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Wednesday,
October 15, 2003
Runaway train, never comin' back So, I'm leaving for 10 days. My school group is going to Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan and Moscow, travelling on the overnight train. Expect lots of pictures of cupolas when I get back. Assuming I don't pull an evil eye-related Anna Karenina at at the train station... Here's a quiz to keep you busy in my absence. 
- declared by Liusia @ 6:02 AM Tuesday,
October 14, 2003
In which I submit to the blogger's vice Yes, that's right, quizzes. It doesn't matter that I hate the things, hate seeing them in other people's blogs, and think they are even more pointless than smilies. I take them anyway. Every time I see one. It's an addiction. I picked them up from this journal, which is a great read, from what I've thus far perused. Medieval history and sordid personal details - what more could you ask for in online entertainment?  You are a Bolshevik! Hooray! You've just overthrown the Tsar! Now all you have to look forward to is the fulfillment of the wondrous dream of Pure Communism! Of course, you won't live to see it, because Stalin will have you shot as a traitor. What kind of Russian are you? brought to you by Quizilla  You are: THEODORA (c500-548). The ultimate Empress, who rose from bawdy actress to champion of the oppressed. Her marriage to Justinian was arguably the most loving and enduring in history. She had many enemies at court, but was a brilliant strategist and incredibly charming. Which Byzantine Empress Are You? brought to you by Quizilla - declared by Liusia @ 4:09 PM In which I am cursed (maybe) So, yesterday, when I was coming home from copy-editing at about 11 pm, I might have gotten the evil eye put on me. That deserves some explanation. Here goes. I was standing on Nevskii Prospekt, waiting for the bus. An old lady came up to me, and asked me where the telegraph office was. She had a strong accent, although I couldn't place it. (The only accents I can really pick out in Russian are British, German, and Vaguely Southeast Asian.) I told her that I didn't know, and apologized. She asked me if I was a foreigner too, and I said, yep, from Canada, which has become my standard lie. I figure Wisconsin is practically Canada anyway. I mean, we don't even need passports to cross the border! We have almost the same silly accent! It's all good. But back to the story - she said that she was from Kazakhstan, and as long as we were both foreigners here, she had a secret for me, about how to find happiness in love. I managed an "um, okay?" So she leaned in all confidentally, and whispered out the story. But between the street noise, the heavy rain, her accent, and the fact that I am mostly deaf in that ear (stupid timpani drums - this is what happens when spend 10 years playing the French horn and sitting right next to them), I caught very little of it. Then she was like, "Oh, no!" and reached up and pulled out a few strands of my hair. "I'm sorry, child, they have the sickness in them now!" As this point, I was torn between believing she was crazy, and that she was trying some elaborate pickpocketing scheme involving mad amounts of misdirection. She blew on the hairs, and insisted that I fold them up in a piece of paper. I pulled a newspaper out of my satchel, but she was like, no, stupid, a piece of paper money. So I got a 10 rouble bill out of my pocket. (I keep my bus money in my coat pocket, and my actual money and credit cards and such in my wallet in a more secure location.) She folded the hairs up in the bill, then told me I needed to put it in the place where I keep my money. I was like, dude, that would be my pocket. She was like, no, your wallet! So, I'm pretty weirded out to begin with, and now I'm visualizing some accomplice or something just waiting in the bushes for me to take out my wallet so he can grab it and run off or whatever. I told her my pocket was where I kept my money, and moreover, my bus was here, so I needed to go. And she was like, no, get out your wallet, get out your wallet! Quickly! But the bus was pulling away, and I was freaked out, so I ran to catch the bus. As I was leaving, she yelled after me, "Things are going to go very badly for you! Be careful, things are going to go very badly for you!" Now, I'm sitting in the bus, feeling like I just survived the opening act of Macbeth, and trying to convince myself that I don't believe in hexes or curses, and that she can't possibly do anything evil with my hair. But seeing as how I do things like regularly pray the rosary for my deceased friends and family's souls, and Sundays at church I munch on bread that has supposedly been changed from flour products into dead Jesus, it's not much of a logical leap to start worrying about hexes. I'm a credulous sort, definitely not a Nietzsche-esque ubermench. So I'm getting pretty worried here, no matter how I try to convince myself the old lady was just some weirdo. Later on the journey home, when I was waiting for a second bus from the metro station, an kindly-looking old man approached me. "Can you help me get to the metro?" he asked. "Sure," I replied. "It's across the street and to the left a few meters." He looked sheepish. "No, I mean...like a metro token or something." A bus pulled up, and I thought I might be mine. "I don't have any, sorry," I said, hurrying off to read the bus number closer-up. But it turned out to be the 27 and not the 22. When I went back in the bus shelter, he was hobbling off. "Oh, wait," I said, because I felt heartless for ignoring him, and I snooped through my pockets to make sure I really didn't have a metro token. "I'm pretty hungry," he said, still sounding embarrassed. He looked well-groomed, although old and sickly, so I figured him for an impoverished retiree or