cutting anyone off at the waist, incidentally. Though crashing and burning into a mountain is a distinct possibility. Look, the stupid lit references are back!)

So, the first time I was ill I just had the standard chest infection thing that my pathetic, semi-asthmatic lungs love to sponge up given the slightest provocation. Not even my semi-automatic umbrella helped! Don't worry, they took the ricin needle out before I got it. It was cheaper. Just kidding, folks! It means it pops out but you've got to scoop it back in manually. Actually, do you scoop umbrellas in? I can't say I've ever had to talk about it - I usually just frantically try to squash-wrestle the whole thing back into its impossibly small bag while praying I'm not going to hit the "It's taking care of dissidents time!" (Chim chimmerney ch-) button and syringe some poor sod who's trying to get to his desk at the politburo on time while I'm attempting to negotiate not getting wet AND ALL FOR BLOODY NOWT.

In my defence I still claim that walking round in St Petersburg is at least two-thirds of the way to trying to breathe through a puddle. There is only one word repellant enough to describe the feeling of getting out of your nice centrally-heated flat/classroom (and yes, it is centrally heated because no-one has control of their own personal heating because Communism) and being lightly slapped in the lungs with the local atmosphere, and that word is moist. Yes, the atmosphere here is fucking moist. I'm pleased to report that that skin-crawlingly creepy word is just as phonetically repulsive in Russian, where it's vlazhny. (Here's someone with a stronger stomach than me pronouncing it.) Just roll either of those words around in your mouth for a bit (avoid the urge to spit/gag/retch, it's natural, and anyway, it's in the fucking air round here so you can't get rid of it) and you'll understand exactly why I wasn't at all surprised that after three weeks here it felt like my lungs were carrying at least a pint of fetid swamp water. BECAUSE THEY ACTUALLY WERE.

Now, when I'm at home, traipsing across the moors (the word rhymes with poor, not pour, and I don't sodding care what the local authority says - I had to look at that daft "Paws on the Moors" sign for five minutes before I twigged) and happily scowling at things (like the aforementioned sign that's meant to be promoting keeping your dog on a leash or something, not that that ever stops the bloody dee-dahs from coming round and letting them loose when they're not setting up their portable barbecues and scorching the grass brown on the flat bits by the road where they park their bloody cars three abreast because no-one lives out in t'sticks, do deh) (ahem), happy as a pig in muck (as I've literally never heard anyone say) I like to think I'm pretty much indestructible. The only times I can remember getting properly ill recently have been when I've been in the South (never a good idea) or when I've been here. My entirely sensible rationalisation is that both places want me dead quite a lot. And hey, a few more ill-advised KGB jokes and my convictions might just become 50% more accurate! But really, apparently Russians don't have a word for being paranoid (paranoiya being more of a technical term), because if you feel like everyone's out to get you and following your every move you're probably just paying attention. (You know where the In Soviet Russia jokes started? "In West, you listen to man on radio. In Soviet Russia, man on radio listen to you!" Stone the crows, that was a joke with actual wit before it became a meme? Colour me phlegmatic. Speaking of which...)

Anyway, long story short, I thought, right, I'm coughing up green stuff, let's get some antibiotics. One of the problems with not being in the British Isles/the EU is no NHS, which any number of I think well-meaning Russians and Americans have tried to convince me is a Big Government fraud designed to rob us of our hard-earned blah-blah (my usual reply is, "Oh, no, we already have that, it's called RBS) (burn!... from about 2008. Come on, they're allowed to have their politics and hairdos stuck in 1985), but seriously, guys, it's free healthcare. And by 'free', I do in fact mean 'free at point of use' as one enterprising Republican tried to catch me out on. Having our incredibly Socialist government (oh look, my cough's come back) doesn't actually mean they just wait for Mary Poppins to come back and - oh shit, Dick Van Dyke scared her away, didn't he? He'll have caused the fucking Apocalypse by the end of this post, I tell you.

But yeah, I rocked up to the shiny clinic called EuroMed in a bid to cash in on my insurance policy and whine me some antibiotics if I hadn't managed to catch the bubonic plague or something as well. After about an hour of the people on the desk trying to coerce my insurers to cough up (blood, stones, it's their job), which wasn't such a drag considering the large number of rather attractive young women in the lobby who were happy to exchange pleasantries in Russian about how annoying all this Bloody Red Tape is (British conversation skills are transferable? Result!), a very nice (male) doctor came out and ushered me into an examination room.

I started out in English, thinking I'd rather not fuck something up and end up leaving with fewer internal organs than I came in with because I put a stress in the wrong place (no, really, that's scarily feasible), but it turned out that it was easier to go for speaking-very-slowly Russian. Eek. Actually, it was fine, and I found that in Russian the word for "green stuff you cough up" is actually just "greenery" (oh Russian, you truly are the master language), and that like a lot of Russians the doctor liked saying "womit". I've really never got this - why do the hypercorrection on that? My dear friend Russian Mistress (about whom more in subsequent posts), whose English is so good it makes me and my friends feel fairly pathetic, still frequently says "wodka" - I mean, not only is it a fairly Russian word, I'm pretty sure it's one of first words Russian children learn, after "mama" and slightly before "all gone". Maybe she's just got Polish blood and she's too ashamed to admit to it - as should anyone from a  culture that can turn Vladimir (aka the scariest name in existence) into something pronounced Vwodek.

