октября 31, 2006
The Weather Turns
10/31 16:54, Pushkin time
Monday during the day the snow melted off most of the way. Work proceeded as normal, and it looked like it was shapng up to be another slightly-too-warm week. Until the evening.
I picked the boys up Monday evening at maybe 6:15 (a good fifteen minutes before I usually get to them; I made great time past the train crossings). Of course, with the time difference, 5:30PM is full-on, pitch-black night. So Я asks me why I came to get them so late, and the both got a discussion on the Earth's axial tilt as it relates to the short short days up here in the winter -- which we're not even particularly close to yet (!!!) -- and the effectively nonexistent nights in the summer. Then, as we walked from our cars into our door, it started to snow.
And kept snowing.
And kept snowing.
Z absolutely insisted on going out to play in the playground near our building, and since we could see it from one of our windows, and I saw otehr kids and parents out there playing, he was allowed to gear up (now a ten-minute process) and get his winter playtime started. Then after dinner, we all went back out -- even A, who claims to hate the snow -- and checked it all out. When we went to sleep, the snow was still coming.
But by this morning, it had already either melted or sublimed, and only a bit of scut was left; and the day was marginally warmer -- enough so that I had no worrying spots on the road to the kids' preschool or then to work. And it stayed that way, the patches of remaining snow melting quietly away, until maybe an hour ago. It began. Flurries flew and kept flying. A and I had made an arrangement to visit the trailer that still holds the bulk of our stuff to make a last exchange before it gets moved to a more secure parking and becomes less convenient to visit. And by the time we were finished, it was cold enough, and my hands were wet enough (I didn't think gloves would be necessary today, it was so pleasant this morning) that I couldn't even holв the key to lock the gate properly. And now as dusk moves to full dark, the snow continues to fall. San Sanich has lectured me about the importance of getting studded tires, told me where to go and get them, given me some ideas for good brands, and given me a discount card (Russian businesses seem simply mad for the things..). We'll have those on the cars by the end of the weekend.
Monday during the day the snow melted off most of the way. Work proceeded as normal, and it looked like it was shapng up to be another slightly-too-warm week. Until the evening.
I picked the boys up Monday evening at maybe 6:15 (a good fifteen minutes before I usually get to them; I made great time past the train crossings). Of course, with the time difference, 5:30PM is full-on, pitch-black night. So Я asks me why I came to get them so late, and the both got a discussion on the Earth's axial tilt as it relates to the short short days up here in the winter -- which we're not even particularly close to yet (!!!) -- and the effectively nonexistent nights in the summer. Then, as we walked from our cars into our door, it started to snow.
And kept snowing.
And kept snowing.
Z absolutely insisted on going out to play in the playground near our building, and since we could see it from one of our windows, and I saw otehr kids and parents out there playing, he was allowed to gear up (now a ten-minute process) and get his winter playtime started. Then after dinner, we all went back out -- even A, who claims to hate the snow -- and checked it all out. When we went to sleep, the snow was still coming.
But by this morning, it had already either melted or sublimed, and only a bit of scut was left; and the day was marginally warmer -- enough so that I had no worrying spots on the road to the kids' preschool or then to work. And it stayed that way, the patches of remaining snow melting quietly away, until maybe an hour ago. It began. Flurries flew and kept flying. A and I had made an arrangement to visit the trailer that still holds the bulk of our stuff to make a last exchange before it gets moved to a more secure parking and becomes less convenient to visit. And by the time we were finished, it was cold enough, and my hands were wet enough (I didn't think gloves would be necessary today, it was so pleasant this morning) that I couldn't even holв the key to lock the gate properly. And now as dusk moves to full dark, the snow continues to fall. San Sanich has lectured me about the importance of getting studded tires, told me where to go and get them, given me some ideas for good brands, and given me a discount card (Russian businesses seem simply mad for the things..). We'll have those on the cars by the end of the weekend.
октября 29, 2006
More Explorations
10/30 08:18, Pushkin time
The frantic week at the office wrapped itself up on friday, and we headed into the weekend under forecast of snow. Saturday morning proved clear and above-freezing, however, and we were hearing that it would stay so until the afternoon. So, having mapped out another set of potential neighborhoods/villages/settlements -- depending on how you translate the word посёлок -- for a house.
We started south on the moskovskoye shosse (the eastern bracket to Pushkin, more or less) and less than five minutes later found ourselves crossing the Izhora river and into another 'county' [they use the word 'район' which they translate as 'region', but that is too general a word and they really fit the concept of 'county' well]. Just south of the river-straddling town of Yam-Izhora, off to the east of the shosse, is the first settlement we had targetted. Krasniy Bor (name means 'The Red Woods') sits on the northern slope of a line of low hills, rising up from fields on both sides of the Izhora. The large-subdivision-sized settlement has a core of older homes and on the southern (and therefore higher and closer to the woods that border it) side, newer and under-construction ones. The roads are potholed and generally crappy inside, but to get between there and work or the city is much less challenging that the same from Gatchina. And we did find three potential candidates, all of which were at a point in construction where many Russian builders stop to find a buyer who will then finish the home themselves, in the manner they see fitting. All were basically shells of brick with roofs and some sort of temporary covering material nailed over the several window or door openings. One we were able to get inside, as the 'garage door' cover had come off. This we did, as the temperature outside finally reached 'snow' and the wind and white stuff started falling in earnest. It had, in addition to the garage level, two floors and a half-sunken half basement that had during the last months of constant rain (one can presume) accumulated a good ten inches or so of water through the similarly-uncovered, weather-facing windows. Pumping it out would definitely be necessary, but since much of the Petersburg region sits in marshlands, I'm not really afraid that the walls or floors are not well-waterproofed. Not that we wouldn't check, of course...
Then from there, we headed north through Kolpino, ultimately passing right by the statue-by-the-graveyard that I commented on during my last Company trip out (the one that the guy walking by suggested would be improved by grenading). We swung through Otradnoye and a couple of other settlements that seemed nice enough, but were less and less convieniently-located for work and school. And finally, we pushed our way all the way to the village of Shlisselburg, right on the mouth of the Neva as it leaves Lage Ladoga. And back through the city on the Murmansk shosse and ring roads.
And the snow that fell saturday night was mostly gone by sunday...
The frantic week at the office wrapped itself up on friday, and we headed into the weekend under forecast of snow. Saturday morning proved clear and above-freezing, however, and we were hearing that it would stay so until the afternoon. So, having mapped out another set of potential neighborhoods/villages/settlements -- depending on how you translate the word посёлок -- for a house.
We started south on the moskovskoye shosse (the eastern bracket to Pushkin, more or less) and less than five minutes later found ourselves crossing the Izhora river and into another 'county' [they use the word 'район' which they translate as 'region', but that is too general a word and they really fit the concept of 'county' well]. Just south of the river-straddling town of Yam-Izhora, off to the east of the shosse, is the first settlement we had targetted. Krasniy Bor (name means 'The Red Woods') sits on the northern slope of a line of low hills, rising up from fields on both sides of the Izhora. The large-subdivision-sized settlement has a core of older homes and on the southern (and therefore higher and closer to the woods that border it) side, newer and under-construction ones. The roads are potholed and generally crappy inside, but to get between there and work or the city is much less challenging that the same from Gatchina. And we did find three potential candidates, all of which were at a point in construction where many Russian builders stop to find a buyer who will then finish the home themselves, in the manner they see fitting. All were basically shells of brick with roofs and some sort of temporary covering material nailed over the several window or door openings. One we were able to get inside, as the 'garage door' cover had come off. This we did, as the temperature outside finally reached 'snow' and the wind and white stuff started falling in earnest. It had, in addition to the garage level, two floors and a half-sunken half basement that had during the last months of constant rain (one can presume) accumulated a good ten inches or so of water through the similarly-uncovered, weather-facing windows. Pumping it out would definitely be necessary, but since much of the Petersburg region sits in marshlands, I'm not really afraid that the walls or floors are not well-waterproofed. Not that we wouldn't check, of course...
