If anybody has a request for a literary style they would like to see employed in my blog please let me know

Boy, have I ever been delinquent in my email-writing! Sorry to have disappeared! But I haven’t written in so long mostly because I’ve been busy with lots of adventures, about most of which you, my captivated (more likely captive!) audience are now to be subjected to reading:

For my last post, I had devised a terribly clever organizational structure. You never got to see this structure in its full glory because I spent four pages writing about the first bit and never got to the rest of them. Since then, my list of things to write about has grown to an unwieldy full page in Microsoft Word, and I’m simply not up to organizing that. So, instead, I present you now with a collage of tasty morsels of Russian experience. A series of vignettes, if you will. (A thought here occurs to me: perhaps if I took less pleasure in writing full paragraphs of self-indulgent prose conveying absolutely no knowledge or meaning whatsoever this whole blogging business would be a bit more streamlined and I would be better able to achieve my goal of communicating to my readers the various goings-on in my life without causing them to be bored out of their gourds. Well, as my grandma says, (Hi, grandma!) “Things are tough all over!”) Onward!

Sex, Drugs, and 19^th Century Russian Literature
Our group recently took a tour of the Dostoevsky museum. The museum consisted of two parts: first, the apartment in which he lived with his family, and second, the neighboring apartment which has been snatched up by the museum for the purpose of housing the “literary exposition” portion of the museum. The first part was pretty straightforward. I gathered from the tour guide (though I can’t stress enough the fact that what I translate for you as having come from the tour guide is in no way intended to be taken as having been fully or in any way accurately understood, and any resemblance to an accurate translation is pure coincidence) that the furniture etc. in the apartment was not so much Dostoevsky’s as remarkably similar to it. This is true with the notable exception of, among a few other things, a package of tobacco and cigarette papers, on which package Dostoevsky’s daughter wrote that he had died at a particular date and time, and which package now lives under a big plastic bubble. The other exception is the divan on which Dostoevsky died, and the clock that was in his room and was stopped, according to Russian-famous-person custom, the moment of his death.

The literary exposition portion of the museum opened with a giant wall-map of St. Petersburg, on which were demarcated the locations of various of the plot elements of Dostoevsky’s novels. Dostoevsky was really into describing geography to a tee, and you can take a Crime and Punishment walking tour of the city so you can visit the apartments where all of the characters lived, etc. Except for the wall map, which was pretty cool, the exposition consists mostly of life-sized dioramas of all of Dostoevsky’s novels. At one point on our tour, we were standing by a window and happened to look out and see the neon lights of a sex shop right across the street. We all started to giggle a bit, hoping the tour guide wouldn’t notice that we were acting like pre-pubescent boys by being amused by the fact that we were on a tour of a literary museum and looking out the window at a sex shop, when the tour guide actually pointed out the sex shop to us! She then started a commentary about how Dostoevsky had written not about the high-society, politically minded Petersburg of Tolstoy, but rather of the poor, dirty, sin-ridden side of the city, and how his neighborhood had over time turned into a neighborhood that would be found in one of his novels! She concluded by saying that, in her opinion, Dostoevsky would be pleased to know that there was a sex shop across the street from his museum.

A Three Hat Day
I’ve noticed that the шапки (shapki – fur hats that are exactly like the fur hats you would expect to see Russians wearing in winter) that people wear here tend to closely mimic the wearers’ eyebrows. Old women with thin, wispy eyebrows generally have thin, fluffy, wispy hats. Young women with elegantly plucked and shaped eyebrows have elegantly shaped hats. My favorites are the old men with unruly, bushy eyebrows wearing giant, unruly, bushy hats.

Meta-McDonalds
So I’ve given in to temptation. I’ve been to McDonald’s here. Sometimes you’re homesick and you just need a cheeseburger. But it’s always a really weird experience for several reasons, including but not limited to the fact that if you don’t ask for ketchup they give you cheese sauce for your fries, there is a walk-up window, and people here actually treat McDonald’s as a restaurant as opposed to a “fast food joint.” All that’s fine, but what always weirds me out about going to McDonald’s is that by ordering a чизбургер (chizboorger – you’ll never guess what the English translation is!) I’m saying a word that is an American word that has been Russianized, and I’m saying the Russianization with an American accent. Just roll that over for a bit. It’s a source of endless amusement for me.

