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!

Don't Ever Start Me Up / Metro Love

Or, I'm too lazy to actually start the obligatory year abroad blog on time, so here we go. I imagine you'll be dying to hear how I'm doing, unless you're in the exclusive/long-suffering group of people I annoy with random progress reports about the cats in St Petersburg and getting the trolleybus in the wrong direction. (Think bus and tram meet at a party and have ugly, ugly sex - it takes them fifteen minutes longer to come than they said it would, but then they both go at the same time and fucking nobody's surprised.)

Um, yeah. I like parentheses (by which I mean stuff in brackets - I'm not the kind of dick that refuses to call them brackets, because come on, brackets is a great word) (see) and I was thinking of recording some of my fascinating observations of being in Russia for posterity/me wondering how the fuck I did nothing with my twenties later. Because this place is frequently hilarious.

So yeah, fascinating observations. Erm... Oh yeah, the metro here is great. There's generally a Soviet thing where they like naming everything after famous writers and stuff. Like, the station I usually go to is called Mayakovskaya (complete with snazzy art deco tile portrait and quotations on the main hall wall) and at one point I got to go to Dostoyevskaya - predictably it was locked up with great iron bars, and looking through all I could see was crushing blackness and silence. I think there was some guy writing a diary down there as well - Notes From The Metro should be hitting stores in time for the lucrative Christmas depression market.

Yup, Russian lit joke. I'm sorry. If you didn't get it because you've got literally anything better to do with your life, you weren't missing much. But seriously, it makes the blue plaques look a bit shit. Why don't we have a Virginia Woolf Tube station? I suppose it'd take ten minutes for them to finish telling you to mind the (class) gap ("... the impression that one is drowning in a sea of people; the distance between the platform and the train stretches like a void of being that can only be crossed with a forthright and firm step; to vanish into such an abyss would be nothing, and furthermore would piss off everyone trying to get to work on time no end, you nonce...") and any poor people/aspiring Irish writers would get the pimples kicked out of them. Ahem. Sorry.

But yeah, the metro is great. It's actually fairly small compared to a real one like in London or Paris (Petersburg has that "We're a capital too! There's a poem about it and everything! ... Guys?" thing going on), having as it does five lines with about ten to fifteen stops each, a good number of which overlap.

It also has my favourite example of modern Russian-ness (in my opinion, duh). So, Petersburg is, to be honest, a crap place to build a city - most of our interesting classes involve being told stories about how the place is basically a godforsaken marsh with a climate so foul that in the late 80s a third of the population had TB at all times, and when you dig a grave here it fills up with water, and when Peter the Great decided it was going to be a capital city and people were going to damn well live there he had to forcibly make them move, and most of them caught colds and died anyway - they had to build the metro really far underground. I hear it's the deepest metro in the world. This translates to loaaaaaaads of time on the escalators getting up and down from street level. There's usually three, one up, one down, and one permanently unused. (Or maybe they open it at rush hour. I can never tell.)

But the really brilliant thing about the escalators is that the handrails always seem to move a bit faster than the steps - you start with your hand pretty much level, and then if you keep it there you eventually look like you were going to trip forwards but managed to catch yourself and you're now hoping that if you just stay like that no-one will notice. This basically means that everyone on the escalator is playing chicken with Soviet electrics - how long do you hold on? If you move your hand every five seconds it looks like you're giving the handrail the world's laziest handjob, but if you keep it there you get the aforementioned who-me-tripping-no-it's-an-exercise-I-got-off-Fitocracy thing. So what do you do? Personally, I stick my head out and watch everyone else doing exactly the same thing. It's always nice to have your wacky foreigner flail moments mirrored by the general populace.

But the slightly tenuous generalisation I'm lumbering towards is that kind of nearly-there aspect I get round here. (I was going to say in Russia, but assuming the whole of Russia is just Moscow and Petersburg sounds like a bad plan, being something of an outspoken provincial round our way.) Yeah, they've got a metro, and it works really well, but the handrails are slightly off, and no-one seems to be overly bothered. You can't drink the tap water without boiling it because you'll get tapeworms, if you're lucky. In some of the more Western bars people try to speak to you in English (even if they haven't twigged - I mostly just say I'm French and do a convincingly Gallic pout), but I usually can't understand them unless I'm listening in oh-you're-speaking-English mode.

Oh, and the other day I saw a guy dressed in a giant iPhone costume advertising iPhones on the corner of Nevsky Prospect (almighty Nevsky Prospect... Okay, I'll stop). I was going to take a picture, but I thought he must feel like enough of a pillock already. I mean, Christ.

I don't mean that in a bad way - after all, it could actually have a bomb dropped on it (as my taxi driver from the airport helpfully pointed out, it already looks that way in places - as well as saying that I shouldn't walk too near the buildings because the masonry has a habit of dropping off onto passers-by, which I think/hope was a joke) and it would still have more infrastructure than Manchester. (That was also a JOKE guys. Everyone knows that's Barnsley, anyway.)

But yeah, people are friendly, I've managed not to get pickpocketed so far, and the family I'm staying with has CATS!!! I was sick for a bit (saga for another post) and I went to lie down, and when I woke up the little black cat was curled up next to me, purring away. Aww.

While next time!

Well, shit...