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Friday,
November 21, 2003
I'm no longer mad at Russia Wow, am I significantly less crabby today. Why? Well, I was supposed to give a presentation in my Razgovornaya Practika class, but our regular professor was at a wedding, and the new teacher filled in. The new teacher is probably two or three years older than me, fresh out of college, and very nice but very nervous. I get the impression we may be her first teaching gig. So she tends to talk too much. She ended up going off on tangents and over-explaining random points at intervals throughout my presentation, which saved me from having to actually talk about anything. Huzzah! Our cohort was, for some reason, expected to go see an opera today. The administrators bought a load of tickets to Yevgeny Onegin and told us we were going. Okay. I'd already seen it once this semester, but whatever. The presentation we saw was a little sucky. I think the main problem was that I didn't really like the voices on either Tatiyana or Onegin, and as they're the main characters, that was problematic. It's not to say they didn't have great voices (they're opera singers, for heaven's sake) but they both sounded, I dunno, too old. She didn't sound like a lovely young woman, and he didn't sound like a callow youth. And they kepts stopping the action to dance, and dance kind of poorly at that. And Onegin looked like Elvis. Lensky was pretty awesome, though. During the duel scene, he waggled his eyebrows so hard his hairdo waggled. The set was also very cool - there were all these dimorphous diaphanous curtains with Pushkin's little sketches and his writing printed on them, and depending on what they did with the lighting, the curtains could be either opaque and showing the writing and pictures, or translucent and revealing the action taking place in the background of the scene. Okay, I didn't describe that well at all, but since you don't care anyway, we'll just move on. I was getting pretty bored by the third act, but Amanda woke me up by leaning over and whispering, "They really need to make Yevgeny Onegin into one of those teen remake movies that takes place in a high school, like Ten Things I Hate about You." So I spent the rest of the opera picturing Onegin as Josh Hartnett, breaking the heart of Katie Holmes' Tatiyana (they'd have to call her Tanya, of course, and Yevgeny, I don't know, Gene?) and then getting into a deadly paintball match with his former best friend, Vinnie Lensky, who is played by that guy who was Pacy on Dawson's Creek. It would be terrible. And terribly funny. After the opera, Amanda, Sofia, this other girl Rachel who I don't think I've mentioned before in the blog, and I went to this lovely sweets store and ate ridiculously rich cake and drank nice tea. So now I'm no longer crabby. There you go - all it takes to cheer me up is bad opera and good cake. - declared by Liusia @ 2:59 PM Thursday,
November 20, 2003
Strongbad agrees with me about the need for proper punctuation. Check it. It's one of the more recent Strongbad emails. The email itself is pretty funny, but this is why I'm linking to it: At the end, when the printer paper comes down, click on the beefy arm on the news logo. Then click on the big capital letter on the CD case that comes up. You can cycle through a number of songs by clicking again and again. I heartily approve of the one that starts off "I don't care how they spell things on the internet..." This also made me laugh heartily - McSweeney's explains the differences between commonly confused English words. And hey - I've added a new toy to the website. It's called the Web Fire Escape, and it looks like this:  The site touts it thus: The Web Fire Escape is a simple device which has been designed to allow readers of weblogs to instantly replace a Web Fire Escape equipped blog with an alternate work-safe site or a fake word processor or spreadsheet application. When you see a weblog with the Web Fire Escape equipped button you can be sure that career salvation is only a click away should a work colleague or manager approach your desk whilst you are catching up with your daily blogs. So funny. Also, considering my obsession with goofy European street signs, very appropriate. - declared by Liusia @ 5:58 AM Wednesday,
November 19, 2003
This just in: people are jerkfaces. Today I saw what I am going to venture to say is the best opera ever. If you ever find yourself with the opportunity to see Die Fledermous, avail yourself of it. Any opera which has a climactic scene which involves the soprano dressing up as a giant bat is something you just have to see for yourself. Also, there's an entire song basically composed of the phrase, "Oh, my God! Whoa!" over and over again, in different keys and rhythms. I love opera. Whoever decided that opera is high culture is an idiot. Opera is silly. But it's so great. I also finished reading Great Expectations. It's kind of ironic that going to Russia has given me an opportunity to catch up on my English literature. Books in English are super-expensive here - except the classics. And while I actually read Russian really quickly and accurately now, sometimes the prospect of starting another book in Russian is just overwhelming. Sometimes I look at a page of text in Russian and think to myself, "Wow, I can't read that! It's just a bunch of squiggly