Tallinn Toon Town

I went to Tallinn, Estonia a few weeks ago…like maybe two weeks ago. It was pretty nice, although honestly not the most exciting place to vacation ever. Before I went, people compared Tallinn to Disneyland, because it was well lit. This comparison was born out by the fact that the Old Town part of the city is extremely quaint and in very nice condition and, well, extremely old, because some of the buildings had plaques saying they were from the 1300s (with various reconstructions). Every European city that is lucky enough to have an old Medieval center that wasn’t destroyed in the various wars polishes them up so nice that you can’t even tell the difference between this and say, the old town in Warsaw, which is a total reconstruction based on photographs and historical records because it was totally flattened. As for the lighting, I don’t know. Almost half the pictures I took were in the dark at night and due to my lack of photo editing skills, they will probably never be appreciated.

Gabi is super psyched to be in Tallinn's Old Town Square!!!

Jason and Ben felt more contemplative about it.

We went on a tour that resulted in a lot of pictures of stuff that I now have no idea what it is. However the names of some attractions in Tallinn were comical to me, such as, House of the Blackheads, Thick Margarita Tower, Tall Hermann Tower, Kiek in de Kok Tower. Truly, Estonians have a knack for naming towers.

Possibly, Thick Margarita is featured here.

A Fortress?

I wish I had more to report from Tallinn. It was really nice! It was relaxing! We didn’t realize there’s a one hour time change from Russia and so we woke up really early and disturbed the people at our hostel. We went to a history museum and a “marzipan museum”. Did you know that marzipan was invented in Estonia? Neither did I, and i agree that it sounds implausible! We also ate some “Estonian pancakes” which were like blini in steroids/smoked trout. We drank some herbaceous beer and some Vana Tallinn, an Estonian liquor that tastes like eggnog and is tasty in coffee.

That fawn dude from Narnia should be appearing any moment.

There were non-Orthodox churches there! Ben and Jason (extremely small, bottom right corner) are amazed!

The nicest part about going there in March, which is not perhaps the best month for tourism, as a rule, is that there were no tourists there. In the summer it’s overrun but we got to enjoy its charms in peace.

Also, there was some decadent cake and chilli hot chocolate latte something that I didn’t taste but was apparently delicious. The same place–Cafe Chocolate, if I remember–also had something like gorgonzola hot chocolate, or gorgonzola latte.Sounds like something Sandra Lee would come up with! Sadly we never tried it. And to my infinite sadness, no one wanted to try blood pancakes or pig ears with me, in the interest of Estonian folk cuisine.

However, we did go to a Depeche Mode themed bar. They only had cocktails named after Depeche Mode songs, but some proved undrinkably bad. Perhaps as an homage to the English heritage of Depeche Mode, there were some extremely drunk old English men in the bar, which was gigantic, and really would have been better if it had more than like, 4 people in it, all of whom were drunk English dudes.

Fact: All citizens of Planet Earth just can't get enough of Depeche Mode. They are one of the most popular bands ever, though not in the US as much.

So although Tallinn was not your typical Spring Break rager vacay locale, it was definitely pleasant, beautiful, and not at all tiring.

Updates!!!

So the weather is nicer now, so I can stop complaining. It’s basically like spring is here, if spring means living in a swamp that barely hovers above freezing! However the sky has been blue (!) for the last few days. My buddy the icicle finally fell down, but I don’t think it killed anyone.

However due to popular curiosity/disbelief at my weather claims, here are some illustrations.

This man is doing physical labor on the ice-covered roof of a 4-storey building with no rope or anything to catch him if he falls.

This is the ice that falls to the ground and crushes cars/humans and explodes in an ice-snow-bombsicle. Opasnaya Zona!

The street that I work on has some serious sneg-related problems (sneg, pronounced snyek, is the charming Russian word for snow). Observe:

Is this an asteroid? Observe the car in the background for scale. This asteroid is the size of several cars.

Another car-sized pile on the same block.

