Area Youth Falls Prey to Narcissistic E-trend

Saturday, September 13, 2003
In which I conduct a poll
This is a poem by the poet with the fabulously dumb name of "William Carlos Williams."

This Is Just To Say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

What do you think this poem is about?

Later, I will share Kait's theory.
- declared by Liusia @ 10:40 AM

In which I learn several important lessons from the vast natural wisdom of the Slavic lands
1)If you make yourself kasha, wash the pot, spoon and bowl immediately thereafter. For "kasha," is turns out, is actually the Old Church Slavonic word for "glue." (Okay, not really. But it congeals like wallpaper paste.)

2)If you stove has CCCP and a big red star on it, do NOT push the button that looks like the atomic energy symbol.

3)It is okay to walk down the street talking and/or singing to yourself, but not to smile in public. If you smile in public, that means you're crazy.

4)The bus-taxi (mashrudnaya) costs twice as much as the regular bus, because it is fast. You are paying for speed. So why am I always surprised when the driver drives very fast and almost crashes into things? Every time, I think, maybe the mashrudnaya will not be knuckle-bitingly frightening this time. And then we almost hit the statue of Aleksandr Nevskii or a babushka or another car or, like, a metro station. But for some reason, I, like everyone else, continue taking it. Conclusion: we are dumb.

5)An apple a day keeps the doctor away. Five apples a day ruins your digestion.
- declared by Liusia @ 10:35 AM

Friday, September 12, 2003
In which I am stabbed, see pirates, walk in Rasuputin's steps, and get fumigated
Wednesday morning, I had to go to a freakin' Russian medical clinic and get an HIV test. NO, I haven't gotten any, thank you very much, and NO, I haven't injected any heroin. I haven't even stepped on a bloody piece of glass. No, the Russian goverment decided that my American HIV test wasn't good enough, and in order to keep my visa, I, and all the other US students, have to re-prove that we are HIV negative. (Foreigners can't have HIV. I guess Russians can have all the HIV they want, though.) So I had to go to the scary Russian clinic where the woman informed me that my "arm was too fat" so she stabbed me in the hand with this big fat needle and drew out a load of blood. And she got it on the first try, but the needle was big enough that I don't know how she could have missed the vein. In fact, she probably hit two. Russian medicine.

After being stabbed, Katia, Kate (whose name, it turns out, is spelled Kait) and I went to see pirates - the Russian dub of Pirates of the Carribean. Hooray, Piraty Carribeanskovo Morya! The dub was really good, actually, unlike the dub on Star Wars, where the same dude did both Luke and Leia's voices. And it turns out that Russian pirates don't say "Avast!" but they do say "Arrr!" so I guess some things are just cross-cultural.

I also had to buy "closed" shoes, because Sonya says that walking around in open-toed shoes is what is making me sick. I am not sure that I believe her, because she has, at this point, attributed my mutant Russian cold to about 50 different causes. So now I have cute Russian shoes.

Thursday, I went to class even though I felt like ass, because after class I was scheduled to go start my internship, which the school set up for me. I'm going to be working with the St. Petersburg Press Institute, which gives press conferences on Russian current events for an international pool of reporters. They say I'm going to be translating press releases from Russian to English, and helping at the press conferences. This is cool. If it works out at all, it'll be way better than any internship I could have finagled myself back home in Madison.

After trying really hard to sound intelligent in Russian in front of my new boss, I met some other classmates to go on the Rasputin Walk. Our guide was this spacy English guy. We went around to Rasputin's old apartment, the palace where they tried to kill him, and suchlike. It was actually quite interesting, but it took irrationally long, because the guide spoke very slowly and in circles, and kept on going off on tangents about various random things. Also, he was afraid of walking on major streets, so we had to go down alleys, which is always fun. Alleys are skanky all over the world, folks. We ended up walking for more than four hours, and my mutant Russian disease was pretty angry by the end of it. See, the evil has spread to my lungs, and breathing all that nice fresh St. Petersburg air (sarcasm) aggravated the dark spirits, and they retaliated by instigating racking coughing fits. On the bus ride home, people actually gave me personal space. Sonya made me drink some other honey concoction and go straight to bed.

