Rain and Sudafed, amongst other things.

When the Summer Language Intensive Handbook said that it rains almost every day in St. Petersburg in the summer I was sure this must be an overstatement, especially after I found out Bryan wrote the handbook and Carly says he is prone to exaggeration. But no, this is definitely the truth. I walked home this afternoon from the Sadovaya metro stop after my Cool! English meeting/recording session (more about that in a minute). I was listening to the Rolling Stones on my iPod as I walked, and just when "You Can't Always Get What You Want" came on a large amount of clouds rolled overhead. As the song began to build a few rain drops fell, and by the time the song hit its climax of all those choir boys singing away behind Mick Jagger it was pouring. It was perfectly timed. A soundtrack kind of moment. Though it would have been completely ideal if then the rain abruptly stopped at the end of the song, but alas, no, it kept on pouring and when I stopped to take a picture of the Gogol Bordello concert poster near my apartment I accidentally stepped in a small lake and by the time I got back to the apartment I was very, very damp.

What was funny though was when I reached my building and turned to walk through the archway into the courtyard. Usually under this archway is maybe one man smoking a cigarette or no one at all, but I actually jumped when I turned into the archway to find about 50 Russian soldiers crammed under there to stay out of the rain. That was a surprise. There are often large packs of soldiers or sailors or other uniformed Russian men walking up and down my street because there are some very popular banyas in my building that the armed services like frequent. But still, I wasn't expecting them all in this 30 square foot area. Also, as I weaved through this pack of camo print, I noticed how young most of these soldiers looked -- they appeared to be my age or younger, and I always think Russians look older than they actually are, so this means these guys probably were approximately thirteen years old.

Earlier on my walk home, before it started to rain, I stopped to take a picture of one of my favorite stores to walk past in St. Petersburg (the "Hip-Hop Pimp Shop") and some really intensely intricate graffiti next to it. While doing this I had one of those moments -- no, who am I kidding, it's not a moment, it's a continuous feeling -- where I wished I always had a tape recorder on my person that kept track of everything people say to me during the day and then I could go home and listen to it again and look in my dictionary and figure out what they said. It wasn't a big deal -- a man who was walking by said something to me, not yelling or anything, he smiled when he said it and might have even been a joke -- and at first I didn't hear it clearly because I had my head phones on and when I took one off and he repeated it, all I caught was "ne nada" which means "don't need to..." Don't need to what? Take pictures of graffiti? Appreciate the hilarity that is a whole shop just for hip-hop pimps? I wasn't sure and didn't want to ask him to repeat it a third time so I just did what I always do which is say "da, da, mhmm" and smile and walk away. I'm sure it wasn't important or vital at all, it just bugs me that I don't know what he said. I have one of these moments at least once a day.

Since apparently I am going backwards through today's events, I had a recording session for Cool! English after class today. Every issue of the magazine comes with a CD where about half of the issue's articles are read out loud, so the readers can listen to how the words are said along with reading them in print. This means though that once a month the editors and main writers of the magazine gather together in this recording studio in a converted apartment near the Sadovaya metro stop and read the things they've written out loud. Part of why William hired me was because he thought I must have a good "radio voice" from WZLY -- ha! -- and when he played back some of what I said I cringed. Ugh, why is it so painful to listen to recordings of your own voice? How do people every get used to it? He seemed to think it went fine though. Anyway, it was fun and at one point when I was standing in the little booth with foamy egg-crate spikes on the walls, wearing big headphones and reading the female part of a "typical U.S. bar chat," William said to me through the mic from where he was sitting at the computer, "I bet you never though you'd be doing this while you were in Russia." Nope, definitely not.

As for class today, normal as always, though I had one funny moment in conversation class that I want to write about specifically for Mom and Nunni. So in conversation class we got on this long tangent about what words you use to describe yourself when you are sick and this turned into a tangent about Russian medicine and doctors versus American medicine and doctors. We talked about how in Russia natural medicine is very popular and when you go the doctor he will often recommend a lot of homeopathic remedies -- herbs to drink and gargle, foods to eat, etc -- before giving you any medicine and only in very extreme cases will doctors even consider giving you an antibiotic. We then talked about how in the U.S. doctors are very prone to just writing everything off with a different drug without even thinking about other possibilities because they are paid by pharmaceutical companies to do so. My conversation class professor, Nika, who can't be thirty yet and lives in Seattle during the year where she studies in graduate school, told us then about a very bad experience she had with an American doctor. Nika said she is prone to getting dizzy with a vertigo-like problem, and when she usually goes to Russian doctors they take her blood, her blood pressure, her temperature, the whole works, and then they usually "clean out" her nose -- drain, I think she meant -- and sinuses and maybe recommend some herbs. When she went to this doctor in America, he looked at her, listened to her breathe three times, said she had water in her ear and told her to take Sudafed: "It was terrible! I didn't sleep for three days and I cried all the time and my friends were all certain I had taken some narcotic because my hands kept shaking and I couldn't stop twitching. Never again!" Ha. Oh, Sudafed. How true that is. Mom and Nunni, I thought you'd appreciate that one.

So. That was about it for today. I'm going to take it easy tonight because the rest of the week is busy, and I'm tired from last night because the movie was longer than anticipated so we got back late. Across the Universe was good. I don't think I loved it as much as Olga loves it -- she had already seen it three or four times before last night -- but it was such a nice break to watch a movie in English. My brain was very happy for once. Plus, Jim Sturgess is very attractive.

Now I'm drinking tea and eating олады ("oladi" are miniature blini, blini being the Russian version of crepes, and oladi are only maybe two inches big) with honey. These are my favorite thing that Olga makes, next to the little pastry dumplings that don't really have a name (I asked, Olga didn't know what to call them). Oh man, she made the little pastry dumpling guys with apple yesterday instead of the usual chocolate -- Dad, you would love them -- and they were so good. The reminded me of mini versions of those Pepperidge Farm frozen apple dumplings I used to eat at Nunni's house back in the day. Only smaller. And more gooey.

Oh, and here's a poem that I really liked from poetry club with Philipp yesterday. It is by Владимир Владимирович Маяковский (Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovskii), an avant-garde poet who was frequently photographed by the love of my life, Александр Родченко (Aleksandr Rodchenko), modern Constructivist photographer who I wrote my final research paper on for History of Photography this spring.

ЛУННАЯ НОЧЬ
(пейзаж)

Будет луна.
Есть уже
немножко.
А вот и полная повисла в воздухе.
Это бог, должно быть,
дивной
серебряной ложкой
роется в звёзд ухе.




My not-doing-justice translation:

Moonlight Night
(landscape)

The moon will be.
It is already a little.
And look now it is full hanging in the air.
This is god, it must be,
with a marvelous
silver spoon
digging through the fish soup of the stars.


And all my pictures are up from this weekend. And from walking home today. Hell yeah, hip-hop pimps.

That's it. Later.