Anyway, enough about the weather! I promise not to post on it again and will not mention how there are now teams of people in the street squirting hot water off giant trucks to melt the ice, or the strange Russian tradition of towing cars, plowing the snow beneath them, then replacing them so that the car owners come back with their cars in slightly different places for unknown reasons. I will not mention my joy that today when I went out, I learned that the layers of ice had been chiseled from my sidewalk and at last, I could push open the door to my building without being in danger of having my feet slide out from under me. Poor readers, you will be forever ignorant of these things.

Snow Day!

Well, blog readership (if any of you remain), it’s been a long time since last I posted. Sorry about that! There are a few reasons for this, mostly that nothing very exciting has been happening, except a recent trip to Estonia and a few silly national holidays both of which I will post about later. Also, after I came back, work was taking a long time to get going, plus I was jet lagged, which resulted in a crazy lifestyle that involved staying up until 6am, sleeping until 4pm, then doing the opposite, then blah blah blah I had insomnia and I didn’t do anything but feel like a waster during the day.

But, mostly, I haven’t been posting because all I can think to post about is my complaints about the weather!!!! Truthfully, during my posting hiatus I mentally composed posts several times, but these were all profanity-ridden rants about the weather, which I spent probably 10% of my time thinking about. But now I will indulge myself.

I feel it is difficult to describe to someone in the US, who is accustomed to plowed streets, shoveled sidewalks, and salted icy-places, how fucked up winter is here. Especially because you silly New Yorkers think you got a lot of snow. I scoff at the New York idea of a lot of snow! I saw on the Bwog that all the snow went away like a week after it fell or something, and now people are enjoying something called Spring Break!

This has been the snowiest, coldest winter in Petersburg in a long time, some say 50 years, someone said 150 years but that seems ridiculous. Even though it’s March, the temperature is sometimes just as low as it was in January (2-4 degrees F). It has snowed virtually every day for the last few months, which doesn’t typically happen here since the city is on the coast and it tends to be moist but not snowy. Everywhere, there are feet of snow piled up. And when I say feet, I mean like four. In a lot of places, the snow has been compressed/melted and refrozen into ice filled with dirt so it looks like disgusting black mold covering the city. In some places there are probably 6 inches of ice on the sidewalk. On smaller streets this makes the sidewalks un-walkable, so you have to walk in the street, which is also icy and if you know anything about Russian driving, not so safe.

However walking in the street is better than risking death/brain injury from icicle! Over 850 people in the month of February were injured by icicles falling on them! EIGHT HUNDRED FIFTY! And February is a short month! Outside my window there is an icicle that’s probably seven or eight feet long and only tenuously attached to the gutter. I am waiting for someone to die from it. Another way that people have been dying is falling off roofs where they are flinging snow and chunks of ice the size of refrigerators to the ground. Unfortunately there are many immigrants working in this booming industry and they apparently aren’t always trained in how not to fall off ice-covered roofs while doing demanding physical labor, or are not provided with safety harnesses by their employer. Someone told me there were maybe 50 people who have died this way recently.

Although this ice-flinging is certainly important work. I know someone whose roof collapsed from the weight of the ice. It can slide down on its own and squash you. I have seen cars partially crushed by these giant blocks of ice.

Thankfully, where the ice is, there are also helpful warning signs, printed out on computer paper and taped to the sides of buildings, proclaiming, DANGER ZONE in a totally unnoticeable fashion. Also sometimes a ribbon of caution tape will be flung on the ground, perhaps taped to a broken chair at one end.

So after the unskilled laborers have shoveled massive amounts of ice into the street, adding to what’s already there (there’s a babushka standing across the street who yells at them to stop when someone needs to walk by), what becomes of the ice? It gets mounded into a giant pile! Then perhaps moved by bulldozer to another location, where it meets other piles, creating a mini-mountain-cum-asteroid that’s maybe seven feet tall and fifty feet long–a craggey, sidewalk-obstructing mass of ice blocks the size of cinder blocks or larger, filthy snow, garbage, dog shit, broken beer bottles (is this some kind of national pastime?), and perfectly clear and cylindrical ice masses that had been incubating inside the gutters all season and on a recent warmish day came shooting out like a litter of ice-babies.

