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
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,
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
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.
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| 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... |