Then from there, we headed north through Kolpino, ultimately passing right by the statue-by-the-graveyard that I commented on during my last Company trip out (the one that the guy walking by suggested would be improved by grenading). We swung through Otradnoye and a couple of other settlements that seemed nice enough, but were less and less convieniently-located for work and school. And finally, we pushed our way all the way to the village of Shlisselburg, right on the mouth of the Neva as it leaves Lage Ladoga. And back through the city on the Murmansk shosse and ring roads.
And the snow that fell saturday night was mostly gone by sunday...
октября 27, 2006
Success yet again!
10/27 19:53, Pushkin time
We are once more the possessors of two house cats. Here's how it went down:
I made it to the air cargo place a hair after 9:30 this morning, got my entry pass and the packet of paperwork that came with the cats. The lady who gave me my packet told me that I needed to then go and pay at a window (an 85% comprehension rate has its drawbacks; there are literally dozens of windows on several scattered locations in that area, and all I had -- more or less -- was 'go to "gfxdwbrfg" window to pay'). I finally figured out what window I needed, by now a quarter past ten, and approached the clerk with my packet of papers and asked him, more or less, whether he wanted my money. He asked me where the broker from last night was, since I was obviously a clueless boob who was perhaps on the verge of hurting myself if left unattended. So I called the broker, and together we spent maybe twenty minutes getting verious pieces of paperwork and a variety of stamps. One person I briefly met with was the veterinary inspector, with whom I had an enlightening conversation about the fact that the paperwork the American government issues is basically useless anywhere they don't speak English, and how much better it would be (and how she always recommend to Americans) to get either a Russian-issued or EU-issued 'passport' for the animals. We can apparently get it from the vet down the road from us for fairly cheap. Probably we'll do it. Sometime.
Finally, after only maybe a total of a full hour of time (by now just a hair past 11:30), the broker and I returned to the warehouse; I paid the customs fees (a total of more than 6000r -- I'm figuring $250 or so), got another series of stamps, and traded some of them along with a signature and a handwritten note that the goods that had been stored were undamaged and that I released the warehouse from liability (warehouse manager asks, 'can you write in Russian?'; I, 'poorly, but yes'; only two words stuck me for spelling, but since Russian is written phonetically they were easily worked past by the guy saying them more slowly). Then, back to the car and home to give the cats a bath and then off to work.
A and the kids are happy, and everyone at work had a big belly laugh at how expensive the cats were. More than one person told me that for 600 rubles they would have been willing to find me two perfectly serviceable cats right here and save on the hassle of customs paperwork. Ha ha.
I find the joy in having managed the whole thing myself, whereas the last items we customs-cleared (the cars) basically had to be done completely for us. Small joy, but nonetheless...
We are once more the possessors of two house cats. Here's how it went down:
I made it to the air cargo place a hair after 9:30 this morning, got my entry pass and the packet of paperwork that came with the cats. The lady who gave me my packet told me that I needed to then go and pay at a window (an 85% comprehension rate has its drawbacks; there are literally dozens of windows on several scattered locations in that area, and all I had -- more or less -- was 'go to "gfxdwbrfg" window to pay'). I finally figured out what window I needed, by now a quarter past ten, and approached the clerk with my packet of papers and asked him, more or less, whether he wanted my money. He asked me where the broker from last night was, since I was obviously a clueless boob who was perhaps on the verge of hurting myself if left unattended. So I called the broker, and together we spent maybe twenty minutes getting verious pieces of paperwork and a variety of stamps. One person I briefly met with was the veterinary inspector, with whom I had an enlightening conversation about the fact that the paperwork the American government issues is basically useless anywhere they don't speak English, and how much better it would be (and how she always recommend to Americans) to get either a Russian-issued or EU-issued 'passport' for the animals. We can apparently get it from the vet down the road from us for fairly cheap. Probably we'll do it. Sometime.
Finally, after only maybe a total of a full hour of time (by now just a hair past 11:30), the broker and I returned to the warehouse; I paid the customs fees (a total of more than 6000r -- I'm figuring $250 or so), got another series of stamps, and traded some of them along with a signature and a handwritten note that the goods that had been stored were undamaged and that I released the warehouse from liability (warehouse manager asks, 'can you write in Russian?'; I, 'poorly, but yes'; only two words stuck me for spelling, but since Russian is written phonetically they were easily worked past by the guy saying them more slowly). Then, back to the car and home to give the cats a bath and then off to work.
A and the kids are happy, and everyone at work had a big belly laugh at how expensive the cats were. More than one person told me that for 600 rubles they would have been willing to find me two perfectly serviceable cats right here and save on the hassle of customs paperwork. Ha ha.
I find the joy in having managed the whole thing myself, whereas the last items we customs-cleared (the cars) basically had to be done completely for us. Small joy, but nonetheless...
октября 26, 2006
Snag
10/27 08:44, Pushkin time
Z's performance yesterday was great. He, along with two other kids, had the part of 'mushroom' (a very important role in a Russian story...). He joined in singing all the songs, and even had a set of lines which he delivered fairly well. Photos will follow (or check the website).
I am, however, very very sad to report that I will not be able to see G's hedgehog debut in person this morning. And here is why:
Yesterday afternoon, our cats were scheduled to arrive. Originally, the plan was for A to go and get them from the airport, but when I called a couple of hours before their flight was scheduled to land, the people at LH Cargo mentioned that there was some paperwork that would need doing, and that the best deal would be for the cats to be picked up by someone who spoke more Russian than "basically none". So I left work right away, and promptly sat behidn a closed train crossing for almost an hour while a somehow-less-than-fully-functional locomotive limped past with its train of almost a hundred cars. Then dashing off to the airport cargo office.
When I arrived, still minutes before the flight was to land at 6PM, I started right away to run into trouble. The LH Cargo office people asked me if I had the forms all processed to clear the cats (ummm.. no?), and then told me that my chances of getting the forms filled out properly before the customs guys left for the day were basically zero, unless I could find a broker to do it with me. Of course, the broker who works on animals had already left for the day (this is, before a flight carrying animals had landed), and of the 20% of the brokers left who hadn't yet bailed out, none were willing to work on animals. The LH people (who were very nice and very helpful throughout) took my argument that the cats absolutely could not spend the night without food and water and managed to get the pets broker called and turned around back to the office.
So the nice pets broker lady started making calls to find out if any customs people were still around. And also discovered that the cats' plane was landing an hour late. Basically, it ended up that, even if we had all of our papers in order days ahead of time, the cats were not leaving the warehouse, since the final step of the clearance process is for a customs inspector to look at the paperwork, look in the boxes, say, 'Yep, those are cats all right...' and put a stamp on things. And the inspectors were long gone before the cats had even pulled in. The pet broker has gotten everthing ready for first thing this morning, though, which is where I'm headed instead of G's show.
And I was able to get in to see the cats (slip a couple to the security guard for the 'pass') and bring them some extra food and water. I tried to talk the guard into letting me pay an extra 'fine' and take the cats out right away, but they all stand in awe of The Stamp, and since all possessors of The Stamp were nowhere to be found, there was no way to informally expedite things. At least I tried...
Z's performance yesterday was great. He, along with two other kids, had the part of 'mushroom' (a very important role in a Russian story...). He joined in singing all the songs, and even had a set of lines which he delivered fairly well. Photos will follow (or check the website).
