Bracing For Impact

I have officially hit the point where it is roughly two weeks (maybe less, depending on when I actually have a chance to post this) until I return to the states. Granted, this is not all bad, as I will get to see my friends and family etc., but I still can’t help but be a little sad to be leaving this country (what feels like) so soon. Especially since my Russian has finally gotten to a point where I’ve noticed real improvement across the board (today my phonetics teacher was amazed that I hadn’t had much intense phonetics drilling in my past classes. You know, because I’m awesome), I somewhat dread knowing that within a couple of weeks of not speaking any Russian, I will probably lose a solid 50% of this improvement. However, in order to ready myself for transition, I have decided to compile a list of the little things that I will be genuinely looking forward to upon my return (again, apart from the obvious).

-Food: While Russian cuisine can be quite tasty, there are a few areas that could use improvement. Example: dill is meant to be a seasoning, and I will be filled with glee when it returns to such a state, as opposed to being a substantial portion of the calories of every meal I eat. Also, while I have learned to enjoy salads here, I’ll look forward to a point when sour cream or mayonnaise are no longer considered acceptable as “dressings”.

-Laundry: Russian apartments are small. Really small. Thusly, so are their washing machines. And just forget about dryers because they are like snipes: oft heard of, but never seen. This means two things: laundry is done in several small loads that takes almost an entire day to two days to complete, and then you have to tack on another day or two for your clothing to line dry. This would be all well and good if my host family didn’t leave clothes to soak and subsequently dry in the shower. This means each week I am faced with the decision of whether I want to have an acceptable body odor, or wear clean clothing. It is not a decision I enjoy as no matter what I choose, something on my body is dirty and gross. Also, line-dried socks feel like slipping my feet into cardboard.

-Making Purchases: While the dollar-to-ruble exchange rate is awesome for any traveler fortunate enough to have the former, there is a slight problem. See, my bank charges me $4 every time I make a withdrawal here, so I like to make sure it’s a worthwhile withdrawal (as getting nickled and dimed to death because Chase can’t catch up with Citibank, which has branches all over the city, makes me cringe). This means every time I take out money, I am saddled with thousand-ruble bills. The problem? Russians are so goddamn lazy that sometimes they would rather not make a sale than make change for you. So even though I have roughly one hundred dollars worth of Rubles in my wallet after a trip to the ATM, to just about every store in the city, I might as well have no money, so I then have to make an expensive and frivolous purchase to justify using a thousand just so I can have smaller bills to get the little things. Like food.

-Beverages: Again, there are many things to hail here. Soda is cheap and made with cane sugar, they make Red Bulls in half-liter cans, and you can walk down the street double-fisting cans of Baltika (the tastiest beer this side of the Neva) and if you’re not acting like a drunk asshole, no cops will give you problems. However, there is a Russian superstition that cold causes sickness because when it’s cold out, everyone gets sick. I guess no one bothered to explain to them that people get sick from huddling inside and turning their tiny apartments into tiny petri dishes. Anyway, a result of this superstition is that their definition of cold drinks generally means “brought back a few degrees from boiling”. To put it in the terms of a rational person sans hyperbole, generally a few degrees below room temperature. Vending machines are usually an OK way around this, and sometimes at grocery stores the refrigerators are for more than show (but don’t hold your breath), but any bar, restaurant, or street vendor that advertises “Kholodnie Napitki” (Cold Drinks) is simply lying to you. And forget about ice, because the water here makes New Jersey seem like Palm freaking Springs, so no one ever bothers making it.

So yeah, that’s about it. See you around.

3 Days in the Big City

I’ve mentioned a few times that I find St. Petersburg to be a city eerily similar to New York. However, having just returned from Moscow, that statement needs to be slightly amended. Moscow is probably much more similar to New York in terms of its overall size, its population (double or more than that of Petersburg), and its status as a tourist destination (I heard more English being spoken on the streets in 3 days in Moscow than I have heard in over a month and a half in Petersburg). However, it is incredibly dissimilar to New York in the sense that it both looks and feels like it was designed by M.C. Escher. Go google a map of Moscow, I’ll wait. Yeah, we had to navigate that sight unseen for three days. I could do a play by play of each day we spent there, but honestly, our schedule was so disjointed that it would make that style kind of hard. Since bulleted lists seem to be my forte here, I see no reason why I can’t run down the highlights in that fashion here. Tally ho!

The Weather: I never thought that there would be a place in the entire world that would make me long for the temperate climate of the city that was built over a damned swamp, but Moscow taught me the dangers of using the word “never”. My hotel room was, upon entry, over 30 degrees Celsius. Now I can never remember the conversion for Celsius to Fahrenheit, but I will estimate that it comes out to about 200 degrees Fahrenheit. And on the street, where there was open air, it was only moderately better. I think I was moderately to severely dehydrated the entire time we were there, and not for lack of consuming water.

The Metro: So if you googled that map of Moscow like I told you too, you might have noticed that it looks like it was the product of some spider beast. I think their metro might be a diagram of the structure of said beast. It’s pretty cool actually, but if you don’t have much time to get acclimated, it is a bitch and a half to figure out. Also, unlike Petersburg, which was a planned city, important areas are in no way denoted by stations with connections to other stations. You can roll through to a 3 station junction, emerge from any of them, and be greeted by nothing but pharmacies, but go to a lone stop way out on the green line and you get 5 different museums and clubs within spitting distance. I guess the thesis here is that you simply have to know where you’re going and can’t try to make judgments about areas based on metro popularity like you could in NY or Petersburg. This would have been nice to not have learned the hard way Saturday night when Chris and I went to every junction in the middle of the circle line looking for some damned thing to do only to walk away disappointed and a little more tired and wet from the kilometers we walked in the rain trying to find diversions.

National Holidays: Pay attention to when they are, or like my entire group, you may wind up schlepping all the damn way down to Red Square to go see Lenin only to find after arrival that there’s one going on and the Mausoleum is closed. As are most of the museums in the city. Yeah, thanks for the superb planning, CIEE. At least the Bulgakov house and Patriarch Pond were accessible, as it means I basically got my wishlist granted for the trip (yes I know there is much more to see there, and I would have been interested had we not only been there for 3 days).

Walking: be prepared to do a lot of it. I probably walked twice as much per day in Moscow as I do in Petersburg, and I walk at least a good 2 miles per day here. I think I ruined every pair of socks I brought with me.

I feel like that about covers my main points. Anyone wanting further details on stuff, feel free to ask. I am back in Petersburg and remain here for about 12 more days (as of writing this), so I’ll be seeing you all sooner than you think.