It is only fitting that this slavic blog (slag?) should end as it began - its author in no condition to be smithing mighty words from mere syllables; indeed suffering from the great slur of the tongue and slip of the mind that comes only from a calculated sleep deprivation, the bedcompany of minor hallucinations. It is irresponsible of me to leave you in such hands, such hands attached to a body that has too long been composting in an airport on the Bed Bath and Beyond side of the iron curtain in the middle of an obscenely long layover while paying too much for McDonalds coffee and feeling the early pangs of the constipation that said coffee, taken black, cannot help but prolong. This is certainly a history better suited to pre-Columbian view of time than the rigid acyclic notion held by my European progenitors, and with that as consolation I hope you'll excuse my indiscretion in leaving it up to this man to communicate. 

I feel that now is the time to say something profound. Instead, let me impart a last humorous anecdote. One day during the last month of my stay I woke up to the hammering sound of a poster being attached to my door (not with nails, mind you, which begs the question of why it was necessary that they make such a racket). It was being put up on the inside of the door, naturally. The uninvited entrance had failed to rouse me as more than commonplace, but this alteration of my accustomed environ, as if friendly scuba joe had one morning been replaced by a gaudy chest of bubbling pirate's gold, struck a hidden reserve of scientific curiousity that I had until that moment thought entirely extinguished by three months of commutative algebra. As soon as I could convince my morning's glory to postpone its trumpeting salute long enough for me to furtively put on some pants in the whole world's barging presence, I moved the door and examined the new emergency instructions. Thus spoke Pozharathustra:

If you find a fire, proceed with the following steps:

1) Notify the fire department and the building commisar.

2) Organize the evacuation of the building.

I will comment only that the burden of social responsibility resting on the observant individual is considerably more weighty in Russia than in some other countries that I know, and I for one am relieved to no longer be living under that kind of constant pressure. 

 

PS - a shout out to maddie for her bravery in flying all the way to Moscow to make my last week awesome. 

When you're in Moscow, you see dogs. And I don't mean dogz, like, your boyz, or dogs like your parents gave away to a farm out west when you were 10, no, these canines are hardcore. I'm talking third generation street dogs - they're not begging you for scraps or just waiting for someone to look deep enough into their big brown eyes to realize that adoption is the only prudent course. No, they are veritable Moscovites themselves, claiming a citizenship and a right to existence on par with our own. Long past the hammer's fall they roam the city in tightly knit self-sufficient packs, following still the path swathed by the sickle's sweep and issuing a constant critique of Orwell's zoologic prejudice in their efficient and effective embrace of the Soviet ideal.  

They will not shy from a hand that feeds them, nor will they bite it off, but they've progressed beyond domestication;  they've rather adapted and evolved to survive in an urban setting - they're dependent on us, but only in the way a wolf is dependent on the grass the sheep eats. Thousands of years from now when mankind's time has come to a close, Moscow is where their greatest archaeologists will situate their most fruitful digs. 

But, they're still dogs. Adorable, cute, cuddly dogs. With a rough edge, maybe, and all of them could use a bath, but that hardly curtails my "awwww" reaction, and in fact their very independence makes it even cuter when they do people stuff. This is a segue to a personal experience. The other day as Val and I headed to school, we noticed a mutt waiting at the top of an escalator. He wanted to go down, clearly, but each time he braved a foot the machine's strange motion caused him to recoil in confusion. The flirtation continued as Val and I stepped onto the escalator adjacent. Not wanting to miss what might be my only chance to ever see, at least short of youtube, a dog heading down an escalator of his own volition, I leaned as far over the railing as I could that the spectacle might not cease. At this point the humor depends explicitly on a certain familiarity with the environment, and so I present to you exhibit A, a photo of said escalator:

(I found this photo here)

Now your first reaction is probably going to be something along the lines of, "damn that's a long escalator." But the careful observer of details with a keen eye for plot device will have appended a normally more mundane fact to this descriptive exclamation, letting their thoughts run on tracks more similar to "damn that's a long escalator whose central banisters are punctuated by large cylindrical light fixtures of a particular solid construction at about every six meters." 

For, you see, directly over that center banister is exactly where my head found itself floating as my eyes, working in conjunction with my neck and the greater part of my upper body, thrust it in an emphatic expression of their passion for the bizzarre. 

