Lex Libertas

I hadn’t expected to get caught in it again, but they turned the hot water off in my neighborhood. They’re a little early this year. I still don’t understand how a country that can build intercontinental ICBMs, put people in space, and design world-class jet fighters cannot figure out a way to make hot water year-round. I asked a friend once, and she replied, “because we sent all our money into space.” seriously, is this really necessary??? To shut off the hot water for an entire month??? In America, we’d tar and feather the mayor. Here, however, it’s the typical political apathy. “It’s always been this way, and it’ll always be this way. One person can’t change anything.” Make it an issue in local politics!!! Don’t just vote for Edinnaya Rossiya because the’re the party of power, make your mayor provide you with hot water!!!!!!!!!

A friend came to visit this weekend, and we set about trying to pack in the sights over three days. This weekend was also the city’s birthday, so there was a big festival along Nevsky Prospect, in downtown St. Petersburg. I had mentally made a list of all the most notable buildings, museums, palaces, churches, etc., that should be seen by any visitors, and I even had routes planned on how to get from each site to the next one.

St. Petersburg is so packed with stuff to see, that it was impossible to do all that I had planned. It’s one thing to figure it all out in your head, another entirely to put it into practice. We didn’t even make half of what we wanted. Of course, a significant part of the frustration was Russia-driven. Things unexpectedly closed or moved, incorrect information, poor transportation infrastructure, etc. We were running around the city (and surrounding palaces) every day from morning till night. By Sunday evening, I couldn’t even walk straight as we went to the train station. Part of the problem was that in addition to walking non-stop for 12+ hours a day, the White Nights are in full swing, which always eats into my sleep.

St. Petersburg is an amazingly beautiful city, full of the best that the Russian Empire had to offer, and which in many aspects rivaled its European competitors. It the city were developed up to European standards, it would be a must-see for any European tourist. As it is now, unfortunately, the infrastructure and service culture just isn’t there.

As I got on the bus today to go downtown, there was only one available seat, though several people were standing anyways. They didn’t want to take it because there was a drunk, dirty, talkative man occupying the seat next to it. His dog was lying on the floor in front of him. I had my backpack, and I didn’t want to stand in the heat, cramped up against other people, for the whole trip. I had to step over the guy in order to sit. I asked if I could sit, and he said “Of course, you could have asked earlier!” Like everyone else, I initially had not wanted to sit next to him. When I saw that the bus was about to get full, I reconsidered.

As often happens with people who are drunk on public transportation at one o’clock in the afternoon, the man was garrulously talking at anyone in range. Well, I had just occupied the territory closest to him and became the new target. I figured I could just ignore him, look out the window, and he would continue bothering the people to the other side of him. No such luck. Unlike Russians, who are able to completely ignore you, even if you are one foot away and talking to them, I find it difficult to blatantly act like I don’t see or hear a person who is addressing me. I’ve gotten better at it, but deep down I’m still an American and haven’t been totally Russified. The guy’s dog is nice and friendly, and even though he reeks of alcohol, and I have my headphones on, I can’t help but listen to what he has to say. Throughout the course of the monologue, I don’t remove my headphones and try to stare out the window. Inevitably, though, I smile, laugh, or look over at him. Normal human reactions.

The guy is not fall down drunk, but he is intoxicated. He’s dirty. Not in the sense of just came from digging a ditch, but more ingrained, it’s a part of his skin and clothes. He has the kind of Soviet (and now Russian) tattoos that inmates in prison camps used to get. I always get a little more cautious when I’m around someone who has these tattoos, especially when they’re on the hands. The tattoos have their own meanings, like what you did to end up in prison, but I don’t understand them. He’s also deeply sunburned, his skin the color of dark caramel.

“I’m Russian. Don’t look at my nose!

Motions to it

I don’t know what that’s about, it’s a question for my mother. I’m as Russian as they come. Ivanov Nikolai Vasilevich. Do you want a beer?

I say “no, thanks.” He doesn’t have any except the open bottle he’s drinking from, I assume he was offering to give me a swig

What, am I the only one who’s going to get drunk on this bus?”