So after a battery of tests, including getting about three pints of blood drawn for testing (I felt like Renton or something. Also like if I breathed too heavily the needle would snap. Cue reciting a couple of Shakespeare sonnets in my head because nothing calms one down like the realisation you're a total pseud whose loss wouldn't leave the world a farthing the worse.) and having x-rays taken (Awesome! They did one of my skull to test for sinus inflation and I got a copy to use for my first album cover because come on, guys!) I finally got some antibiotics and some anti-inflammatory stuff. (Good to pop a few when talking to the Americans, actually.)

And then having paid my £80 end of the deal, I found out that in Russia you can get pretty much any drugs bar psychiatric meds over the fucking counter. So you know, I got a bit of swamp on my lungs and blew my medical insurance on some flashy tests and a batch of Doc Fleming's finest. On the plus side, it turns out I didn't have TB (good to know that TB jab isn't just a random spot on my arm) or any other particularly interesting diseases. The funny part is that my landlady had been saying for the previous week or so that she could go down to the pharmacy and get me something, though I thought this would be some kind of cruel and unusual herbal shit - which Russian Mistress has insisted on feeding me anyway this time round and it's fucking foul, in case you were feeling disappointed at the lack of Schadenfreudesfutte. Also, as it's Chinese, the name is given in English as "oral fluid", which gives an approximation of what it tastes like. Her friends looked on bemusedly as I laughed uncontrollably for about ten minutes. I pretended it was something you couldn't translate to get out of admitting how incredibly mature I am.

To be fair, if you go private back home you can get just as shafted - I dropped into a private clinic in London because I needed to get a same-day HIV test, because I'm amazing at getting things done ahead of time (not that you'd be able to tell by my update schedule over here or owt), and paid about £130 for having my finger pricked with a needle and the resulting drop of blood put in a little blue tray that stayed blue to mean I didn't have HIV. When I got the bill I went back and had some more free water from the fountain thing a) because if you average it out it it was definitely the most expensive thing I've drunk since becoming a student and b) to attempt to cool down my remaining boiling Northern blood. Fair, though, I suppose, they know their market and that we're pretty much a captive audience. Didn't stop me scowling a hole in the wall as I filled up my little plastic cup again, though, the bastards...

So basically, as always happens for us apparently not-long-to-be-loaded foreigners around these parts (as indeed happens at home too), I got sucked into something with Euro- in the title and got screwed out of a load of money. I just hope I don't have to use my insurance for something else, I've got no idea what I've got left and I'd rather not have to check. I suppose I should be thankful I got exposed to Mr Van Dyke's wallpaper-peelingly awful Cockney stylings before I got to Russia, really, because it kind of puts the populace's attempts to butcher my mother tongue in perspective. Though I did think I should have brought a hat to see that cover band murder Beatles to hide the blood pouring from my ears... Oh well.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to go fly a kite, despite the fact that no English person would ever, ever, ever omit the 'and' after 'go'. The power of (likethisonFacebookorDickVanDykewillhauntyourdreams) subliminal (doitnow) messages, (noIfuckingmeanit) eh?

While next time!

I think a wire got crossed somewhere. Also, I couldn't find my skull x-ray.

Wolf Me Down For Tea Tonight / Cabbage Soup

Bloody hell, another blog post? Must have been an uneventful week. I've been variously laughing at Americans (they're lovely really), waiting for the bridges to go up if I've stayed up past about midnight (or the first metro, at about half five), playing/teaching guitar (my cheap Russian guitar is also lovely, but cost and feels about a quarter of the price of my actual acoustic at home) and occasionally working at Russian. Y'know, when I've ran out of other stuff to do or something.

(Hoho, aren't we feckless arts students feckless. No fecks to be given here - I feel like I'm in some kind of Communist Father Ted tribute.)

Anyway, the main thing that I thought I'd talk about this time around is food. It seems to be most of what people want to know about when they're doing the politely-asking-about-your-year-off-why-haven't-you-got-any-proper-work-you-bastard thing over Facebook chat. Many have asked me whether the only sustenance to be had is actually various forms of cabbage soup washed down with vodka and the tears of the oppressed populace. This is emphatically not true - I provide the tears myself, on being faced with another bowl of lukewarm shchi with bloody buckwheat on the side.

Just kidding, folks! It's actually fairly passable. I opted to be in a homestay while I was applying for my neshing-out-of-a-year-abroad university course, so I get home-cooked food made by my landlady along with vaguely sardonic comments - I can't tell if they're genuine criticism or just being jokey. For example:

(Landlady has made some coffee for me in the coffee machine. The cup is standing there on the opposite side of the kitchen. As it's breakfast my brain has yet to wake up, hence the coffee.)