These Boots Are Made for Walking?
I threw my American fashion-sensibilities (what, you didn’t know I was a fashion diva?) to the winds and bought a new pair of fur-trimmed Russian-made boots. I love them. What I don’t love is the Russian boot ethos. Women here as a rule where knee-high leather boots with spiked heels and all sorts of crazy embroidery or beads or studs or other decoration. “Gasp!” you say. “How can they wear heels when there are three inches of icky brown muddy slush on the sidewalk, which slush we remember from your impossibly clever and endlessly interesting story about tucking your pants into your boots?” Well, that’s a fine question, but the real question is, how can they wear said boots without there EVER being even a SPECK or a DROPLET of mud on them? Not even a SMUDGE??? Seriously, there is not a dirty shoe in this entire country unless that dirty shoe is on an American foot. Women carry mini shoe-polishing kits and brushes in their purses and whip out the brushes on street corners while waiting for a light, and break out the polish on the bus on their way to work. I tried to keep my Russian boots in Russian condition, but I can’t help but miss the boots that these fur ones replaced. They were great – fashionable, comfortable, sturdy, etc., but their real virtue lay in the fact that they enabled me to tromp through mud puddles and bound over icy patches of slush with reckless abandon. Well, when in Rome…

The Great Fare Negotiation of ’07
The Metro closes in Petersburg around midnight and opens again around 6 am, regardless of the day of the week. So if you’re out past midnight and don’t want to stay out until 6, you take a cab home. But, while there are official cab services, they’re really expensive and it’s usually cheaper and easier and more convenient in every way just to take what is known here as a “gypsy cab.” Gypsy cabs are basically just people driving around who decide they want to pick up a few extra bucks by driving somebody somewhere. So when you hail a cab whoever happens to be out and about will stop, and then you negotiate your fare and get in. If they won’t give you the fare you want, you just say never mind, they drive off, and you start negotiating with the driver of the car next in the line that is invariable at least three cars long. I’ve actually gotten to be pretty good at negotiating cab fares, which is odd, because while I’m a fearless cab fare negotiator, I’ll go into a pharmacy for nail polish remover and wander around for an hour without buying anything because I’m afraid to ask a salesperson for help finding it. Anyway, now, for your reading pleasure, a re-enactment of my proudest fare-negotiating moment:

Our fearless heroine; quick-witted and graceful, which is to say, me: How much to Kazanskij Sobor?

Driver trying to fleece me: 200 roubles (about $8).

Heroine: 200? I don’t think so. Let’s say 80.

Fleecy: Fine, we’ll say 100.

Heroine: I can get to Vasilevsky for 100! (NB: This isn’t actually true. I’ve never gotten less than 150.)

Fleecy (unlocking back door): Okay, get in. 80 it is. (about $3.25)

Woot!

I Probably Shouldn’t Complain Too Much About This One Because I Still Don’t Actually Know the Order of the Letters of the Russian Alphabet Anyway
I had to buy some books for one of my classes. They were all novels in Russian, so I just went to a big bookstore downtown. As you’ll remember from the last story, I get really nervous asking salespeople for help. But I knew the authors and titles of the books I needed, and they were all fiction, so I figured I should be able to just find the fiction section, go along alphabetically by author, and then find the particular novels I needed. This didn’t work. I haven’t yet figured out how novels in Russian bookstores are actually organized, but here are some conjectures: a) by paper weight, b) by number of colors on the cover design, c) by date the publishing company in question decided they might consider printing the particular edition of the novel. So I had to ask for help. The saleswoman I talked to was quite friendly and helpful, but that doesn’t change the fact that my pleasure in lolling about in bookstores has been reduced for an indeterminate period of time.

Well, I’ve written upwards of three pages in Word at this point, so I think I’m going to cut myself off for now. But I hardly made a dent in my list, so never fear! Your excuse to not do your homework/your laundry/your taxes is not anywhere near to running out of material. I hope everyone is well!

Love,
Annie