And that brings us to today. You might have noticed the timestamp, and said to yourself, shouldn't she be in school right now? And the answer would be "yes." Except when we got to school, we discovered that the building had just been fumigated with some particularly pungent miasma of bug killer. Everyone suffered through the first class period, then they sent everyone home, on the basis of all of us dying would be bad.

So vicious miasma freed me!

That's not really something you can say every day.
- declared by Liusia @ 3:51 AM

Tuesday, September 09, 2003
Hooray! My blog is now up-to-date! And all the pictures should now work! Some of them I even improved! Take a look!
But alas, I am sick.

I have succumbed to some terrible virlent Russia strain of the common cold.

It's quite icky, but I'm actually feeling quite a bit better today, compared to yesterday, where I nearly passed out on the bus home from school. When I got home, I mentioned that I felt sick, and Sonya and Tolio spent about an hour discussing possible causes (Sonya attributed it to walking too much in the warm weather yesterday, whereas Tolio advanced the more scientific opinion that my sickness was due to walking around the house in bare feet) and although I personally believe it's some horrible Russian disease I cought in the metro, I did not mention this. They made me drink hot milk with honey and go to bed. Sonya woke me up a bit later with some scary pill, which she said was "Super Soviet medicine," and she and Tolio had taken them all their lives whenever they got sick and it always worked well. I considered this briefly. On the one hand, they've survived to be really old. On the other hand, they both survived the Siege of Leningrad, so they can probably survive anything. Also, I am allergic to many common pain relievers, which meant potential hives or stomach cramps. But I figured stomach cramps were better than feeling like my head was going to burst and dribble down my windpipe, settling vomitously in my stomach (I'm a little bit of a baby about illness. Those who have lived with me will attest) and accepted the pill, then slept for 30 hours. I only woke up when she insisted on taking my temperature again. I guess the pill worked, because today I feel less deathly, although my brain cavity still seems unnaturally inflated, throwing me off balance. I've been wobbling around like a Weeble.

Today they had to go help a friend prepare for a funeral, so they made me stay home from school and promise to spend the day drinking hot milk and sleeping. As you may have noticed, I am doing neither, for I elected to venture out in search of cough medicine and piroshki and was instead lured in by a sign touting 24-hour internet access. They left me a bunch of pre-prepared soup and kasha and stuff, telling me I only needed to reheat it and could I do that and was I sure it was okay for them to go, because they could really stay and take care of me! To which I said, no, your friend's husband died, for heaven's sake, that's much more serious than my stupid headcold, even if I am a melodramatic, intellectually-subpar Americanka. But I can't figure out how to turn the stove on, so it was either go buy something or eat cold kasha, which was not really appealing in its congealed state.

Okay, time to go find piroshki. Mmm, piroshki.
- declared by Liusia @ 5:35 AM

Sunday, September 07, 2003
In which I sucessfully manage to both take a train and view shiny objects
Katia and I saw this spaceship-looking thing:

Aliens are invading St. Petersburg!
last Wednesday when we were trying to find our group, and it kind of freaked us out. But she just found out what it is, and it's pretty benign: the cathedral at Smolny, now under restoration. The alien bulkheads are actually scaffolding. Who knew?

Anyway, this morning, we met at the Pushkin metro stop. Our ambitious plan: to travel to and tour both Pavlovsk and the town of Pushkin in one day. Given my fantastic mass transit experiences to date, you might think this was slightly irrational. But it worked out!

There was a bit of confusion about where we were supposed to meet, as we'd agreed to wait "in the metro station, where you come out." So she waited for me on the platform, and I waited for her at the exit. Durr. The real problem was that I was on time for once, which meant that she, on the platform, didn't spot me coming out of the car.

But finally we found one another, and headed to the train station down the street. It's lovely - it was built to take the Russian royalty to their palaces in the countryside, and recently restored. I'm amazed by all the restoration work here - I know that a lot of it is being done for St. Petersburg's 300th anniversary and the related tourism, but the scope is amazing.

