October 15th

Normally the state of disrepair of this city is merely a minor inconvenience. You eventually get used to having to look at your feet every step of the way so that you don’t die in a chasm in the sidewalk. The women here impress me every day with their seemingly superhuman ability to walk in this veritable jungle gym with five inch stiletto heels. I’ve heard of suffering for fashion, but this takes it to a new level completely. Anyhow, this pitiable state of things here that manages to suffice on a day to day basis has one fatal flaw: rain. Last night it rained for about 5 hours and this city slid into the 13^th Century. I always wondered why so many houses have piles of dirt out front and today I realized why. These giant piles exist to provide the omnipresent mud that coats everything and gets everywhere, running in giant mud rivers down streets or forming giant mud lakes that encompass the entirety of the sidewalk forcing pedestrians onto the road to get splashed with mud from passing cars. It’s fun to see where construction workers covered up their oil spills with sand because after it rains, these sand piles have fun incandescent streams of mud emanating from their core like some sort of demented rainbow. The natives are pro at managing to avoid the mud and I’ve seen people perform virtual miracles of gymnastic ability to avoid getting sucked into the muck. Not that I’m sure muck is the best way to describe it. There’s a huge piece of sidewalk missing on my way to school that’s filled with dirt. In dry weather, it’s annoying at best, in wet weather it’s become a festering pit of quicksandy doom. Have I painted a rosy enough picture yet? But despite all this, the weather continues to be simply lovely. I’m working on exact temperatures, but I’ve yet to master the mental back flips needed to comprehend the Russian numbers and then convert that to some sort of passable Fahrenheit that means anything to me. It’s been warm though, which is especially sweet considering that Germany got 20 cm of snow yesterday and Moscow and St. Petersburg are cold, windy, and rainy. That being said, Sperry Topsiders may easily have constituted the worst shoe choice in the history of poor footwear choices and my Russian shoes have the dubious distinction of being the only pair of shoes in the world that actually draw moisture out of the air and ground and use it to soak my feet while walking. Luckily I have a pair of waterproof shoes from home. To be honest the advertisement for these shoes should just be a picture of Voronezh after a rainstorm with the words, “The world is your playground. Only this playground has a solid coating of oil and mud that’ll ruin your other shoes. Buy Timberlands today: Voronezh is waiting.” I should be in PR.

Voronezh Moment of the Day

Warning: this scene takes place in a McDonald’s bathroom and is just a tiny bit vulgar. I apologize for offending, but this story is simply too illustrative of my time here to be left out. So, I was using the restroom while at McDonald’s and a man came up next to me to use the other urinal. Now, the urinals in this particular bathroom are really close together, like the other man had to squeeze in next to me between the two walls. Uncomfortable. From the get go it’s clear this man is wildly drunk, which, seeing as it was 1:30 PM, was mildly surprising, even for Russia. I can tell because this guy is all over the place, he’s swaying on his feet, missing the urinal and just generally being really drunk. Just as I’m about to leave, this man apparently passes out, falling heavily, spraying urine everywhere, including on a less than thrilled Chris. I lose my cool and storm out to alert the staff of the unconscious exposed man in their bathroom. They could clearly care less and are in fact annoyed at me. Bear in mind (and this may be the subject of another post) but this is a country where the employee is always right and the customer is only right when it suits the employee. Anyways, about two hours and a change of clothes later, I was meeting some of my friends in their apartment. On the stairs about halfway up there’s an old man sleeping head first down about six stairs. The girls freaked out and made me take his pulse, as he’d obviously fallen. He was quite alright, just so inebriated at four in the afternoon that he just had to take a nap right then and there. And you see why a) women are the breadwinners in this society and b) alcoholism kills (literally, a Russian passenger plane just crashed in Perm; cause of crash: pilot was drunk. Criminal).