I am, however, very very sad to report that I will not be able to see G's hedgehog debut in person this morning. And here is why:
Yesterday afternoon, our cats were scheduled to arrive. Originally, the plan was for A to go and get them from the airport, but when I called a couple of hours before their flight was scheduled to land, the people at LH Cargo mentioned that there was some paperwork that would need doing, and that the best deal would be for the cats to be picked up by someone who spoke more Russian than "basically none". So I left work right away, and promptly sat behidn a closed train crossing for almost an hour while a somehow-less-than-fully-functional locomotive limped past with its train of almost a hundred cars. Then dashing off to the airport cargo office.
When I arrived, still minutes before the flight was to land at 6PM, I started right away to run into trouble. The LH Cargo office people asked me if I had the forms all processed to clear the cats (ummm.. no?), and then told me that my chances of getting the forms filled out properly before the customs guys left for the day were basically zero, unless I could find a broker to do it with me. Of course, the broker who works on animals had already left for the day (this is, before a flight carrying animals had landed), and of the 20% of the brokers left who hadn't yet bailed out, none were willing to work on animals. The LH people (who were very nice and very helpful throughout) took my argument that the cats absolutely could not spend the night without food and water and managed to get the pets broker called and turned around back to the office.
So the nice pets broker lady started making calls to find out if any customs people were still around. And also discovered that the cats' plane was landing an hour late. Basically, it ended up that, even if we had all of our papers in order days ahead of time, the cats were not leaving the warehouse, since the final step of the clearance process is for a customs inspector to look at the paperwork, look in the boxes, say, 'Yep, those are cats all right...' and put a stamp on things. And the inspectors were long gone before the cats had even pulled in. The pet broker has gotten everthing ready for first thing this morning, though, which is where I'm headed instead of G's show.
And I was able to get in to see the cats (slip a couple to the security guard for the 'pass') and bring them some extra food and water. I tried to talk the guard into letting me pay an extra 'fine' and take the cats out right away, but they all stand in awe of The Stamp, and since all possessors of The Stamp were nowhere to be found, there was no way to informally expedite things. At least I tried...
октября 25, 2006
The most boring post EVER
10/25 19:51, Pushkin time
It has gotten dark. The presunrise dim starts at maybe 8:45; actual sunup is maybe 10 or 10:30. Then it starts getting dusk-y around 4 and full-on dark by just a hair past 6. And two more months left before the solstice... Wow.
We're also threatened just recently with the onset of real winter; the first two frosts and the chilliness around them was just a preview, as it has bounced up significantly. But the temps are back on the way down. 13C today; calling for 6C tomorrow, then maybe 1C Friday, then into the minuses and so forth. The reputable (read: non-Russian) forecasts are calling for snow on Friday/night. A good time it would be, since all knowledgeable parties agree that the first snow will come with a minimum 8-hour total, absolutely-no-moving gridlock. Weekend would be the best time for that.
So, the kids have their 'goodbye to fall' (in the practical, if not the strict calendar sense..) celebrations on Thurday and Friday. We've been informed that G has the part of 'hedgehog' -- Z is somewhat tighter-lipped about his situation. Nonetheless, pictures and mirth should be expected in short order.
Monday, I met with the main engineer at the factory with whom we expect to be working to go over the plans I had prepared for what we want from them. As fortune has it, the vast majority of engineering drafting notation is basically the same in Russia as it is in the US. In fact, this project has proved a wealth of forehead-smacks along those lines. My personal favorite is when, talking to another possible vendor on the phone, it was inquired of me what steel we were hoping to use in the construction. Immediately, I realized that:
- "Basic carbon steel" wouldn't necessarily mean a damn thing here, even if correctly translated
- I barely know ASTM steel designations off the top of my head (thank goodness I had a Ryerson catalogue from the States on my desk)
- The "A" in ASTM stands for "American"
- Outside American, they don't use "American" steel standards
- I know absolutely zero about Russian steel standards
So, I stalled and grabbed one of the other project guys to get a quick primer on Russian steel. The 'basic' one is "сталь-3" [steel-3]; many of the higher-grade (meaning not 'precision aircraft', but 'more expensive') structural ones are higher-grade due to their cold-temperature properties. That's new -- although, to be honest, in school they did mention that metal gets brittle in the extreme cold and that 'designing for such situations, this fact must be taken into account'. Helpful... The primary cold-weather grades are 08-Г2С and 17-Г1С. I got on the Inter Nets (just for the heck of it) and discovered that not only are these unique Russian designations, but based on the chemical makeup specs, they actually have absolutely no analogue in the US. But fortunately, since 'cold' for steel starts at minus 25C, and сталь-3 suffers a mere percent or so detriment per five or so degrees until it gets really cold (minus 55C or more; Yakutia sees it but in places where people actually do things, only very briefly), the basic cheap stuff will work out for us just fine.
Tuesday was a snowless preview of the first day of snow. An accident at a major intersection in Petersburg wasn't cleaned up for a couple of hours, causing traffic to pile upon traffic and eventually a city-wide traffic jam that lasted for most of the day into the evening. Which allows for an interesting segue.
According to the И's, A's accident was an anomaly-to-the-point-of-unreality. Normally, traffic cops would take significantly more than the ten minutes that she saw to arrive at the scene of an accident and start taking notes -- which they must complete fully before anyone can move at all even if the accident is blocking a major street. И В says that the last accident he was in the DPS took five hours to show up. So the 8-hours-of-gridlock is totally believable, if one posits several dozen accidents all happening in the same couple-hour stretch. Oh, the rapture of it all.
Then this morning, after a brief ring with S B (yes, the Aussies wanted to call up to laugh their butts off about how cold it is where I am as springtime gets into full swing in their hemisphere), A gave me another frantic call to let me know that Z -- who was staying home today due to a crummy feeling this morning -- had puked all over the back seats of the caravan. The carwashes here also do interiors, though, so A came out of the whole thing with a clean inside-and-out van and only lighter by 520r [~$18]. The doctor at Z and G's preschool called me as soon as she got there this morning (I had told Z's teacher why he was staying home) and asked after him. Since his temperature wasn't too high and he was perking up after the puke, she said there was no need to bring him by for a checkup, and left with G a list of medicines to start Z on if he's not feeling better tomorrow.
So it seems the school nurses around here are doctors, and are not 'school' so much as simply 'located in the school'. A half-dozen of the girls in Z's class asked after him when our paths crossed in the morning or afternoon. Lucky boy...
It has gotten dark. The presunrise dim starts at maybe 8:45; actual sunup is maybe 10 or 10:30. Then it starts getting dusk-y around 4 and full-on dark by just a hair past 6. And two more months left before the solstice... Wow.
We're also threatened just recently with the onset of real winter; the first two frosts and the chilliness around them was just a preview, as it has bounced up significantly. But the temps are back on the way down. 13C today; calling for 6C tomorrow, then maybe 1C Friday, then into the minuses and so forth. The reputable (read: non-Russian) forecasts are calling for snow on Friday/night. A good time it would be, since all knowledgeable parties agree that the first snow will come with a minimum 8-hour total, absolutely-no-moving gridlock. Weekend would be the best time for that.
So, the kids have their 'goodbye to fall' (in the practical, if not the strict calendar sense..) celebrations on Thurday and Friday. We've been informed that G has the part of 'hedgehog' -- Z is somewhat tighter-lipped about his situation. Nonetheless, pictures and mirth should be expected in short order.