something, probably having a place to stay but no real pension to take care of himself, and felt really bad that he'd come to the point where he had no one to support him, and the Soviet government that was supposed to take care of him in his old age had dissolved, and imagined that he must feel awful having to ask random girls for metro money... "Oh, jeez," was about all I could come up with, and I gave him the entire contents of my coat pocket, which added up to about 55 roubles - not much in American money, but enough here to get a decent meal and a metro ride. When I caught the next bus home, I felt even more like a character in a play, but that I might have just averted a major disaster for myself. First of all, the old Kazakh woman, then the old man, and next would have been, like, the Ghost of Christmas Future, had I not given the old guy some cash. I got home in one piece, not seeing any further apparitions. But this morning when I woke up, I felt like I had a hangover - terrible headache, queasy, light-sensitive - despite the fact that I hadn't drank a drop. I decided to sleep through my morning classes, and go in after lunch if I felt better. Well, after a few more hours of sleep I felt a bit better, so I headed in. And when I told Katia the story of the old Kazak woman, she informed me that I probably had the evil eye, because that's the way the Slavic evil eye works. She said that according to her Slavic folklore class, if you tell someone a secret, you are giving something to someone, which means you have to "take something back," possibly cursing them with the evil eye, even if you don't mean to. So the old Kazakh woman was probably looking at my hair when she told me the secret, and because of that, she thought that was where the evil eye hit me. So she was trying to undo the unluckiness by pulling out the hair and neutralizing the evil with some ritual. But then I ran away before she could cancel out the unluckiness. I still think she was probably either a)nuts or b)trying to steal my wallet, but tomorrow Katia is going to come over to my house and do some crazy fortune-telling test with an egg to find out if I have been afflicted with the evil eye. So I will keep you updated on my evil eye status. Unless I get hit by a bus. - declared by Liusia @ 2:13 PM Books I have on the dresser next to my bed: The Bible 501 Russian Verbs the Kenneth Katzner English-Russian Russian-English dictionary Timequake, Curt Vonnegut Q is for Quarry, Sue Grafton a collection of Ambrose Bierce short stories Deadly Decisions, Kathy Reichs, aka the R.L. Stein Award-winner Fatal Voyage, Kathy Reichs, aka the Bad Airplane Book a collection of Edgar Allen Poe's poetry 4 Lemony Snicket A Series of Unfortunate Events books in Russian translation the Afisha guide to Petersburg (in Russian) Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in Russian translation a collection of Chekhov stories, entitled Death of a Clerk and Other Tales (in Russian) Stolen from Gypsies by Noble Smith, aka the best pointless book ever To Arms! To Arms! (in Russian), which I thought was the translation of Terry Pratchett's Guards! Guards! but turned out to be his Men at Arms instead, which is almost as good Azazel, by Boris Akunin (in Russian) - a dark mystery novel starring a 19th century crime-solving monk I think this reveals some disturbing facts about my personality. - declared by Liusia @ 2:10 PM Monday,
October 13, 2003
In which I punch a Gypsy Today, leaving school, Katia was attacked by Gypsies. For real! This small horde of colorfully dressed short people swarmed around her and started trying to grab her bag and go through her pockets, not sneakily or anything, but right on Nevskii Prospekt, in broad daylight, out in the open. They crowded up around her so she couldn't get away or effectively fight back. Apparently they were retarded Gypsies, though, because Katia was with Sofia, Kait and I, none of whom are tiny little waif girls, despite the fact that I do have the galloping consumption. Seriously, I'm 5'9'', and Kait and Sofia have to be about the same height as me. I myself took out several, including the one mentioned in the title, who is gonna be feeling that for a while. I don't think they managed to get anyone's stuff, and they didn't injure anyone, although one did sock me pretty good in the side. In theory, I am in favor of a rollicking nomadic lifestyle. I just think people should limit their rollicking, i.e., not attack my friends. Otherwise, I will punch them in the face. I haven't punched anyone in the face since I was 12, but I guess I still have the knack of it. It's weird, because I thought I had some kind of compunction against physical violence, but I didn't even think before whacking the idiots. I'm a loose cannon, yo. In other news, the radio here in the internet cafe is playing, I kid you not, a soft jazz remix of the soundtrack of the freaky evil videotape from The Ring. It goes something like soft jazz jazz jazz jazz SKREE-AHH! SKREE-AHH! soft jazz jazz jazz ping ping ping SKREEE-AHH! It is scaring the hell out of me. - declared by Liusia @ 7:36 AM Sunday,
October 12, 2003
In which I play with Photoshop I like that there are big creepy angels in the architecture all over the place here. It's very gothic. So, when I was playing around with Photoshop, I turned two of my pictures in super-broody .JPGs. Should I suddenly decide to dye my hair black, wear lots of eyeliner and sit in the basement contemplating the dark mysteries (and reading even more books of depressing poetry than I already read, I will have to use one of them as the header in a new page design for this website. They are just that broody. The first one is the angel on top of the pillar-thing in front of the Hermitage. It's bludgeoning a snake with a cross. The second is St. Issac's Cathedral at twilight.  
