Monday 9/24Friday:

The St. Petersburg Ska-Jazz Review at one of the new hipster clubs on Konyshennaya Ploshad. A swell place, in spite of the crowd, and an excellent show. We worked up into the crowd and danced our minds out. Russian ska kids yell “ska” when they’re dancing, which, by the way, is usually not a skank or any kind of two step, but the generic flailing enthusiasm that’s the norm in the bars and clubs that don’t play hardcore techno. Anyways, it was fun all the same.

Afterwards we went about the usual roaming. Submitting to Danny’s hunger, we stopped by Subway and watched him order and eat an enormous, double meat sub. The staff was amused. Later, before going home some big guys seemed to be leering towards the two girls remaining with us, so I stepped in and hijacked them from the conversation. They turned out to be fine fellows, immigrant metro workers from Romania, they’ve lived here for 10 years. By way of parting one of them lifted me up by my belt, an endearing gesture in spite of its machismo.

After school on Friday I dropped by Quo Vadis (the slick internet cafe), and ran into Yulia. In addition to stuffing me with cookies, cake, and tea she told me about a friend of hers who’s looking for someone to fill a room in his apartment just off of Nevsky Prospekt, near Ploschad Vostaniia. I called him immediately and on Saturday I checked out the place. It’s in a beautiful courtyard, indeed just off Nevsky and the building is old in the best possible way. All of the amenities are there and there’s plenty of space, the rent is sort of ridiculously reasonable considering the location (pretty much as dead in the center of the city, near some of my favorite day and night locales, and 5 minutes from the Metro.

Meanwhile I’ve discussed the matter with TP and she was understanding about it, all things considered. She obviously wants me to stay with her, and so I’ve been fending off various arguments about why this is a bad idea all weekend. She also proposed a way for me to live with her at a lower cost, in fact a cost equivalent to the rent I’d be paying downtown (except it would include food). I do feel terrible leaving her, but there are several reasons why I think it’s for the best. First financially this is a great and one-time deal, it’s pretty much my dream apartment. I’d always intended to move into my own apartment, at some point, and I doubt anything this ideal would come by again. Second, the commute in and out of the center is beginning to wear on me, even if it is only the small distance to Primorskaya. I dont mind riding transport, or even walking home, but it undeniably makes socializing around town a little bit more difficult to deal with bridges, metro closing, and etc. This difficulty will only worsen when it gets cold. I’m well aware that this is kind of a spoiled point of view, that to live in a central location is a rare luxury, but all the same if my purpose living here is to work on my Russian, that’s best served, I think, by being out and about with my Russian friends. Third, the space thing is critical. I’m not so much talking about physical space, the apartment on Vasilevsky is plenty comfortable for two people. Instead I mean the ability to do everyday things like read, cook, leave and return as suits my schedule and desires. TP certainly allows me to live as I please, in fact she’s often bending over backwards to make me more comfortable, but at some point there’s always an extent to which I am a guest in her home and should behave accordingly and I’m always conscious of the demands that my presence put on her. This is fine for the time being, but I can’t imagine being comfortable living as a guest for more than a couple months. Finally, I really, really don’t want to blow my hair after taking a shower (especially now that they’ve turned the heat on and it’s like a sauna in the apartment) which has been established as, pretty much, a cardinal rule of my stay here.

Returning to the weekend: Saturday night found Eric and I hanging out at a cafe near Primorskaya. At some point a very drunk, very patriotic fellow named Ivan came up to me hoping to explain in very broken English how Russia’s strength lies in its goodness, in the fact that Russians care not for the good of themselves but for the good of everyone. He wanted my opinion on this, and the usual anti-American sentiments floating aloud. For some reason he had decided that I couldn’t speak any Russian (hence the English) but that Eric as a native speaker. He kept turning to Eric asking him to translate for me. This in spite of my insistence (in Russian) that I understood him perfectly and that it would be possible to continue in Russian. I even translated his Russian into English, which he immediately repeated for, presumably, my own benefit.

I agreed whole-heartedly about the goodness of Russians, but my attempts to qualify and nuance this talk of goodness were lost on him and he’d have nothing of my thoughts about the relationship between a people and its government. Instead, he started to explain (in English) that he’s a patriot and a member of United Russia (The party that backs Putin and controls pretty much everything), and that Russia would make this world a better place. I should know better than to make diplomatic attempts with anyone so far under… but all the same, he started to claim that we were also good people and implored us to drink with him. Bar denizens being, in fact, citizens of the world. Unfortunately, by the time Eric returned with Beer for the three of us his interests had fallen on two girls sitting nearby, and we were promptly abandoned. Would Ivan have understood my warning if I told him that his belief in doing good for all is one of the (purported, at least) core values of our neo-conservative movement and its strategy in the middle east? What with the road to hell being all good intentions, and all.

And etc.