Monday, I met with the main engineer at the factory with whom we expect to be working to go over the plans I had prepared for what we want from them. As fortune has it, the vast majority of engineering drafting notation is basically the same in Russia as it is in the US. In fact, this project has proved a wealth of forehead-smacks along those lines. My personal favorite is when, talking to another possible vendor on the phone, it was inquired of me what steel we were hoping to use in the construction. Immediately, I realized that:
- "Basic carbon steel" wouldn't necessarily mean a damn thing here, even if correctly translated
- I barely know ASTM steel designations off the top of my head (thank goodness I had a Ryerson catalogue from the States on my desk)
- The "A" in ASTM stands for "American"
- Outside American, they don't use "American" steel standards
- I know absolutely zero about Russian steel standards
So, I stalled and grabbed one of the other project guys to get a quick primer on Russian steel. The 'basic' one is "сталь-3" [steel-3]; many of the higher-grade (meaning not 'precision aircraft', but 'more expensive') structural ones are higher-grade due to their cold-temperature properties. That's new -- although, to be honest, in school they did mention that metal gets brittle in the extreme cold and that 'designing for such situations, this fact must be taken into account'. Helpful... The primary cold-weather grades are 08-Г2С and 17-Г1С. I got on the Inter Nets (just for the heck of it) and discovered that not only are these unique Russian designations, but based on the chemical makeup specs, they actually have absolutely no analogue in the US. But fortunately, since 'cold' for steel starts at minus 25C, and сталь-3 suffers a mere percent or so detriment per five or so degrees until it gets really cold (minus 55C or more; Yakutia sees it but in places where people actually do things, only very briefly), the basic cheap stuff will work out for us just fine.
Tuesday was a snowless preview of the first day of snow. An accident at a major intersection in Petersburg wasn't cleaned up for a couple of hours, causing traffic to pile upon traffic and eventually a city-wide traffic jam that lasted for most of the day into the evening. Which allows for an interesting segue.
According to the И's, A's accident was an anomaly-to-the-point-of-unreality. Normally, traffic cops would take significantly more than the ten minutes that she saw to arrive at the scene of an accident and start taking notes -- which they must complete fully before anyone can move at all even if the accident is blocking a major street. И В says that the last accident he was in the DPS took five hours to show up. So the 8-hours-of-gridlock is totally believable, if one posits several dozen accidents all happening in the same couple-hour stretch. Oh, the rapture of it all.
Then this morning, after a brief ring with S B (yes, the Aussies wanted to call up to laugh their butts off about how cold it is where I am as springtime gets into full swing in their hemisphere), A gave me another frantic call to let me know that Z -- who was staying home today due to a crummy feeling this morning -- had puked all over the back seats of the caravan. The carwashes here also do interiors, though, so A came out of the whole thing with a clean inside-and-out van and only lighter by 520r [~$18]. The doctor at Z and G's preschool called me as soon as she got there this morning (I had told Z's teacher why he was staying home) and asked after him. Since his temperature wasn't too high and he was perking up after the puke, she said there was no need to bring him by for a checkup, and left with G a list of medicines to start Z on if he's not feeling better tomorrow.
So it seems the school nurses around here are doctors, and are not 'school' so much as simply 'located in the school'. A half-dozen of the girls in Z's class asked after him when our paths crossed in the morning or afternoon. Lucky boy...
октября 23, 2006
..Continued...
10/23 19:48, Pushkin time
so where did I leave off?...
Ah yes. Saturday we wrapped up fairly simply (it's still pretty wet out most all the time). A got to weep at the sight of our van so covered with road crud that the rear license plate is almost invisible. It will get worse before summer; I begin to understand why there are so many carwashes in Russia...
Sunday we started out heading north to find a fabric store in the city center about which we had been told the day before. It turned out to be on the northern part of town, near the Finland train station. From there, we went north through what seems to be a massively-under-development part of Petersburg (at one point there were tower cranes on every block on both sides of the street for better than 2 miles). Money, money, and more money... We took the Vyborg shosse to the northern part of the ring road, then that back around towards Pushkin. In the process, we went past Vsevolozhsk -- one of the regions we're looking at for buying a house -- and determined that the commute from there in the mornings would be no less than 30 minutes one way. A possible serious minus, though at least we know now.
Then going down Kievskoye shosse, we on the spur of the moment decided to pass Pushkin and go take a look at the city which forms more or less the southern extent of our region-under-consideration, Gatchina (24km south of Pushkin). The quality of the road certainly gets worse as you get further from Petersburg. But Gatchina is a city at least as big as Pushkin (A thinks bigger, but it's hard to say, since none of our maps show it in any detail) and the seat of one of the, let's say, 'counties' in the Leningradskaya oblast. Houses are notably cheaper there than in Pushkin; the commute to Pushkin would be reliably shorter than from Vsevolozhsk, but Gatchina feels far away from the city. And we didn't see any supermarkets, though we did see some other larger stores whose presence strongly implies that such supermarkets are to be found somewhere in town. Again, pluses and minuses..
Then, rather than taking the shosse back home (I'd like to say intentionally, but I took a series of wrong turns getting out of Gatchina and ended up -- luckily -- on the alternate return road), we took a major backroad through several neighborhoods/villages ending up in Pavlovsk, which is the southern half of the Pushkin/Pavlovsk suburban area. With the fog and cloud, it was tough to say for sure, but I think we saw in the neighborhoods on the way back in several spots that will bear closer inspection. Particularly appealing to me (in addition to the fact that the commute time from some of the places might end up being not much more than I see right now) was the fact that the route takes you through a countryside fo rolling hills. As flat as it is here compared to the Pac NW, that little bit makes a huge difference. The down side is the likelihood that we would have to go through the whole paperwork-obtaining process and that some utilities might not be easily available in some of the places. But it is good to start looking.
so where did I leave off?...
Ah yes. Saturday we wrapped up fairly simply (it's still pretty wet out most all the time). A got to weep at the sight of our van so covered with road crud that the rear license plate is almost invisible. It will get worse before summer; I begin to understand why there are so many carwashes in Russia...
Sunday we started out heading north to find a fabric store in the city center about which we had been told the day before. It turned out to be on the northern part of town, near the Finland train station. From there, we went north through what seems to be a massively-under-development part of Petersburg (at one point there were tower cranes on every block on both sides of the street for better than 2 miles). Money, money, and more money... We took the Vyborg shosse to the northern part of the ring road, then that back around towards Pushkin. In the process, we went past Vsevolozhsk -- one of the regions we're looking at for buying a house -- and determined that the commute from there in the mornings would be no less than 30 minutes one way. A possible serious minus, though at least we know now.
Then going down Kievskoye shosse, we on the spur of the moment decided to pass Pushkin and go take a look at the city which forms more or less the southern extent of our region-under-consideration, Gatchina (24km south of Pushkin). The quality of the road certainly gets worse as you get further from Petersburg. But Gatchina is a city at least as big as Pushkin (A thinks bigger, but it's hard to say, since none of our maps show it in any detail) and the seat of one of the, let's say, 'counties' in the Leningradskaya oblast. Houses are notably cheaper there than in Pushkin; the commute to Pushkin would be reliably shorter than from Vsevolozhsk, but Gatchina feels far away from the city. And we didn't see any supermarkets, though we did see some other larger stores whose presence strongly implies that such supermarkets are to be found somewhere in town. Again, pluses and minuses..
Then, rather than taking the shosse back home (I'd like to say intentionally, but I took a series of wrong turns getting out of Gatchina and ended up -- luckily -- on the alternate return road), we took a major backroad through several neighborhoods/villages ending up in Pavlovsk, which is the southern half of the Pushkin/Pavlovsk suburban area. With the fog and cloud, it was tough to say for sure, but I think we saw in the neighborhoods on the way back in several spots that will bear closer inspection. Particularly appealing to me (in addition to the fact that the commute time from some of the places might end up being not much more than I see right now) was the fact that the route takes you through a countryside fo rolling hills. As flat as it is here compared to the Pac NW, that little bit makes a huge difference. The down side is the likelihood that we would have to go through the whole paperwork-obtaining process and that some utilities might not be easily available in some of the places. But it is good to start looking.