He shows me an id card, as if I don’t believe that he’s Russian. I glance at it. Yup, his name’s Russian. “Well,” I think, “I’m not about to let him know that I’m not.” I nod.

“I was stopped by the police, they asked me for my documents. What am I, an idiot! Of course I don’t have my documents on me! When they see my name, they let me go. Sure, I’ve been in jail. But I deserve a second chance, don’t I? I was wounded in Afghanistan. Look at my head, you can see the scar.

He does indeed have a nickel-sized scar around the receding hairline

I have others. My hands are messed up, I’m going to the hospital now.

His hands are swollen considerably

My kid studies at the “Ministry of Extraordinary Situations” academy.

Sort of a federal search and rescue, and disaster relief agency

He walks around with his nose in the air, like he’s too good for me. I was at the corner of Budapest and Slavy,

Right by where I live

and these hookers propositioned me. ‘Do you want to have a good time?’ I don’t even know what they do these days. Will I screw them, or will they screw me?

Uses much harsher language, gives a visual demonstration

I asked how much. They said 2,000 rubles, they all want a hundred bucks! Can you believe that!”

By this time, we’re getting closer to the hospital, but first we pass a graveyard. His dog yawns.

“Why do dogs have such white teeth? They don’t brush! I brush everyday but it doesn’t help. Look, a graveyard, next to the hospital. Only Russians would do that. Why put a graveyard next to a hospital? So you can just throw them out the window and be done with it? Only Russians.”

With this we reach the hospital, and he gets out. This was the most pleasant “Talkative/Aggressive Drunk on Public Transportation” experiences that I’ve had. I feel sorry for the guy. He was surprisingly cogent. While I certainly don’t condone drinking to escape your problems, I get the feeling that he took this avenue. Yeah, life can really suck at times, and it’s especially hard here. It sounds like this guy got the full beating, but he’s retained his sense of humour, and that says a lot.

Interestingly, I found that “ruminations” means “The act of pondering; meditation,” which is how I’ve always understood the word. It also means, “The act or process of chewing cud.” Now that I think about, I find that rather appropriate.

To balance out a previous post about how much Russians like American Boys, I thought it appropriate to mention that the feelings are reciprocal. I don’t know how to say this without getting in trouble with the PC police, but there are many things about Russian women that make them more attractive than Western women.

First and foremost, they are more feminine. It may sound crazy to some, but in America if you like women to be women, then you are considered a misogynist. In the West feminism has been pushing us to some strange, androgynous state where men are more effeminate and women more masculine. Russian women will have none of this. Men are expected to be men, indeed after three years over here I have become more traditionally masculine than when I left the states as something of a metrosexual. In trying to explain, I have created a new category, and will be posting from time to time on differences between Russian and Western girls. For newcomers, it can be very difficult at first to grasp the local mentality, and I’ve spent a fair amount of time explaining to Westerners the root of countless misunderstandings.

Mike over at the Glory of Carniola reminds me of a particular set of Eastern European superstitions that annoy almost all visitors:

I can’t believe how many people are terrified of the cold, or drafts from open windows, or wet hair. The false idea that cold causes colds is fairly widespread everywhere, but here it’s almost like orthodoxy.

There are various related permutations:

• Going outside with wet hair will make you sick
• Sitting on a bench in the cold will give women problems with their ovaries, leading to sterilization
• Walking around the house barefoot will make you sick - You must wear “tapochki” (slippers)
• Never drink water from the refrigerator, even in summer
• Try not to drink juice from the refrigerator
• Don’t open windows in moving vehicles

And the mother of all:

• Opening a window and door at the same time will absolutely cause you to fall ill, and may leave you paralyzed

Most of these superstitions affect only the person taking the action, so we foreigners can ignore them and suffer only verbal harassment. (However, if you’re female and sit on a bench, the babushki will lay into you pretty heavily) I’ve spent most of my life in the American South and South-West, and one of the first words I learned was “cross-breeze.” When you live without air conditioning, opening both a door and a window to get some air moving is the only thing that makes life bearable. Try it in Eastern Europe at your own risk. I have had very well educated, intelligent people tell me with a straight face that sitting in a cross-breeze can make you paralyzed. At the very least, you’ll catch a cold. This extends to driving in vehicles. It’s not nice to be stuck standing in a crowded marshrutka, in summer, with all the windows closed.