Oh my god, winter sucks so bad! I just want more than anything to be able to walk down the street without thinking about where exactly I’m going to place my foot and distribute my weight on it, lest I fall flat on my face or slide into oncoming traffic!

I also heard recently that the snow is supposed to last until May. MAY!!! It will never melt. My optimism has vanished. It will be here all summer. It will never stop snowing. It will be White Nights, in June, and I will be getting hit on the head with a piece of ice the size and shape of Medieval weaponry.

A Sad Day in Russia

I just heard news that GM is shutting down the Hummer brand. Surely some oligarchs are crying icy tears of diamond-filtered vodka right now, as they will soon be deprived of their number one favorite way to display their excessive wealth–with a car as unwieldy as several bajillion rubles.

And what will the marriage parties do? With the collapse of Hummer, will the Stretch Hummer Limo also pass out of production? Important questions!

Whither modern marital traditions without the Hummer?

The Olympic Spirit Sweeping the Nation!

Ah, the Olympics. The most wonderful time of every two-year period, am I right? Makes you glad you live on Planet Earth where awesome international festivals of cutthroat competition, goodwill and fantastic athletic achievement unite all of humanity, am I right?

Obviously, I love the Olympics. While I was home, several people commented along the lines of, it will be interesting to watch the Olympics in Russia, because I hear they’re really into sports. True, I thought, I too am curious how Russians feel about the Olympics–positive, or super-positive?

I have done a brief study (ie. I interrogated a freshman class about it, watcheda few sports), producing the following results:

1. Few people care about the Olympics as much as I do, particularly almost all the Americans I know. Also, apparently the Russian TV-viewing population which as far as I can tell is 100% of Russians. The Olympics are in Vancouver which is like on the other side of the world, thus none of the sports are viewable live, because that would be ridiculous, right, in the middle of the night? In fact no, the only time main non-cable channel broadcasts is live! Lacking Eurosport HD, I had to get up this morning at 6:30 to watch figure skating! OK so I don’t have much else going on in my life right now but still. Evening coverage doesn’t start until midnight. I was also surprised that during figure skating, they never announced the standings, although I later read it was extremely close. The Russian guy went, they showed his score, the guy stood up, the news came on announcing some escaped convict from somewhere. Later I learned that that Russian guy had done the best! I’d like a little sensationalism, please!
2. Russians love the biathlon. There are biathlon fans here, many of them. Do they watch the biathlon during non-Olympic season? Can you even do that?
3. My students are basically not watching the Olympics at all. One outspoken Afansii said he thought they were silly because in ancient Greece, the Olympics were meant to keep warriors in shape between wars, but now what’s the point, you’re not going to figure skate away from an Uzi or whatever. Afansii later went on to speak about how he is a member of a medieval role-playing/reenacting bloodsport club where you learn to fight with scimitars and his new goal is to fight with two scimitars.  I did not point out the hypocrisy of his earlier position, nor how painfully nerdy this is.
4. No one seems to be excited for Sochi! Sochi 2014! One student who is a big Olympic fan said she wanted to go and everyone laughed at her and told her it was impossible. Afansii said he thought the money for the stadium should be used to house the homeless of Sochi, which was a fair point I guess. Also, corruption, which is obvious. I  asked them if they thought it was a good opportunity to show the world what Russia is all about now, ie no longer Soviet. They were all like, don’t be ridiculous, no one thinks Russia now is anything like the USSR. I suggested that perhaps this was not true, which confused them.
5. They expect folk dancing, ballet and a survey of Russian peoples similar to Canada’s in the opening ceremony, though Afansii suggested some experimental computer music to show off Russia’s….experimentalism? Afansii has unusual ideas, and also one extremely long lock of hair that descends from behind his ear. He will probably only come to class two more times this semester.
6. Would they like to see the Olympics in St. Petersburg? Definitely not! Weirdly, they all espoused the really widely held view that it is impossible to modernize St. Petersburg (to make it a “modern city”, which no one can really define). Many of my students have said this when I asked them about the giant skyscraper that Gazprom is set to build here. Anyway, because the architecture of Petersburg’s center is all baroque, all from the same period essentially, the city should never build anything new that would mar that. Because the skyline is protected by UNESCO, building anything that would change the skyline would revoke that status. But no one ever seems to realize that its possible to build things outside the center, or that there are dozens and dozens of Soviet high rises a short subway ride away! Anyway, this view makes little sense to me. Sometimes it seems that Petersburg is very like a small town, very set in its ways. I will perhaps post more about this one day because it so perplexes me.