lines!" Logically, all writing is just a bunch of squiggly lines, but just try to explain that to my right brain hemisphere. So sometimes I just have to get some English language literature to consume, and give the poor cortex a break. I'm going to enter dangerous literary ground here and venture to say that Dickens couldn't write a plot for crap. Seriously. All the "action sequences" go something like, "And then Abel fell off the boat and got all bruised. Meanwhile, all the steamboats crashed into one another and stuff. Also, there were some police, who were wearing humorous hats. Now, let's get back to the part of the story where I create amusing characterizations and describe Pip's ascots." But the amusing characterizations entirely make up for this fault, I think. Just the mental image of Aged P. lowering the drawbridge so that Wemmick can cross the 3-foot-wide moat is enough to start me giggling all over again. Dude, Wemmick totally dug a moat around his house. He's my hero. I'm going to dig a moat around my house someday. Also, he calls his dad "Aged P." I'd start calling my mom Aged M., but she'd kick my ass. I'm beginning to feel like Russia is a bit of a suck. I mean, I like living here. There are innumerable awesome things about St. Petersburg and Russia in general. But when stuff sucks here, it sucks really hard. For example, Amanda had her wallet and passport pickpocketed today...at the opera. Who pickpockets at an opera? And it's one thing to steal someone's money, but their passport? That's ass. You can theoretically get arrested so fast in Russia for being a foreigner and going around without documents. I can imagine that someone would desperately need the money, and might be able to rationalize that their target is an American and therefore can afford to lose it (not true, of course, but I'm rationalizing here) but to throw someone on the mercy of the Russian justice system? That's just soulless. And speaking of people treating foreigners like ass, we went to the train station today to buy tickets to Pskov and Novgorod. We waited in line like good little citizens, chatting amongst ourselves (in English, of course, what the hell) and when we got to the ticket window, the seller, who had totally savvied us for foreigners, stuck up her little "on break" sign and glared at us. Then, as soon as we moved to a different ticket window, she took the sign down and started serving people again. I just can't figure it. First of all, I don't understand why she couldn't wrap her brain around the concept that we might speak both English and Russian (which, of course, we do). And even if we didn't speak Russian, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be able to buy friggin' train tickets. I mean, what if we wanted to take the train out of this country? Or maybe she just assumed that anyone who spoke English must be evil, and therefore didn't want to deal with us. I don't know. But this kind of thing happens way too often. For quite a while, I rationalized it as, well, I'm a foreigner here, do as the Romans do, blah blah. But at this point, I'm just tired. I'm so close to kicking the next person who rolls their eyes when they hear my accent. Sonya keeps telling me that I speak fluidly and accurately, except for my stupid accent. (Although she does allow that my accent is, on average, less stupid-sounding than other foreigners she knows. It's just that all foreigners sound stupid.) She says my worst accent issue is my Ls are rude. Look, I don't even know what that means. And what do you say to that? Yeah, that's what happens when you learn a foreign language, you have an accent. Especially when you've only spoken it for two and a half years. I'm working on it. I'm taking phonetics class, for heaven's sake. It's speech therapy for dirty foreigners! I talk pretty someday! I sit in my room practicing phoneme noises! Na. Na. Nya. La. La. Lya. Ta. Ta. Tya. Meanwhile, all of Russia can bite me. I'm accustomed to having a silly accent. I've had a silly accent all my life, English, Spanish, whatever. The difference is, in the US, when people hear my silly accent, they don't assume that I'm a mentally impaired capitalist pig-dog. Oh, I don't know. I'm just crabby about it today. I should really put thing in perspective. No one's having a purge and shooting all the foreigners or anything. They're just glaring at them. And it's not even close to being everyone, or even a whole lot of people, just a few people who are either apparently confused about who actually makes US foreign policy (here's a hint: not me) or for some reason are linguistic purists and really offended by "rude Ls." All I know is, after I get back to the US, the first person I hear say some variation on "this is America, everyone must speak English!" is gonna be in a world of hurt. I've always thought those people were assholes, but now, I'm extra pissy about it. Nothing like being on the flip side of the scenario to give you a bit more sympathy. Languages are hard. That doesn't mean I'm going to start tolerating punctuation abuse, though. There's just no excuse for that. - declared by Liusia @ 5:22 PM Tuesday,
November 18, 2003