I think you know where this is going. To you, my reader, I must apologize. You probably think me trite, washed up, and old hack rehashing old materials. "Your characters are one dimensional!" you scream as your literary tendencies gain the better of your inbred American susceptibility to physical humor. And I sympathize with all my heart - I wish all my stories weren't about how clumsy I am, I wish that this ended with an acrobatic trick, or perhaps an impressive skateboarding move pizazzed further by torch juggling. But the truth demands its say:

"Clunk." A flicker and then a noticable dimming. A red flush is dealt on my face and a bruise cuts the umbilical. A few seconds later the light comes back online, its proletariat workmanship handling the impact better than my pride. But all throughout, something is missing. No laughter, no smiles, except for Val's chuckle. At 5pm the metros are packed, at least 20 people must've seen me do this, at least out of the corners of their eyes. But the Russian stoic has grown more sophisticated in humor. What in America would be a funniest home video in Russia is just an american, doing those things  americans do while they look on, secretly wondering how on earth, of all the peoples in the world, they lost in the 1980 winter olympics ice hockey medal round to us.

Babooshkaed.

Itemization is King, and the bullet wears the crown.

• Instead of "push" and "pull" the doors here say, well, some gibberish in Cyrillic, but it turns out that what it means is "to yourself" or "from yourself." Though innocuous, I think it is an important difference. These doors make no assumption about your intent; they do not demand action, only inform you of their function. "I open towards you, but, you know, only if you want me to." Nothing is required, you sign no metaphysical agreement, and there is no breach of contract when you look at the door, read the sign, and then choose not to go in. It's the difference between a popup ad and a hyperlink; there is no act of volition, no conflict of wills required to refuse it. It makes for a less harrowing existence, at least, for those who don't have something better to be harrowed by.
  
• Amidst my philosophical meditations on the metro as a metaphor for all human interaction (see: last post), I frequently find myself on the wrong train. There are only three stops between here and the IUM, and they are, in fact, the same stops each day, so every few weeks or so I develop a wholly natural sense of confidence in the route and stop looking at the signs or listening to the announcements. Inevitably it crumbles; the engines of history and character chug inexorably on, mulching my independence to fertilize a fresh plot of self doubt - I step off a train into an entirely foreign place, pause, and wonder "Where am I?" But the real question is not where but who, and I am me, not a man who can tell you how to get from here to there, but rather a man who flies free of the strictures of only one left and one right. I lose my way in a return to self.
• Speaking of the metro, in the afternoon there's a train which has had half of its seats removed and replaced with art. Two days ago I caught it and was transported.
  
• Today at the laundromat I was, suddenly and without warning, babooshkaed. Laundry is not my area of expertise, and I try to avoid it - only in a whisper will I even admit the necessity of clean garments. Although I have been doing my own laundry for the last 12 years, it has been in a purely utilitarian and grudging fashion: I know which hole takes the clothes and which hole takes the soap. Like a young man before Internet porn, I can visualize the basic mechanics of the operation but the intricacies, the small details that turn it from a struggle to an art, are to me as magic to a muggle. I do not know what temperature anything should be washed at; if you asked me what effect the temperature had, I would say something stupid, or mumble, or change the subject, maybe throw in some science words - perhaps all at once - "It warms the clothing and then changes the ph content of my color stratum which, say, did you see the Padres game?" I would try to brush it aside and if you didn't let me you would find proving my ignorance only a Pyrrhic victory as you fell forever into its dark chasmic depths. I buy color-safe bleach not because I know the difference, but because the word "safe" comforts me. Laundry is a ritual I approach carefully, the same way each time, my chants and symbols warding off any malevolent gods. But here in Russia, they do not practice the same laundry handed down to the western world in a direct line from the ancient Roman lava-toga, no, as in all things they are positively Byzantine. Idols line the wall, Easter is a week later, and there is a machine that comes between the washer and dryer (warding off the evil spirits that occupy the scarce trodden realm between wet and dry). A Russian grandmother, seeing my ignorance of the Orthodox ways, spoke to me in tongues and with a wild gesture proceeded to do my laundry for me. Спасибо, бабушка, спасибо.
• There is no strategy to Russian Scrabble because you are only allowed to use the nominative singular. If you know both what that means and why that matters there's a good chance you don't have a tan. Also, nothing is bullet worthy without italicization.
  

Because Continuity Is Overrated

I'm bored, but in Soviet Russia you entertain internet, so instead of suckling at the milky teat of user filtered content, I've decided to dust of the old blog and offer up my own nipple for a change.

• The overflow stock of the book store has now completely barricaded in the ping pong table, rendering it inaccessible. In a few weeks, it will only be whispered of in dark grottos; in a month, it will be as the caveman ensconced in ice in the bowels of the Yukon - or Boba Fett in the Sarlacc Pit - forgotten to the world, but ever-suffering. This bullet would be perfectly completed by a photo of the ping pong table, but as I don't have my camera on hand I can only approximate:

• The metro is no tea party. First, there is no tea. Second, the Russian people, finding insufficient opportunity for solitude in their spiteful, never sleeping winters or at the bottom of a bottle of vodka, embrace the chance provided by the daily commute to finally get in some quality frowning silently time. The other day (well, like three weeks ago), someone made a phone call, and their cellphone proceeded to blare out at full volume an obnoxious generic club-music ringback tone for the next 30 seconds. Like statues we stood, sweaty and crammed in next to eachother, without a single jig cracking in any limb, nor the merest change of expression. I hope, at least, that nobody missed the irony.