Moving along
10/23 16:34, Pushkin time
Another weekend come and gone.
Friday after work I spent in the very illuminating pursuit of trying to find a voltage transformer or a 0.25-amp tube fuse for the one i blew up in the only such transformer we brought with us (temporarily darkening the Nintendo [sob]...). From store to store I roamed through Pushkin, right on the heels of their closing times. The first store I hit at 6:41; closing time 6:40. The next at 6:53; closing time of 6:50. The next at 7:02; closing time 7 on the dot. The next, at 7:04; closing time listed as 7:05, but the staff was not about to take the chances of working late and had already locked the doors. And so on. The end result? Not a damn thing. And a cold dinner by the time I made it home.
So Saturday we went into the city a ways to check the several shops around there. Again, to no luck. Not even the big tourist hotel sold what we needed. So I elected to take the Russian route, and stuffed a bolt into the fuse spot (where do I remember seeing that before?..) and after the coating popped off at the very first plug-in, the transformer is back in business! Along the way, we picked up a few posters with parts of the body and weather words on them, along with one of those very busy cartoony maps (each cartoon representing some sort of important event or fact or animal) of Russia. No soviet stuff on it, but there is a neat little picture of a grinning Uncle Sam-type waving a fistful of cash at a sad-faced, respectably-dressed Russian holding a deed. The caption? "America buys Alaska from us"...
More tomorrow. The day just flew by.
Another weekend come and gone.
Friday after work I spent in the very illuminating pursuit of trying to find a voltage transformer or a 0.25-amp tube fuse for the one i blew up in the only such transformer we brought with us (temporarily darkening the Nintendo [sob]...). From store to store I roamed through Pushkin, right on the heels of their closing times. The first store I hit at 6:41; closing time 6:40. The next at 6:53; closing time of 6:50. The next at 7:02; closing time 7 on the dot. The next, at 7:04; closing time listed as 7:05, but the staff was not about to take the chances of working late and had already locked the doors. And so on. The end result? Not a damn thing. And a cold dinner by the time I made it home.
So Saturday we went into the city a ways to check the several shops around there. Again, to no luck. Not even the big tourist hotel sold what we needed. So I elected to take the Russian route, and stuffed a bolt into the fuse spot (where do I remember seeing that before?..) and after the coating popped off at the very first plug-in, the transformer is back in business! Along the way, we picked up a few posters with parts of the body and weather words on them, along with one of those very busy cartoony maps (each cartoon representing some sort of important event or fact or animal) of Russia. No soviet stuff on it, but there is a neat little picture of a grinning Uncle Sam-type waving a fistful of cash at a sad-faced, respectably-dressed Russian holding a deed. The caption? "America buys Alaska from us"...
More tomorrow. The day just flew by.
октября 19, 2006
10/19 16:00, Pushkin time
Warmed up a little on Wednesday, but today is another chiller. The car (as well as the fields and signs and fences and whatnot) had frost this morning that didn't melt off until mid-day. Z has moved into his fuzzy-lined boots, and for both kids, layering needs no reminder. Both boys are chomping at the bits for snow to make an appearance; when Z complains on the phone that he doesn't like the cold, the other party should rest assured that his actions run opposite that claim.
Yesterday, A and I were greeted by Z's teacher with the news that he had kicked another kid and bloodied his nose. Panick (and fury) lessened somewhat when we learned that the other kid was napping in a bed neighboring Z's, and was, rather than napping, leaning out to mess with Z's feet. So he got whopped. Still, Z wasin the middle of getting a very angry talking-to from the both of us, when the teacher spoke up that this sort of thing happens and not to worry too much. The fact that the dad of one of his schoolmates was there and shared the teacher's opinion -- including that Z would be the recipient too, one of these days -- soothed somewhat. Though we weren't about to let Z pick up on that, even if it was somewhat accidental. Further comforting came from К today when she shared that her daughter, who goes to the same preschool, right in between Z and G's ages, smacked and got smacked back with a toy, blacking the other kid's eye. Again, it's not like they allow or condone those kind of things happening (in fact, they probably aren't as frequent as I'm sure my focus makes them appear), but they do recognize that such incidents are a part of a normal childhood, and try to draw lessons for the kids from them, rather than getting angry.
A has decided to end patronizing the friend-of-И В's-wife for language lessons, as she is fairly far away and not actually a teacher (meaning she's not the best at helping along a student who is having difficulty). Fortunately, right here in Pushkin [somewhere] is a language academy that offers lessons for foreigners trying to learn Russian. So that's what we're movig to next.
And work? Work is work. My side-project-of-the-moment is trying to figure out how to con a US/European satellite broadband internet provider into setting up an account for someone in Russia (which is closed for several reasons, not the least of which is the legal monopoly given to the 'preferred' providers). As they say here -- and I've ended up at quite a politically-conscious business -- 'given two otherwise basically equal options, we'll always take the one that screws the government'. Heh heh.
Warmed up a little on Wednesday, but today is another chiller. The car (as well as the fields and signs and fences and whatnot) had frost this morning that didn't melt off until mid-day. Z has moved into his fuzzy-lined boots, and for both kids, layering needs no reminder. Both boys are chomping at the bits for snow to make an appearance; when Z complains on the phone that he doesn't like the cold, the other party should rest assured that his actions run opposite that claim.
Yesterday, A and I were greeted by Z's teacher with the news that he had kicked another kid and bloodied his nose. Panick (and fury) lessened somewhat when we learned that the other kid was napping in a bed neighboring Z's, and was, rather than napping, leaning out to mess with Z's feet. So he got whopped. Still, Z wasin the middle of getting a very angry talking-to from the both of us, when the teacher spoke up that this sort of thing happens and not to worry too much. The fact that the dad of one of his schoolmates was there and shared the teacher's opinion -- including that Z would be the recipient too, one of these days -- soothed somewhat. Though we weren't about to let Z pick up on that, even if it was somewhat accidental. Further comforting came from К today when she shared that her daughter, who goes to the same preschool, right in between Z and G's ages, smacked and got smacked back with a toy, blacking the other kid's eye. Again, it's not like they allow or condone those kind of things happening (in fact, they probably aren't as frequent as I'm sure my focus makes them appear), but they do recognize that such incidents are a part of a normal childhood, and try to draw lessons for the kids from them, rather than getting angry.
A has decided to end patronizing the friend-of-И В's-wife for language lessons, as she is fairly far away and not actually a teacher (meaning she's not the best at helping along a student who is having difficulty). Fortunately, right here in Pushkin [somewhere] is a language academy that offers lessons for foreigners trying to learn Russian. So that's what we're movig to next.
And work? Work is work. My side-project-of-the-moment is trying to figure out how to con a US/European satellite broadband internet provider into setting up an account for someone in Russia (which is closed for several reasons, not the least of which is the legal monopoly given to the 'preferred' providers). As they say here -- and I've ended up at quite a politically-conscious business -- 'given two otherwise basically equal options, we'll always take the one that screws the government'. Heh heh.
октября 17, 2006
Slipping
10/17 12:49, Pushkin time
So it's been almost a week. I'm getting busier and busier, and the postings are getting increasingly less frequent. sigh.
On the other hand, A has managed to start getting stuff up on our website (www.ourlastname.org) so we won't be fully cut off...