Me - (after a pause) "Is the coffee ready?"
LL - "Yes. I thought you weren't going to take it."
Me - "Oh, no, I just thought you were going to give it me." (considering she'd made it and laid the rest of the table)
LL - "Never do much for yourself, do you?"

What the fuck do you say to that? I mean, there's also the additional thing where I'm worried I've missed a nuance, or failed to take into account that my landlady can be absolutely bloody terrifying in the way that only a single mother of three can pull off (Hi Mum! I'll ring next week, promise?)

In the end I went "Well, I'm usually afraid I'll break something", to which she replied "Mm-mm". It's an infuriatingly noncommittal Russian noise (sort of a low-mid-low nasal tone thing, kind of a cross between "uh-huh" and "ah") that they make given any opportunity, and the worst fucking thing is I've started doing it in English as well. Also, when written down it's spelt "ugu", which is just ridiculous.

When I first arrived, I got what appears to be the usual Slavic thing of being sat at a table with approximately every item of food available in the surrounding area arranged alphabetically, with a few more that I'm pretty sure haven't been available since Soviet times and were defrosted just for show. The Slavs, apparently, like to put on a spread. So, wanting to show willing and avoid the silent look of female Russian reproach that I'm so familiar with from first year grammar class, I tried a bit of everything. I've got to say, some of it wasn't half bad. They do a thing with fried mushrooms that's actually pretty good (though I get the feeling I'd die if I ate it more than once a fortnight), and being quite into their soup I've been fed a lot of shchi (cabbage soup) and borsch (beetroot soup), often with some chicken or beef sitting in the bottom for flavour.

Comrades, they fucking love dill. I have no idea why - it has hardly any flavour and the main plus seems to be that you can grow it in a window box even if you live in a high-rise apartment (protip: that's pretty much everyone in cities). An indication of the slightly worrying dill-fixation is that the Russian word for dill is derived from the word for "to sprinkle" - yup, while we think of sprinkles as some kind of hundreds-and-thousands job that you put on your ice cream as a kid, to Russians it's a nondescript herb. Woot. There's a lot of dill-hate on the internet - just Google Dillwatch to find a Facebook group about it (that it turns out my tutor is on - awkward). I imagine if you lived here for a long time it'd get a bit irksome, but I personally found it more pissing off when some cheeky upselling waiter put ground cinnamon on my coffee without asking. Fucking nerve - and it tasted like ground sawdust.

Anyway, I had a point somewhere here. Oh, they like ketchup, too. And mayonnaise, which will be put in everything, along with sour cream. Considering the bitter cold (I caught myself thinking "Ee, it's cold out" on the way to the metro this morning, which given my Yorkshire antifreeze blood is saying summat) it's understandable that they put something fattening in whatever they're making - even the coffee machine at uni defaults to putting about three sugars in unless you use some kind of volume control thing to turn it down. When the heating came on in the flats one of our teachers referred to it as "a national holiday". Being still unused to this personal property thing (fun fact - Russians have no word for "privacy". Have a look at "kommunalka" on Wikipedia or just have a look at this to see why), Russians have no control over the heating in their flats. In Petersburg it's apparently a matter of mayoral policy to decide when the heating goes on, usually around the start of October, but often dependent on the average daily temperature thing in a manner that I eventually gave up trying to grok. The things I put myself through for both readers of this blog, eh?

So anyway, after a few weeks of diligently trying everything (homegrown cucumber seems to be particularly prevalent - not our weedy English type that we cut the crusts off and feed to toffs with weak teeth, but a full-blooded Russian kind that looks like an English pickle's older, nonalcoholic (lol) cousin) my landlady asked my why I ate everything mixed up. "Mixed up?" I asked. "Yes, you eat sweet things and then savoury things and then sweet things. That's not done here."

For fuck's sake, I thought, here I've been having to practically roll away from the table at breakfast and tea trying to fit in and it's all been for nowt. Take it from me, the worst thing you can hear as a foreigner in Russia is "That's not done here" (much shorter in Russian, of course, because they need to say it so often). Whistling in the street? Nope. Apparently you're supposed to be whistling away your money. Christ! There I was assuming that the fact that a grand (in roubles) is about £20 makes you feel a little rich and thus a little freer with your money (or the locals hear our attempts to speak Russian and assume we're a) mentally impaired b) will only go losing our money if they don't take it off us) was why we all seem to be broke by half time, but no, it's the fact that I sometimes whistle the solo from "I Am The Resurrection" when I'm waiting for the metro that means I'm destined never to be rolling in the Vladimirs. Actually, they put monuments in different cities on their notes - a thousand has one in Yaroslavl, for instance. Though I wouldn't be surprised if they start putting their long-serving politicians on there soon.

What's that? The we're-not-the-KGB-anymore are here to take me away for questionable attempts at political commentary? It's a fair cop.

While next time! (I hope)

Baked cheese is one of the good things.
It's like everything you wanted cheese strings to be when you were eight!