• On Monday my Russian teacher delivered a spirited defense of the tuba solo. A quick youtube search has revealed that it was, in fact, I who was in the wrong.

Exercise Face Control! (part 2)

Perhaps now is the time to explain the title of this post.
When I first arrived I was handed a small guide book printed by the IUM for its incoming students every semester. Among its many gems was an exclamation in the warnings section:
Exercise Face Control!
When I first read it, I tried to think of what it could mean. I'd never head the term before, and like any pure bred white boy, I was raised in far too politically correct of an environment to leap to the obvious conclusion. But it means exactly what it says: discriminate based on appearances. Of course you could never get away with saying something like that in the US, but there's such a homogeneous culture in Russia that if you lived here you'd never even think of the possible racist connotations.
From a purely linguistic sense I think these syllables constitute some of the the most precious (s)tones in the english language. It is a very common phrase, but as far as I can tell, only for speakers of English as a second language in Russia. It must be a direct translation, but my favorite part is that nobody seems to realize it's a colloquialism, and will drop it in front of a native english speaker without hesitation. It's like a delicious treat every time I hear it.
Although, it occurs to me that maybe everyone's using it in the US too and I'm just not cool enough (or maybe too cool?) to have heard it - so if I just made a huge ass of myself my bad.

The point is, on Friday night, my face got controlled, hardcore style. But that's getting ahead of myself.
After a long day of touring and a tasty but terribly confusing dinner, a few of us were looking to get our part-ay on. And just our luck! A poster on the hostel wall - just a few blocks away lay a club (dance style, not Grog-club-dinosaur-Grog-eat-dinosaur-Grog-sleep-now style). After drinking a few 1 liter cans of Baltika we were ready to groove, so we outed through the door and moseyed down the ulitsa. The club was in a corner basement with absolutely no signs indicating its presence. At this point it was around 11 o'clock, so we went in, and were promptly stopped by the doormen. They had a list, and anybody who wasn't on the list would have to wait till 12. Seemed reasonable. Seemed like a good time to level up in drunk, especially because you can drink on the street without getting hassled here. So we stopped by a local mart and purchased ourselves a few more Baltikas. Unfortunately though these were of the glass bottled variety, and when we went to imbibe we were confronted with the great challenge that has spurred all of mankind's great invention - removing liquid from a hard shell without a bottle opener. In a Grog-club-dinosaur-Grog-club-beer kindof move we opted for the "open on the sidewalk" technique. It met with a success ratio of 1/3, mine and Shane's beers constituting the acceptable losses. Or, were they losses? After all, no glass had fallen in, and well, I'm not THAT drunk, I can drink a beer without it touching my lips. (I had only hit the ground once that night - I'd only barely gotten my stumble rolling). Those of you who know me at all already can tell where this is going - no, I can't perform any act of agility; roll 2d6 - you need a thirteen. So I cut my lip and bled for an hour, while Dirk and Shane kindly kept me company.
Finally though with the bleeding staunched and only some bloody snow left behind to evidence it ever occurred, we were ready to make our second pass at the club. After standing in a short line, we met the doormen, and were again refused. I *think* it was mainly because we couldn't speak a damned word of Russian, or at least I flatter myself that I wasn't so terribly unstylish as to be denied solely on those grounds. Our pride was hurt a little, but the night was still young (or so we thought!), and we went out in search of another club.
However, we, having left our astrolabe at home, found ourselves after three large circles to be entirely in need of a competent navigator. We were set on the Sphinx, a joint we'd spied coming off the train, but the Nile wound a labyrinthine course. So we wandered the desert, until after many minutes the way was revealed to us; we'd been there all along, and only needed to clap our shoes thrice and walk down two blocks! Unfortunately the place was about as empty as a bad analogy. Despair almost took us then, but we spied some hip looking Russians walking down the way, and Dirk bravely dared his tongue to formulate the mystic's foreign words that would spell them as our guides. It worked! They agreed to lead us to a club, only 100 rubles entry, the party of the night! At last our long journey was begun!
Unfortunately it was the same club we'd been to earlier. This time though, Dirk managed to slip in with the crowd of Russians. Shane and I were not so lucky; we had no 100 ruble notes and so were forced to ask change for a 1000, whereupon they lighted on the fact that we were still Americans, and Americans who had already been asked to hit the road!