They're angsty! - declared by Liusia @ 6:00 PM In which I acutally tell what's going on in my life It just occurred to me that I have posted nothing of substantance all week. To rectify that situation, here is a post with actual content: Monday, I had my first day at the St. Petersburg Times. It was lovely. I copy-edited a whole bunch of things. I even fixed errors in wire copy. I am that good, y'all. (And humble, too!) I realize that sitting for four hours and copy-editing things may not sound thrilling to all you sane people out there, but I really enjoy writing all over other people's work in red pen. I enjoy waging war against punctuation abuse. Also, sometimes I suspect that I am a big bad hack writer, and tearing other people's work apart makes me feel somewhat better. I can say to myself, "Heh heh heh, while I may not be able to create anything original, clever or emotionally resonant, I at least know that comma splices are unacceptable in professional writing, unlike this poor bastard!" Yep. Then, when I went to my internship at the Journalism Soyuz on Thursday, Chris the Librarian told me that he heard I was a copy-editing whiz. And there is further evidence that I am gaining a reputation for red-penmanship: Trey, this other American guy at our university, asked me to proofread something for him, because it was going to be published in some business directory. This is perhaps not the reputation I would have chosen for myself, but as far as reputations go, there are worse things to be known for, I guess. I should start doing like I did back in Madison, and demand that people who want something proofread bring me a tribute of cookies. It has also been a very artsy week. On Wednesday, I went to the Hermitage. My camera's batteries were dying, so the pictures I took came out quite terribly, except for one, which looks sort of cool so I prefer to think of it as "artistic" instead of merely "woefully out-of-focus." But I'm not going to post it. Instead, I am going to show you two blurry pictures of note: 
This is the carriage Peter the Great had made for Catherine I's coronation ceremony. It weighs two tons and goes really slowly, so it was only used twice: for Catherine I's coronation and Elizabeth's coronation. While Peter the Great was, of course, super-cool, the first thing I thought when I looked at this was: "this is the kind of thing that makes the proletariat want to revolt. " It's just poorly-thought-out to go tooling around the streets in a carriage entirely encrusted in gold when a huge chunk of your population can't even afford food. Then, there was also this room: 
I wandered into it randomly, and I have no idea what it is. It's just this alcove, off by itself in a hallway, and entirely distinct from the surrounding decor. It seems to be some kind of a throne room, or perhaps an altar to Peter. See that chair? Yeah, that'll give you a sense of the dimensions of the thing. The picture is definitely Peter the Great, and I assume the chica with him is his wife Catherine. I do not know. But it is pretty. Wednesday night, we went to see the ballet Midsummer Night's Dream at the Marinsky Theater. Normally, I am not a big ballet fan. I mean, I don't dislike it, but I get bored very quickly, because people jumping around for two hours is not enough to hold my admittedly capricious interest. But this ballet was cool, 'cuz for one thing, it was performed by a company from La Scalia, and they were all graceful and in-sync and such. It was also cool because it featured things like a dude with a donkey head, which brightens up any performance. And the guy who played (danced?) Puck was hilarious. Puck annoys me a lot of the time. He's too spastic. (My beloved Stanley Tucci gets a pass on this one, of course.) Also, fairies and suchlike irritate me in general, being all cutesy and mischevious. But this guy was great. Here is a picture of the Marinsky Theater's chandelier. I have read The Phantom of the Opera one too many times, I guess, because every time I see a chandelier in a theater or opera house, I start to worry.  Save us, Raoul, save us! We also went to see the opera The Queen of Spades on Friday and the ballet Don Quixote on Sunday. Both were very enjoyable, although I have to admit that I have not yet read The Queen of Spades, and therefore was ridiculously confused. But the music was awesome and the staging was dramatic and I have to send some serious mad props to the stage crew, who made this awesome-lookin' gate thing that clanged shut in front of the stage after every act. There was some extreme weirdness in Act III, though, when a bunch of guys in blackface dressed like something out of Arabian Nights came out and danced with a bunch of girls dressed like cheery Russian peasants, and they all sang a happy song. It was inexplicable. Don Quixote was great. Katia, who knows all about ballet and suchlike, did not think it was as good as Midsummer Night's Dream, but I was suitably impressed by all the windmills and flamenco and the live horse onstage that I didn't notice this. Dude! There was a live horse! So that's pretty much it. I saw a lot of arty things. I did some copy-editing. The weather was terrible, but this is St. Petersburg, so it's to be expected. All in all, a good week. - declared by Liusia @ 4:39 PM
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