Following the helpful advice of the Lonely Planet St. Petersburg guidebook, we bought tickets (about 50 cents each) to Pavlovsk. Katia advised me to watch out for Gypsy pickpockets, this being crucial information she had gleaned from Russian gangster movies. The train ride was about a half hour. The train stopped directly at the entrance to Pavlovsk's grounds, and we paid the ticket lady (she charged us the American price, dammit, despite our student ID cards - most Russian touristy things have a Russian price and a foreigner price, which is often four times as much. Foreign students, though, are supposed to be considered Russian) and headed into the forest. It was lovely, all natural, filled with little streams and ponds and towering dark green trees. Distracted by the loveliness, we got all lost, and ended up walking several miles instead of the one required to reach the palace itself.

I have prettier pictures, that show it from a distance, surrounded by forest, but they're too large to post and if I shrink them down, the details are too small to see.

Tsar Paul was pretty much a dick, so his place was built by Catherine the Great in the middle of nowhere to seclude him from society. The inside was impressive, especially since the palace was nearly destroyed during WWII and has since been reconstructed based on historical documents. The extra-cool part was that we were able to tour not only the showcase rooms, but people's actual living quarters. Unfortunately, photography wasn't allowed. But here's nice English-language website about it.

From Pavlovsk, we hopped a bus-taxi ("Mashrudnaya") that had a "Pushkin" sign on the front. We assumed it was going to Pushkin. It wasn't. But after only like a mile, some Russians, overhearing our conversation about going to Pushkin, told us in the nicest possible way that this bus-taxi was going away from Pushkin, and told the driver to let the "confused foreigners" out at the next bus stop that had taxi-busses going in the correct direction. People are surprisingly helpful here.

So, we waited a bit and got on the next taxi-bus to Pushkin. The town itself was pretty sad and rundown (also destroyed in WWII) but we quickly found Catherine's summer palace.

We paid for entrance onto the grounds (I managed to get the Russian price by showing my student ID and saying "one ticket" all quietly and gruffly!) and walked up to the palace doors. Because this is Russia, there was a big freakin' inefficient line. And because Russia is tricksy, we had to pay again once we got inside - the outside tickets were just for the grounds, the inside tickets were for the palace. But once again, we managed to get the student price of 50 rubles (less than $2), as opposed to the foreigner price, which was like eight times that. The palace tour was worth the wait.

Since both of us knew the history of the building (I had to read an entire book about it for this one class) we tour group hopped - when our guide started rambling about some stupid tea service from the queen of Austria or whatever, we snuck into the next group. So we managed to see the palace without listening to too many lectures.

Stunning isn't a strong enough word.

But I can't post too many pictures, as I'm already eating bandwidth here, but here are couple of photos that turned out really well. Not the most impressive sights in the palace, really, but the coolest photos.

The main stairwell

I just like this photo - it shows the crowd of tourists, filing through a long line of doors.

Some of the more awesome rooms were the hall into which the tour first entered, gigantic and filled with mirrors, light and gilded plaster, and the Amber Room. The Amber Room is the reconstructionist's pride and joy - it was entirely plundered during the war, but they've managed to put it back together from old photographs and diagrams. The walls are entirely covered in mosaics of amber, and it's a good-sized room, too.

After the tour, we walked the grounds. They're not completely restored yet, although they're well on their way, and very beautiful. One of the restoration projects made me giggle, though:

It's Catherine's "ruined castle" that she had built. It's supposed to look like a gothic wonder, now fallen to time. It, too, was damaged. So...they're repairing the ruin to its ruined state. Heh.

The restorations really are amazing. Here's an artist's rendition of what the palace looked like after the war (they also had real photos on display, and if anything, the photos were even more dismal), followed by a picture I took today of the same part of the building:

Wow.

And the whole day, including train tickets, lunch, and admission fees, cost less than $10! I love Russia.

Getting back to St. Petersburg was a bit of hassle, in part because our feet were practically falling off from the extreme amount of walking. We couldn't find a cab to the train station, etc, etc. But we made it back to Nevskii Prospekt finally, around 8 pm, and when we did, we celebrated a day of Russian cultural experiences by going to Pizza Hut for supper.
- declared by Liusia @ 1:00 PM