July 1 - Thinking in Russian

It seems sort of funny that I am celebrating Canada Day in Russia before you are celebrating it in Canada.

Okay, so I'm not exactly celebrating, I'm just sitting now in the "office", an English type pub across the street from the Herzen Inn where most of the SLS activity takes place. I've finally figured out how to get my laptop to "work", using the wireless here. It's more expensive to get access to wireless than it is to sit in that grotty pornography peek show of an internet cafe that I usually go to, but slightly more pleasant as there is non stop rock music playing here, a combination of 60s 70s and 80s rock from England and NA, and loud, and if I can get out of here before say 11 pm, it should be before the fights start and I won't have to pick my way through the pools of blood.

Okay, I'm exaggerating, but only a little.

It's Sunday night, and today I spent wandering around the inner core of the city, doing nothing. It's the first day since I've been here that I have had nothing planned for me, and I spent it wandering through the market, visiting the Church of Our Savior of the Spilled Blood, drinking coffee...fairly boring stuff. So, I'll get to the story.

What's the story today? I actually don't really feel like writing, but I'll tell you about the necessity of finding your inner babushka.

Or was I going to tell you about neo-Marxism? Progressive nostalgia? Don't think I can do any of that, as my brain seems to have turned off. It's like the system is down.

So, I'll waste our time by telling you that I am about to finish the last of my antibiotics and I'm terrified that in another week that horrible abcess will return and I'll have nothing. I'll have to leave Russia, then, lest the infection travel through my bloodstream.

Oh, and this morning I wondered if we were at war, as I first heard and then saw military jets flying over Petersburg. I meant to check the news, but it is so hard to get news here, except news of Petersburg. So, I spent the rest of the day just wondering about that, but no more military jets flew overhead, and no tanks rolled through the streets (thereby necessitating the erection of yet another commemorative plaque), so I feel secure that when I go to bed later tonight I will not have to first rehearse stop drop and roll...oh no, that's the thing to do for if you catch on fire. Well, anyway, that thing you older folks had to do at school during the Cuban missile crisis.

Hide under your desks to avoid nuclear dust. As if that would have worked.

Tomorrow I start another session of new courses, and will have poetry and another section of "untranslatable Russia", a series of lectures by a Russian expert who will explain the current Russian obsession (and thus my current obsession) with weddings - among other things.

Okay, so in my wanderings I got to the "kissing bridge", the bridge over the Fontanka canal where newlyweds go to get serenaded by some guy playing a french horn while they kiss (this in the shadow of the domes of the Church of Our Saviour of the Spilled Blood) and then they cross the bridge (and if the bride is not heavier than the groom, he will carry her) and then everyone jumps up and down on the bridge and many photographs are taken, and the bride wears a long white gown, carries flowers, and the guests, which are generally small in numbers, sing a song and laugh, and everyone laughs and smiles while the flat bottomed tourist boats putter by under the bridge trying to avoid the idiots on jet skiis who are trying to spray water up to the bridge where they hope to soak the wedding guests and all this observed by tourists who have just run the gamit/gamut/gammit/gambit? of the market stalls where everyone will lower their prices, just for you, and where if you are not careful the gypsies will direct their children to grab on to your pant leg like gibbons until you either give them money or kick them off.

I'm hoping I will never have to kick a child, but I've heard stories from reliable people. The alternative is, in case you are drawing in your collective breaths, losing everything in your purse/travel pouch/pocket/money belt/hidden pocket. Like, um, your passport and stuff like that which if you do lose it the guys at the customs as you are trying to leave get cranky about, especially since there is this tiny little piece of paper that got stamped when you entered the country which you have to carry with you at all times and if you don't and you get stopped, i've heard tell nice things do not happen.

Okay, so this morning I'm in the shower, well, sort of in the shower. It's like this. It's day 4 or 5 with no hot water, and while I was able to get away with not washing my hair for a couple of days, this morning I was insane with my dirty hair, so forced myself to hold my head under the shower spray. The thing is, when I DO wash my hair, it doesn't really help that much, as the water is so dirty - and I have to make sure I keep my lips shut tightly as I don't want any little beavers to climb in there and take up residence in my gastro intestinal system - but even if I could keep my mouth open, my hair would still be dirty, and it has by now acquired the consistency of dry straw and I've pretty much given up on it, or caring about it. My clothes, too, by the way, are disgustingly dirty, because I've been too busy to find out which 3 minutes of which days the laundry lady is open to receiving laundry (but that's a whole other story) and because I live far away from the laundry lady, I'm not real keen about carrying a bag of dirty laundry around with me all day. I think you get the picture, right?

Anyway, I'm in the shower this morning trying to aim the shower spray at my armpits when suddenly I realized that I was thinking in Russian. I know, you are not believing me right now, you're thinking, no fuckin' way, Anne, you're not. But I swear, it's the truth, I starting thinking in Russian, but even stranger than actually thinking in Russian was the fact that I had no idea what I was thinking about, because it was all in Russian. And now you really don't believe me, but I'm not going to say another thing about it, because that's the absolute truth: I was thinking in Russian and I didn't understand my own thoughts, had no idea what I was thinking about, and really, if you believe me just a little bit (and it's totally true) isn't that just the most amazing thing?

So, I have another shower story, if you haven't logged off. Are you with me? Okay, here goes. So, I'm in the shower, well, standing outside the shower stall and have moved on from my armpits and down to my legs, which are covered with mosquito bites (which I have allergic reactions to, and which become very gross-looking - I'll spare you those details), and I think: Okay, god (yep, I start bargaining with god), okay, like it's like this: god, if you make this water hot, I will move to Russia, I will learn what my Russian thoughts mean, I will join the Russian orthodox church, heck, I'll even become one of those babushka's who spends her time scraping the wax from the floor around the burning candles, or I'll sell the holy water to the supplicants who come with their empty pop bottles...god, I will give up everything just for 15 minutes of hot water.

And, this is true, I swear, absolutely upon the icon of the holy mother, after I set the terms of my bargain, the water got colder.

So I got dressed, covered my festering mosquito bites with a pair of tights, and headed off into petersburg to find out what would happen.

Okay, so here's another story: the location of a present day McDonald's in Petersburg is where during the soviet years the "poets" would gather. So, the thing is that the poets and artists and essayists were generally assigned to the job of street sweeper, and they took many breaks in those days, when there probably wasn't as much broken glass on the streets, but I may be wrong about that; anyway, they congregated in this one cafe. The word "cafe" is a bit of a stretch, since coffee was not available in russia, so when they gathered in this cafe, they would drink tea made in one cup with 6 teabags so that it would be strong, and on a table in the cafe would be a large bowl of soup, but no spoons. And these street sweepers, upon entering the cafe, would thrust their firsts into the soup, first to demonstrate their defiance and second to scoop up a handful of soup to drink.

The line up for the tea was always long and slow, and the writers would break out into spontaneous bursts of poetry, oral recitations of just made up verse, or verse that they had previously "composed" and memorized. As the story goes, each artistic group had it s own table: artists sat with artists, poets with poets, etc. And, the kgb, because these subversives all gathered in the same place, had their table, too, where they sat drinking strong tea and surveying. Not that any of it was a secret from anyone.

So, anyway, that's a Dmitri story. I told you I was going to tell you about Dmitri, and that's one of his stories. But there's more about Dmitri, and more stories, and more about progressive nostalgia, and neo Marxism.

Love,