I hate being in a stuffy room. Russians have a word for stuffy, душно (dushno), and they sometimes even complain about it. It seems, however, that on balance they’d rather sit in a stuffy room than open themselves up to the possibility of becoming caught in a draft. This is especially a problem in winter. Even though it routinely gets below -20 Celsius, being in a Russian apartment in winter can be downright uncomfortable. Soviet apartments are incredibly tiny and cramped. The rooms are small and filled with stuff (хлам, khlam) such as china display cabinets, huge plants, enormous chest-sized radios, rugs on the wall, etc. Add to this physical lack of space the typical overcrowding in a Soviet Apartment (two plus people living per room) and working heating, and a Russian apartment in winter can be quite a suffocating experience. Upon entering, you immediately walk into a wall of stale air. At my place, I would often have the window open to get some fresh air, but you can’t do that at someone else’s - people look at you like you’re insane. I used to rue having to stay at someone else’s place when traveling because I have problems sleeping in a hot and stuffy room.

These superstitions about cold are deeply ingrained into the minds of people all around Eastern Europe. It’s not just confined to Slavs, Romanians were just as vehemently convinced of the deadly draft. Where do these beliefs come from? And why do they seem to be prevalent only in Eastern, not Western Europe?

Dumpsters and trash cans seem to catch fire here rather often. Honestly, I don’t know from what. People just throw their cigarette butts on the ground, not in trash cans. Moreover, the lid on this dumpster is closed, and I sincerely doubt that someone lifted it up to deposit a cigarette. There was a pretty big dumpster fire near my apartment, but this one is in downtown Moscow, in a park near Pushkin square.

I’ve finally made my next step into Web 2.0. For some reason, my camera takes video in .mov format, which is incredibly hard to edit. It took a while, but I found some software so that I am now able to edit and compress videos.

This was taken at the Ukrainian border control stop on the Moscow-Kiev route. The painted train station, flags, and penguin trashcans all made for a very abrupt, and welcome, change from Russia. While I understand that this station is so nice because it’s a border crossing, it still does have a psychological effect - “Look, Ukraine is happy and colorful, not dreary and dillapidated and angry like Russia!”

The women are getting their bags full of pigs in place for the walk home. Besides the squealing and squirming, you can hear one of the women say “Thank God! I’m off.”

This was by far the best Eurovision that I have seen in the past three years. Overall, the performances, sets, dancing, and voices were all up to par. Here’s a brief description of each act, followed by some more indepth commentary:

1. Bosnia and Herzegovina: Decent opening, but immediately forgotten, even after I saw it two times again during the recap before voting.

2. Spain: Good energy, but a generic boy band. Fortunately that’s not currently in style.

3. Belarus: Neat, clean overall presentation, innovative avant-garde theme. Came a little too early in the show to capitalize. Russian announcers don’t say “Belarus,” they say “Belarussia.” If they win, will Lukashenko let anyone into the country? (more…)

The first thing we saw as we crossed the border from Russia was this trashcan at the railway station. It made for a pleasant first impression of Ukraine.

When I studied French, we were told about a group of words called “Les Faux Amis,” or “false friends.”  These are words that are similar to, or the exact same, as English words, but which have a different meaning.  While not as common, such words exist in Russian as well.  “Фильм,” (Fil’m) is one such word.  Or perhaps more correctly, is even more nuanced than a simple faux ami.  Fil’m does indeed mean “film,” or “movie,” as us Americans are more apt to use.  However, in Russian the word covers a wider variety of media than in English.  Roughly speaking, it also encompases the concepts of “TV Show” and “miniseries.”  Maybe this only bothers someone from Los Angeles, but it took a long time before I finally understood that not all фильмы are movies.  The first time I noticed was when people in the dorm were talking about a fil’m called “Brigada,” about Russian mobsters.  I started to wonder how many sequels had been made when it was finally explained that it was a miniseries of 16 parts.  In fact, Russians rarely use fil’m when talking about movies.  Instead they say кино (kino).  In my experience, a Russian is far more likely to say хорошое кино (good) than хороший фильм when talking about a movie.  It’s not that it doesn’t happen, just not nearly as often, whereas foreigners will always say fil’m.