Downtrodden, we walked away for good, got some beer at a cafe, and went with heavy hearts to slumber.

(To be continued)

Exercise Face Control! (part 1)

Before I begin to describe the actual events of my trip to St. Petersburg (Peterboork as they call it here), let me just say that if you ever come to Russia go there. Moscow is good for math, but St. Petersburg just kicks ass.

Also, I didn't use my camera at all, so I stole all these pictures from Val.

We traveled, as I suggested at the end of my last post, via a midnight train. The locomotive itself was designed for just such a trip, with beds rather than seats. They were packed tight but very comfortable.
I had a romantic image in my head about maybe staying awake all night to watch the Russian landscape, but it turns out that during winter at least it's mostly gray and boring, so I slept most of the way there.

I accidentally bought carbonated water and was burping all night.

We arrived around ten am and were immediately subjected to a van tour of the city. Our tour guide was a very kind lady who almost spoke english well. On day one we also saw the Yusapov palace and the Russian Museum. Words fail, so I will launch a salvo of images from my jealousy cannon, after each of which I will attempt to say something clever (also spliced in are photos from the second day where we visited two more palaces, and the third day when we saw the hermitage and a big fucking church)

This mofo couldn't blow up anything even if it wanted to right now; the whole harbor is frozen.

Maybe you're more literate than me so you already know who this is . I'll give you a hint: Russia's first rapper. (Bonus points if you know why that's racist.)

Peter the Great. You can't see it but that horse is curb stomping a snake. There aren't any snakes here because Peter fucking took care of it. That's why they call him great. Man I love Russia.

Some palace. Or maybe the Hermitage (which is also some palace).

Bling motherfuckin' bling. I bet Pushkin lived here.

Like all the chandeliers, these were originally lit using real candles. So, that was basically some dude's job; he sat around all day with a pole keeping candles lit.

A little known fact about Rasputin was his murderers were all made (and poorly) out of wax. This was actually one of the most interesting parts of the trip; everyone's heard the story of how Rasputin got poisoned, shot a bunch of times, and then wrapped in a carpet and thrown into the river with the autopsy revealing that he finally died of drowning. While some crazy shit did go down (he survived the poison attempt and the initial gunshots), the last part was only invented so that he could not be sainted (in the orthodox faith you can't be sainted if you drown; if God really loved you he'd put you on a crucifix at least.) Or, anyway, that's what our tour guide said.

I don't have anything really to say about this one so let me tell you more about our tour guide. In recalling Russian history she had a hilarious habit of emphasizing physical appearances as reflections of the greatness or not-so-greatness of particular historical figures. Without fail the beloved Russian tsarinas were recalled as "the most beautiful of their time, 1.8 meters tall with long legs and a good figure," while the hated ones were "not so very good looking at all." The only exception to this rule was Pushkin, but to compensate he had the most beautiful wife in town.

Followers of the Orthodox faith worship in cartoons.

And here's one unobscured by nerds.

This is basically what I did during the day. Like a true wildcat I also had adventurous evenings, but unfortunately I'm still recovering and thus exhausted so I'll save those stories for next time.

Definition Theorem Number Next

Monday was a big Russian holiday- something roughly equivalent to Veteran's Day. Pretty much everybody here had it off, but on Saturday we had still not heard anything about it from our program's coordinator, so I fired off an e-mail to see what was up. This is the response I got:

Dear Sean,

Yes, you'll have classes tomorrow. Our program ignores all holidays.

Sincerely,
Irina

I think it's safe to say that I've involved myself in some sort of voluntary gulag.

Also on the topic of holidays, next week is "Pancake Week." At last, I've found a place to call home.

As a personal celebration of the imminence of pancake week I went out to a club last night. It was called the Club Bilingua, and unfortunately I didn't just forget to type the l - the two languages in question were Russian and Spanish. I thought I might have more success communicating in Spanish than I have thusfar in Russian, but it turns out that having another language I barely speak thrown in interchangeably only compounds the difficulty. Still, I had an excellent time, and in a clever twist the concert that evening was sung largely in Catalan, so nobody could understand it. And we had fantastic seats; we had been graciously invited out for the evening by Anna, one of the girls hired by the program to assist us with the basics of living, shopping, and fending off the KGB, and she knew the concert coordinator so we had a reserved table up front. All in all I spent the evening feeling very metropolitan if entirely clueless.

In a few hours I'm taking a midnight train to St. Petersburg for the weekend. Unfortunately I'm a technologically inept hillbilly so I'm still using the original 16mb compact flash card my camera came with five odd years ago, so my ability to convey this experience to you will be sharply limited. Still, at the current exchange rate of 1000 words per picture, my next post should treat you to considerably more information, so stay tuned.

As long as I don't run out of batteries.