"So yeah, I live in the most expensive city in the world, and I pay around $1500 a month for a two-room apartment in this neighborhood in north Moscow, and I bought this car with a loan that comes with 20% APR in an economy that is falsely confident because the country I live in has an enormous amount of oil and gas reserves that my government uses as political muscle throughout Europe, and most of my fellow Russian citizens earn less than $700 a month, but you know what? I'm gonna treat myself to something nice. I'm gonna splurge. I'm gonna get a fucking desert and a woman with snakes coming out of her face airbrushed onto the fucking side of this tiny car that I will end up paying more interest on than the car is worth. Why? Because it's fucking possible, you stupid American. And it wasn't possible 8 years ago, therefore it is extremely important that I do it now. And I happen to think women with snakes emerging from their pores are fucking AWESOME."
More graffiti from the stairwell of my hosts' place...Rostix is a KFC-style fast food chain here. I ate there once and it was fine, but maybe this person had a bad experience and needed to express it on the wall of this 5-story building in south Moscow.
Speaking of food ... this is what it comes to, folks. You're hungry at 2am but you don't have any groceries, so you create a makeshift sandwich out of your friends' refrigerator contents. Which include bread, cheese, and carrots that have been soaked in some sort of vinegar.
So part of my rent at my friends' place, at least of my own design, is doing their dishes. As I was paying my rent last week on my first day off from work, I broke a glass and cut my hand to the bone, which resulted in a trip to the hospital and four stitches. I called one clinic that was willing to use my insurance and apparently, once I told them I was American, dollar signs appeared in their eyes. They wanted to send an ambulance and keep me in the hospital for several days and perform surgery on me. I just decided to pay for it out of pocket somewhere else so I wouldn't have to wait any longer. The nurse who dressed the wound was typically Russian -- very cold, blunt and to the point -- but when they were applying anesthetic with a needle, every time I winced she would yell very loudly in Russian, "EVERYTHING IS FINE, EVERYTHING IS OK, EVERYTHING IS GOING OK", like some sort of robot. It could have been worse, I suppose.
The glass that cut me. Well, not the exact glass, but one exactly like it. My friends had 4 of them when I moved in, but I've broken 2 of them so far. Белый Медведь (Byeli Medvyed) means "White Bear"; "medvyed" means "bear", so the last name of the current president of Russia, Medvedev, means "of the bears", which is actually quite fitting for this blog, since bears, specifically those from the country, have provided an enormous amount of discussion among those "in the know." That was a lot of commas.
A corrupt douchebag pundit's commentary on a laptop viewed through a cheap digital camera. Fuck Giuliani.
Russian cat frontin' (the same one that was postin' up last week). This one is for Crash and Bronweezy.
Pourin' one on the Moscow ground for Cy.
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