On a sidenote, Russian television is organized slightly differntly than in the US.  In America there is a clear difference between a TV show and miniseries.  TV shows are usually made up of an unspecified number of episodes, shown once a week on a particular day, over the course of a season.  Depending on how well they are doing, they are picked up for the next season, or not.  Miniseries resemble films in terms of design and story arc, and are usually broken up into 2 to 4 parts, sometimes more, and show on successive nights.  Russian TV shows are a strange hybrid of the two.  They often film an entire story arc that consists of numerous episodes, and then show them on successive nights over the course of a month or more.  Then it’s over.  They may decide to continue, or not.  As such, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between a TV show and a very long, rambling miniseries.  It feels much more chaotic and anarchic than the US’s very formalized structure.  I don’t really watch Russian TV, but these are my tangential impressions.

It’s no secret that many women from this part of the world would like to find a Western husband, and this has been the case for a while. It is actually lessening as time goes on and Russians get richer. In fact, if your main goal is simply to find a sponsor (money for sex, but on a more permanent basis than simple prostitution), it’s better and easier to find a rich, older Russian.

Here’s a fun pop song from almost twenty years ago, called “American Boy,” back when there really was no native option. This is a huge nostalgia song for the 35 and under crowd, it brings them back to their childhood. A friend of mine remembers hearing this at her Pioneer dance-parties (Pioneers were like Soviet Scouts, relaxation in the wilderness and Communist indoctrination). The chorus is partly in English, with a mistake that only makes the song even better:

American Boy
American Joy
American Boy
For Always Time

American Boy
Уеду с тобой (I’ll leave with you)
уеду с тобой
Москва прощай (Goodbye Moscow)

Retro 80s dance music is pretty popular over here (as it is still in the States), and they often have concerts with the old artists. The video that you see is from one of those, “Legends of Retro FM.” To see the rest of the lyrics (in a very wooden, literal translation), click on “more.”
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Tom and I first met in the fall of 2004 at the dormitory in St. Petersburg. At first, I thought he was just another of the random post-college Westerners who came to Russia for no good reason. A group that I myself could be considered a part of. Tom left Russia in February of this year. Life moves relentlessly forward, and we must with it. In the intervening two and half years he became an integral part of St. Petersburg for not only me, but also for most foreigners and numerous locals.

Of all the foreigners I met, Tom has had the cloest Russia experience to mine. Most foreigners have enough money to live a good life in St. Petersburg, usually living off Nevsky, the main drag. They also almost exclusively interact with Westernized Russians who speak very good English. To them, Russia is an extended-adolesence playground of girls and alcohol. Tom, while certainly not lacking in the former, got into the nitty-gritty of Russian life. We both lived in areas far off the beaten track, where the only other foreigners were Tajiks, and went through many of the tribulations that have given Russian literature its characteristic dark tone.

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An advertisment for an international autoshow in Kiev. I wonder if they’ve going to have these particular cars on sale. I think they’d go over well. It was very cold, and this poster warmed us up a bit.  The cars are shiny - you have to know me to understand how much I appreciate that.

Sheik Ahmad Bahr, acting Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council, declared during a Friday sermon at a Sudan mosque that America and Israel will be annihilated and called upon Allah to kill Jews and Americans “to the very Last One.”

Does anyone honestly think that Americans and Jews pray to God about Muslims, asking him to “count their numbers, and kill them all, down to the very last one.” I can’t even imagine a world in which the heads of the US or Israeli parliament would give a speech such as that one. Why, then, are the Jews the immoral, bloodthirsty ones in this saga and the Palestinians doe-eyed, peace-hungry victims of Religious Imperialism?