I think I finally got the guestbook working. If someone would post something to test the thing out, I'd appreciate it. Link's at the top of the page, under Cafe Terrace. - declared by Liusia @ 1:26 PM Subject: Become a secret shopper agent! I just got the weirdest email. Hi there, Have you ever dreamed to work as a secret agent? Do you want to have fun, do undercover investigations, and be paid for them? Do you like top secrets? I will tell you one and help you make your dreams come true! There is a type of job called mystery shopping! If you want to become one, you will actually serve as a "secret agent" of a company, which hires you to disguise as a normal customer and inspect the quality of services delivered by its employees. You can help big companies improve their business by just dining at a restaurant or watching the premiere of a new movie. And all this for free plus a salary of $10 to $25 per hour! The best part is that you do not need much time for this "undercover job". Each mystery shopping "mission" takes 2 hours on average. You can adjust your assignments in a way convenient to you, without deterring your classes during the academic year! If all this sounds tempting, join our "agent 007 club" by writing me back! Make your life more "mysterious"! Waiting to see you all as the future "shopping agents" of the century! Sincerely, Agent Harry Smith There were no links, no attachments, no viruses and no HTML. I'm...I'm so tempted to respond. I know it's a scam. I don't want into whatever stupid sham they're running, I just want to harass this guy. Do you think writing back would put my life and/or computer in some kind of dreadful peril? - declared by Liusia @ 1:17 PM My life, in film Road to Perdition Yesterday evening, when I was walking from class to the St. Petersburg Times office, the street looked exactly like a scene from Road to Perdition. It was already dark, of course, because we're so far north, and there was a steady drizzle. All the men were wearing those slouchy caps, and all the women had their hair tied up in scarves, and everyone was wearing trench coats. Most people were carrying black umbrellas. All these old trucks kept zooming down the narrow street, spraying murky water from the puddles onto the walls of the gorgeous but run-down old buildings. I kept thinking Tom Hanks was gonna jump out and shoot me. Conspiracy Theory Last night, on television, they showed a Russian documentary about how J. Edgar Hoover and Lyndon B. Johnson assassinated JFK. It was presented as though this theory is established historical fact. When they were talking about Kennedy's postmortem, to add to the, I dunno, realism, they kept cutting to actual pretty gory footage of an autopsy. Now, I was watching this while I was sitting in the kitchen eating supper. At first, I was all, augh! Don't show a bloody and cracked open chest! I'm trying to eat dinner here! I'm going to be sick! but then, I realized that I was cheerfuly munching down my dinner with no signs of gastric upset, even when they were all waving the skull cap around and such. The morals of this story: 1)Russian TV has no standards and practices department. 2)No amount of yick can stop me from enjoying my pelmeni. His Gal Friday The St. Petersburg Times office is located in St. Issac's Square, in what I'm pretty sure must be an old, out-of-order palace or something of that ilk. It's next to the Astoria, across from the Duma building and kitty-corner from St. Issac's Cathedral. You can tell that our building is the one where the journalists work, because it's the only one that looks all battered. It's one of those things. You have to let journalists in on the action, but keep reminding them of their place, and apparently in Russia their place is the second floor of a creepy old ruin of a palace next door to the place where all the rich bastards vacation. I'm sure there's some profound sociological conclusion we can all draw from that, but I'll be damned if I can find it. - declared by Liusia @ 12:16 PM A conversation I had outside the "Speak Out!" center for English Language Accquistion, where I volunteer Man passing by: Do you know what street we're on? Me: No. MPB: Do you at least know what building that is? Me: It's an English school. MPB: Wait, are you a foreigner? Me: Yeah. MPB: Where are you from? America? Me: Canada. [This is now my standard lie.] MPB: Ah, the land of hockey. Then you must know this song! (begins singing something that may, in fact, have been "My Heart Will Go On") Me: Uh, I'm not sure. MPB: I thought you were from Canada! How can you not know that song?! Do you know Creedence Clearwater Revival, at least? Me: I...no, not really, I mean, I know of them, but... MPB: All Canadians know about CCR! Me: Maybe not French Canadians. MPB: So you're a French Canadian? [Here, for some reason, he decides to switch to English. I don't know why the idea that I might not be a speaker of English would make him think this was a good idea.] Does you spiker inglersh? Me: (still in Russian, trying for diplomacy) I don't think I understand you. MPB: (back in Russian) Well, if you don't know about CCR, what do you know about? Apparently not healthy living, because you're not wearing a hat! You'll freeze to death! Here, do you want mine? Me: I'm cold-resistant. I don't need a hat. MPB: You're a very strange person. Me: Thank you. I'm gonna go now. MPB: All right, it was nice not talking to you about CCR, Frenchie. - declared by Liusia @ 12:15 PM Addendum to the previous: Jesus Christ. A tall glass of milk, that's all I'm asking for. - declared by Liusia @ 12:10 PM |