And there you have it–the Russian view of the Olympics, one giant shrug.

Kitchen Confidental

So guys, there has been a series of developments in the kitchen department.

When I noted previously that the lamp was leaking in little droplets, I was, frankly, concerned. My landlady had noted the problem when we paid the rent last week, and had affixed a small metal cup to the ceiling to catch the drops. This did not totally assuage my fears, particularly as the cup soon overflowed. She did, however, seem to agree with me that something was awry in the whole situation–namely that ceiling fixtures aught not drip–and she appeared to be attending to the problem. Although I have an extremely difficult time understanding her for some reason, she did not seem to be very alarmed, though she did start calling me more often. By the time she came over with her husband Sasha today, this was the state of things:

Like Hobo Chic, but for Houses

Not pictured: series of pots on the floor capturing drippy drops.

If you’re wondering why the lamp shade, once a charming zebra-esque glass thing that would have looked perfect in a Sims house, is now a mere relic of its former self, that would be because an extremely large Norwegian man and and extremely tiny Russian woman were here over the weekend and engaged in perhaps too much merrymaking. Somehow, Gottfried (Gottlieb?) ended up hitting Olga’s head on the lamp, breaking it, but strangely not causing that final slice to fall. I was not in the room at the time and my roomie won’t tell me exactly how it went down. This is not the first time that Olga has suffered a head injury due to drunken shenanigans! That girl should wear a helmet.

In any case, we were all lucky nothing worse than a shattered lampshade resulted from that incident, which I concealed with a basically not false lie (I was out, I came back, it was broken!).

Marina and Sasha came over today and got to work unscrewing the remains of the lampshade and then asked for a plastic bag, which I, for some reason, thought would be a replacement lampshade. But then they removed the lightbulbs and sealed off the lamp inside it with duct tape. This perplexed me, as did Marina’s desire to climb a ladder with her hands wrapped in toilet paper and to caress the ceiling like it was a pregnant woman’s belly or something.

But then something disturbing happened. The sound of sloshing water. The surface of the ceiling all wrinkly, like some kind of skin covering a giant blister—Yes, the ceiling was somehow filled with water.

My landlord’s husband asked for a plastic bag to wear as a hat, which matched his leopards-and-tigers-in-the-night t-shirt excellently, and they initiated a strange quasi-sexual birthing-type procedure that involved extensive massage of the ceiling, many grunts, much fingering of the ceiling hole and an enormous amount of brown water, some of which Sasha managed to catch in a baby bath basin. Marina basically stroke-sloshed the water out through the hole that the ceiling lamp hangs from. It showered down upon us, upon the kitchen, upon the food we keep in the kitchen. Apparently the ceiling is made of some kind of vinyl that rippled in a truly repulsive, skin-like way. When I asked what was up with that, the explanation was that the apartment needs to be remodeled. Agree! Eventually, all–or at least most, I hope–of the water had been evacuated, leaving behind this charming reminder….

The kitchen isn't this dark but you can see the "reminder" better this way

Apparently, it will one day atrophy back from whence it came. Also, if you’re curious, you can see the water-swollen spot in the first picture as well, in the background, lurking like an alien womb waiting to burst and ruin our lives with a load of mucusy disgustingness. Luckily that fate has been averted! For now.