Having the both cars has been nice. We spent Saturday getting an alarm system installed in our caravan, and doing a bit of wandering in the vicinity of the installers' shop on Prospekt Kosmonavtov (Spaceman Street -- what a name...). The rain is continuing, as the cold continues to loom. Sunday was a pretty much do-nothing day, though Z and I did go try (unsuccessfully) to pay our internet service bill. Bill paying around here can be done for most everything at a Sberbank (the federally-run bank) branch, for those willing to wait in long, slow-moving lines and to have a payment be actually credited several days after it is made. The alternative, for most items, is to use the automated equipment (either ATMs, or ATM-like machines; there are both types) that is scattered around everywhere. Of course, only some equipment works for only some types of bills from only some providers. Still, Z and I hunted down the ATM for PromStroiBank not terribly far from his school. Two times I followed the directions for paying out ISP all the way to the end; both times to receive a ticket telling me that something wasn't working out either with the machine or with what I was trying to do. So, to hell with it. A ended up experiencing for herself the 'Sberbank' option on Monday. And it is just as bad as advertised.
Monday morning it was cold. For the first time this season, heaters began to get plugged in, resulting in a series of three back-to-back blackouts in the block on which the office sits. Before two hours had passed, the situation was resolved; just another thing that happens every year here, and that everyone is more or less used to as a part of life. It stayed barely above freezing all day, but not by much; at the most, it got up to 5C (41F) for a half-hour maybe around four in the afternoon. And by five, it was already starting to get dusk-looking. As advertised, in the middle of October, I looked at teh sky one day and thought, 'man, it's dark'. And, smilingly, everyone here tells me to just wait another month or so, when it's full black by four.
Last night, after the cold day, A and I decided to bite the bullet and went out to get proper cold-weather gear for the kids. Coats they already had, but G was severely lacking for snow pants, and both he and Z needed better hats and non-snow gloves. Now G, getting dressed in the morning, wears 'underpants and stretchy pants and overpants and undershirt and sweatshirt and socks and boots and gloves and coat and hat'. This morning, on top of it all, he had his backpack with swimming gear. Like a little polar explorer... I'll get a picture up shortly.
So it's been almost a week. I'm getting busier and busier, and the postings are getting increasingly less frequent. sigh.
On the other hand, A has managed to start getting stuff up on our website (www.ourlastname.org) so we won't be fully cut off...
Having the both cars has been nice. We spent Saturday getting an alarm system installed in our caravan, and doing a bit of wandering in the vicinity of the installers' shop on Prospekt Kosmonavtov (Spaceman Street -- what a name...). The rain is continuing, as the cold continues to loom. Sunday was a pretty much do-nothing day, though Z and I did go try (unsuccessfully) to pay our internet service bill. Bill paying around here can be done for most everything at a Sberbank (the federally-run bank) branch, for those willing to wait in long, slow-moving lines and to have a payment be actually credited several days after it is made. The alternative, for most items, is to use the automated equipment (either ATMs, or ATM-like machines; there are both types) that is scattered around everywhere. Of course, only some equipment works for only some types of bills from only some providers. Still, Z and I hunted down the ATM for PromStroiBank not terribly far from his school. Two times I followed the directions for paying out ISP all the way to the end; both times to receive a ticket telling me that something wasn't working out either with the machine or with what I was trying to do. So, to hell with it. A ended up experiencing for herself the 'Sberbank' option on Monday. And it is just as bad as advertised.
Monday morning it was cold. For the first time this season, heaters began to get plugged in, resulting in a series of three back-to-back blackouts in the block on which the office sits. Before two hours had passed, the situation was resolved; just another thing that happens every year here, and that everyone is more or less used to as a part of life. It stayed barely above freezing all day, but not by much; at the most, it got up to 5C (41F) for a half-hour maybe around four in the afternoon. And by five, it was already starting to get dusk-looking. As advertised, in the middle of October, I looked at teh sky one day and thought, 'man, it's dark'. And, smilingly, everyone here tells me to just wait another month or so, when it's full black by four.
Last night, after the cold day, A and I decided to bite the bullet and went out to get proper cold-weather gear for the kids. Coats they already had, but G was severely lacking for snow pants, and both he and Z needed better hats and non-snow gloves. Now G, getting dressed in the morning, wears 'underpants and stretchy pants and overpants and undershirt and sweatshirt and socks and boots and gloves and coat and hat'. This morning, on top of it all, he had his backpack with swimming gear. Like a little polar explorer... I'll get a picture up shortly.
октября 11, 2006
Success!
10/11 21:26, Pushkin time
Wednesday night already.
I really don't remember what we did on Monday (this infrequent posting is resulting in serious loss of detail...). I do remember one item from the afternoon. One of the main sales yard guys ("Sam Sammitch" as they call him for short -- it cracks me up) called me to tell me that the rental car was missing a bolt from the front driver side wheel. Wheels here bolt onto the axle, rather than being held onto studs by nuts, and on that particular wheel it seems we had been driving all weekend on only three bolts. Very dangerous. And an unexpected oversight on the part of the rental company. But Sam Sammitch got me fixed up with a spare bolt out of a mechanic's toolbox, and away we go.
Yesterday, though, we got to the office to find that the cars still hadn't arrived, and that the whole customs deal still wasn't figured out yet. So, driving A back home that morning, I zigged when I should have zagged and ran smack through a serious pothole. The rental drove funny the rest of the way back, and when we got to the apartment, I hopped out to find that that same passenger-side front tire was almost flat, and that the rim had a major kink in it from the impact-with-asphalt. So, I drove it back and asked Sam Sammitch (a very good guy to go to for questions in general) for advice. Here, they simply repair that kind of thing. I went to a nearby tire mounting shop -- there are literally dozens of them along any particular couple-mile stretch of any major street in Russia -- and made my situation known. The attendant told me that he lacked the equipment to do a proper job, but offered to wham the rim back into some sort of nearby shape with a hammer and fill my tire with enough air to get me to the better-equipped shop a bit further down the way. At this other shop, the mechanic took a quick look, pulled the wheel off the car, the tire off the wheel, stuck it on a gizmo to put it back to round, tire back on, on another gizmo to balance, and back on the car in a matter of under ten minutes. For 200r ($6.50?). And during, we got to have a nice talk about the kind of crap you can get at rental shops, about snow tires, and about driving in particular. And back to work before I was even really missed. A bit more dirt on the rim, and you'd never know it had been pac-man shaped.
Then in the afternoon, the cars were unloaded and delivered to the office. We had to leave them overnight as they lacked any kind of legality.
Today, though, was the culmination. A and I went back with О К to the customs office, driving our own cars. After stashing them in the inspection yard, we went back to waiting. And waiting. And waiting. And waiting. By a quarter to four (we had arrived before ten) we were -- finally -- informed that the papers would be ready for us at five thirty to pick up. О К had a bit more to take care of, but A and I decided to go seek out some grub. Walking a short way down the road on which the customs office was located, I realized we were in a non-food-serving neighborhood. Mechanics and auto parts stores they had; cafes and restauruants, not so much. So I stopped a guy walkign from the other direction to ask how to get to a food area, only to have him tell us that he was heading towards one right at that moment, and that he would be happy to take us on the shortcut through the bog (actually, he called it a park; having seen it in person, I assert that my word is more appropriate; A would agree) that was situated as a sort of barrier between the city proper and whatever suburb we were in. Okay, so down a trail through the bog, to pop out right at an intersection of major roads -- as promised, near to several eateries. Food was cheap and good -- A got curry; had I paid attention to the menu, so would I -- and once finished we retraced through the bog (a good ten-minute walk), only a short further wait stood between us and the receipt (finally) of the paperwork allowing us to have our cars in Russia.
As an interesting aside, we're not getting the Russian license plates since we're bringing the cars in as 'temporary admits'.
As a further interesting aside, this is a good thing in at least one respect. On the way into the city this morning, going past a DPS pull-over point, both A and I got a serious eyeballing, but the road cops decided ultimately to simply let us pass. О К explained -- very plausibly -- that the cops, seeing our foreign plates, would have the very reasonable expectation that we would either not speak Russian, or at least would not understand the 'expected' behavior for a pulled-over motorist. That being the case, were they to pull us over for a shake-down, they could expect to expend ten times as long to get their pay out of us, accounting for the tiem to get across the point of what they were trying to do. In that time, of course, they could have collected ten times from ten different Russian motorists. 100 rubles versus 1000 rubles makes the choice pretty obvious. Heh heh heh. He even recommended that, if we do get pulled over in these cars, we go into the 'I'm afraid I don't speak very much Russian' routine, in the expectation that the cop will decide to cut his losses quickly and just wave us on. Double heh heh heh..
Wednesday night already.
I really don't remember what we did on Monday (this infrequent posting is resulting in serious loss of detail...). I do remember one item from the afternoon. One of the main sales yard guys ("Sam Sammitch" as they call him for short -- it cracks me up) called me to tell me that the rental car was missing a bolt from the front driver side wheel. Wheels here bolt onto the axle, rather than being held onto studs by nuts, and on that particular wheel it seems we had been driving all weekend on only three bolts. Very dangerous. And an unexpected oversight on the part of the rental company. But Sam Sammitch got me fixed up with a spare bolt out of a mechanic's toolbox, and away we go.
Yesterday, though, we got to the office to find that the cars still hadn't arrived, and that the whole customs deal still wasn't figured out yet. So, driving A back home that morning, I zigged when I should have zagged and ran smack through a serious pothole. The rental drove funny the rest of the way back, and when we got to the apartment, I hopped out to find that that same passenger-side front tire was almost flat, and that the rim had a major kink in it from the impact-with-asphalt. So, I drove it back and asked Sam Sammitch (a very good guy to go to for questions in general) for advice. Here, they simply repair that kind of thing. I went to a nearby tire mounting shop -- there are literally dozens of them along any particular couple-mile stretch of any major street in Russia -- and made my situation known. The attendant told me that he lacked the equipment to do a proper job, but offered to wham the rim back into some sort of nearby shape with a hammer and fill my tire with enough air to get me to the better-equipped shop a bit further down the way. At this other shop, the mechanic took a quick look, pulled the wheel off the car, the tire off the wheel, stuck it on a gizmo to put it back to round, tire back on, on another gizmo to balance, and back on the car in a matter of under ten minutes. For 200r ($6.50?). And during, we got to have a nice talk about the kind of crap you can get at rental shops, about snow tires, and about driving in particular. And back to work before I was even really missed. A bit more dirt on the rim, and you'd never know it had been pac-man shaped.
Then in the afternoon, the cars were unloaded and delivered to the office. We had to leave them overnight as they lacked any kind of legality.
Today, though, was the culmination. A and I went back with О К to the customs office, driving our own cars. After stashing them in the inspection yard, we went back to waiting. And waiting. And waiting. And waiting. By a quarter to four (we had arrived before ten) we were -- finally -- informed that the papers would be ready for us at five thirty to pick up. О К had a bit more to take care of, but A and I decided to go seek out some grub. Walking a short way down the road on which the customs office was located, I realized we were in a non-food-serving neighborhood. Mechanics and auto parts stores they had; cafes and restauruants, not so much. So I stopped a guy walkign from the other direction to ask how to get to a food area, only to have him tell us that he was heading towards one right at that moment, and that he would be happy to take us on the shortcut through the bog (actually, he called it a park; having seen it in person, I assert that my word is more appropriate; A would agree) that was situated as a sort of barrier between the city proper and whatever suburb we were in. Okay, so down a trail through the bog, to pop out right at an intersection of major roads -- as promised, near to several eateries. Food was cheap and good -- A got curry; had I paid attention to the menu, so would I -- and once finished we retraced through the bog (a good ten-minute walk), only a short further wait stood between us and the receipt (finally) of the paperwork allowing us to have our cars in Russia.
As an interesting aside, we're not getting the Russian license plates since we're bringing the cars in as 'temporary admits'.
As a further interesting aside, this is a good thing in at least one respect. On the way into the city this morning, going past a DPS pull-over point, both A and I got a serious eyeballing, but the road cops decided ultimately to simply let us pass. О К explained -- very plausibly -- that the cops, seeing our foreign plates, would have the very reasonable expectation that we would either not speak Russian, or at least would not understand the 'expected' behavior for a pulled-over motorist. That being the case, were they to pull us over for a shake-down, they could expect to expend ten times as long to get their pay out of us, accounting for the tiem to get across the point of what they were trying to do. In that time, of course, they could have collected ten times from ten different Russian motorists. 100 rubles versus 1000 rubles makes the choice pretty obvious. Heh heh heh. He even recommended that, if we do get pulled over in these cars, we go into the 'I'm afraid I don't speak very much Russian' routine, in the expectation that the cop will decide to cut his losses quickly and just wave us on. Double heh heh heh..
октября 08, 2006
Alrighty Then
10/8 14:25, Pushkin time
I said I might not get back to fleshing out the details until today...
So, we've gone through the trailer of stuff (at least, started to) and gotten our beds and some furniture up into our place and set up. No more sitting on the floor or sleeping on the 50% metal-filled matress!
Anyway, to the stories.
On Thursday morning, A dropped me off at work, we grabbed a couple of quick boxes, and off she went to run some errands. No more than five minutes after she left, my phone rang with a hysterical A on the other end of the line. After a couple of incoherent screaming attempts at communicating, she took a bit of a breath and got herself pulled together enough to tell me that she had just been in an accident ("hit someone" was, I believe, the term she used) right down the street. Of course, I jumped up and headed for the door, pausing briefly to collect Е to both drive and to translate would that prove necessary. We got, within six minutes of my phone having rang, to the intersection of the sub-street leading to my work with the main street going into Pushkin.The intersection is a very dangerous one under any circumstances, as the substreet runs parallel the main one, and the main one basically takes a sharp right turn crossing the substreet -- all under the concealment of significant greenery. Apparently, the rain and the fog and the dark had conspired to make the guy coming around the bend on the main road (without headlights, as A tells it -- and I am inclined to believe) invisible to A until she ran -- from a stop -- straight into the side of his car. Both cars were still driveable, but we had (fortunately) just recently been told that one of the cardinal rules of road accidents in Russia is do not move anything until the cops have had a chance to make out their reports. So here we pull up, A still in shaking fits, the apparent driver of the other car fairly irate as well, the two sitting in this intersection, and the cops just starting to arrive with questions. It turned out to be a very good thing I had asked Е to come along.
There was a fair amount of filling-out-of-paperwork; the cops took measurements and signed statements (E wrote it out, A signed it) along with, several times, the various documents such as passports, car registrations, driver's licences, and so forth. At one point, they gave A what appeared to be a ticket, and then shortly after, a 'receipt' for her license -- which E confirmed, they were not going to be giving back to her. Not as bad as it sounds, though; there had apparently been a woman in the other car who had, according to the guy in the car, hurt her arm in the accident and left to get medical help. So until they could assess the whole situation, they wanted to make sure that A stayed in town. Fair enough, we can get the license back on Tuesday after paying an 'administrative' fee of 450r (call it $18), but still. Getting your license taken away in a foreign country... Whoa.
And the capper of the whole thing? As we were finishing up signing each other's insurance forms, A pulled me aside to tell me that the guy who was filling out the forms as 'Driver of car B' had been the passenger, and that a woman had been driving. Too late to make any difference by that point, but it makes us pretty confident that her reason for leaving was less 'medical' related and more 'afraid-of-getting-caught-by-the-cops' related. A has by this point chalked it all up to 'the other lady was driving drunk and that's why she fled' -- which has calmed her nerves significantly. But we are all driving much more cautiously now.
Driving, I said? Oh yes. Thursday we took the front-end-smashed rental car into Petersburg and swapped it for a new one. Easy as that. It absolutely boggles the mind. And since our insurance wasn't the one paying for the accident, our rates next year (since this year is already paid for) won't be affected at all. We'll even still be getting those discounts, assuming no more 'incidents'.
Then Friday.
We left the office at before 10AM with О К, the guy who does customs clearance for this company, to go get our cars settled. Things looked bright for perhaps the first three minutes of the process, until the most unexpected stroke of bad luck hit us. The customs girls, having been presented with titles, proof of insurance, drivers licences, passports, and the like, told us they would also need the vehicle registration forms. You know, the ones that you leave in the glovebox of your car. The cars that are still inside the trailer. The trailer that is still inside the customs lockup. Huh.
So I jumped in and started to explain to them that the Oregon title contains all of the information on the registrations, and is issued by the same people for the same purposes. The customs girls seemed to me to be on the verge of buying it when a voice speaks up right next to me -- a clearly American voice speaking badly in Russia -- and announces that "Those are titles. Registration in Oregon is a completely different paper. Here, see?". And the speaker hands the customs girls an Oregon title and registration for a brand-new BMW. Then, "I'm with the US Consulate, I know these things. Could we please process my son's new car quickly?"...
I even tried, while this guy was pushing the knife into our back, to aside in English that we were doing fine and that we really didn't need help, and that this was working against us, but he just bulled on. I was in absolute shock. To be so royally screwed by someone who had absolutely nothing to gain in doing so. Just an asshole. A and I learned somewhat later that this guy is the owner of Eyrie vineyards in McMinnville. I hope that a boycott would be not too much to ask?
So, after that, the cutoms folks changed completely the agreement that we could just come in, sign, and be done. Now they are insisting to actually see the cars. Which shouldn't be such a big deal, except:
- The cars are in a trailer parked in storage under a different customs organization (there are four in this area; the trailer is in the 'international sea freight' lot, our cars need approval from the 'City of Petersburg' organization, and the two don't have anything to do with each other_
- A and I cannot get a temporary permission to bring the cars to the proper customs lot, as we are not citizens.
- И Ю, who is the legal owner of the trailer, cannot get permission to bring either it entirely, or the cars inside separately, as they are not his cars
- the inspectors from Petersburg customs do not have the authority to inspect on the sea freight customs lot
- the sea freight customs inspectors do not have the authority to file inspections for the Petersburg city customs.
We spent the entire day Friday finding this out, one painfully slow drip at a time. There are several possible solutions still available for the trying, and no one in any of the bureaucratic offices is against us in principle. It truly seems to have come down to an issue of there not being a form appropriate for our specific situation. I begin to understand why О К is able to afford such a nice car. Someone who can play these games well would be nearly priceless.
And that catches us up to today. It's raining out, but hasn't turned cold yet. The apartment echoes a lot less with furniture in it. We ran into one of Z's schoolmates in the store; she saw him first, and yelled "Zakar!" (he's a bit flummoxed why they've chosen to shorten his name so, but he knows it means him) and the two of them made a very little kid-small-talk. And tomorrow we just may blow an entire second day wading through the customs bureaucracy. As О К said, when it started to sprinkle on our way back to Pushkin Friday afternoon, 'the sky is crying at how things are progressing'. But it is adversity that makes for the best stories.
I said I might not get back to fleshing out the details until today...
So, we've gone through the trailer of stuff (at least, started to) and gotten our beds and some furniture up into our place and set up. No more sitting on the floor or sleeping on the 50% metal-filled matress!
Anyway, to the stories.
On Thursday morning, A dropped me off at work, we grabbed a couple of quick boxes, and off she went to run some errands. No more than five minutes after she left, my phone rang with a hysterical A on the other end of the line. After a couple of incoherent screaming attempts at communicating, she took a bit of a breath and got herself pulled together enough to tell me that she had just been in an accident ("hit someone" was, I believe, the term she used) right down the street. Of course, I jumped up and headed for the door, pausing briefly to collect Е to both drive and to translate would that prove necessary. We got, within six minutes of my phone having rang, to the intersection of the sub-street leading to my work with the main street going into Pushkin.The intersection is a very dangerous one under any circumstances, as the substreet runs parallel the main one, and the main one basically takes a sharp right turn crossing the substreet -- all under the concealment of significant greenery. Apparently, the rain and the fog and the dark had conspired to make the guy coming around the bend on the main road (without headlights, as A tells it -- and I am inclined to believe) invisible to A until she ran -- from a stop -- straight into the side of his car. Both cars were still driveable, but we had (fortunately) just recently been told that one of the cardinal rules of road accidents in Russia is do not move anything until the cops have had a chance to make out their reports. So here we pull up, A still in shaking fits, the apparent driver of the other car fairly irate as well, the two sitting in this intersection, and the cops just starting to arrive with questions. It turned out to be a very good thing I had asked Е to come along.
There was a fair amount of filling-out-of-paperwork; the cops took measurements and signed statements (E wrote it out, A signed it) along with, several times, the various documents such as passports, car registrations, driver's licences, and so forth. At one point, they gave A what appeared to be a ticket, and then shortly after, a 'receipt' for her license -- which E confirmed, they were not going to be giving back to her. Not as bad as it sounds, though; there had apparently been a woman in the other car who had, according to the guy in the car, hurt her arm in the accident and left to get medical help. So until they could assess the whole situation, they wanted to make sure that A stayed in town. Fair enough, we can get the license back on Tuesday after paying an 'administrative' fee of 450r (call it $18), but still. Getting your license taken away in a foreign country... Whoa.
And the capper of the whole thing? As we were finishing up signing each other's insurance forms, A pulled me aside to tell me that the guy who was filling out the forms as 'Driver of car B' had been the passenger, and that a woman had been driving. Too late to make any difference by that point, but it makes us pretty confident that her reason for leaving was less 'medical' related and more 'afraid-of-getting-caught-by-the-cops' related. A has by this point chalked it all up to 'the other lady was driving drunk and that's why she fled' -- which has calmed her nerves significantly. But we are all driving much more cautiously now.
Driving, I said? Oh yes. Thursday we took the front-end-smashed rental car into Petersburg and swapped it for a new one. Easy as that. It absolutely boggles the mind. And since our insurance wasn't the one paying for the accident, our rates next year (since this year is already paid for) won't be affected at all. We'll even still be getting those discounts, assuming no more 'incidents'.
Then Friday.
We left the office at before 10AM with О К, the guy who does customs clearance for this company, to go get our cars settled. Things looked bright for perhaps the first three minutes of the process, until the most unexpected stroke of bad luck hit us. The customs girls, having been presented with titles, proof of insurance, drivers licences, passports, and the like, told us they would also need the vehicle registration forms. You know, the ones that you leave in the glovebox of your car. The cars that are still inside the trailer. The trailer that is still inside the customs lockup. Huh.
So I jumped in and started to explain to them that the Oregon title contains all of the information on the registrations, and is issued by the same people for the same purposes. The customs girls seemed to me to be on the verge of buying it when a voice speaks up right next to me -- a clearly American voice speaking badly in Russia -- and announces that "Those are titles. Registration in Oregon is a completely different paper. Here, see?". And the speaker hands the customs girls an Oregon title and registration for a brand-new BMW. Then, "I'm with the US Consulate, I know these things. Could we please process my son's new car quickly?"...
I even tried, while this guy was pushing the knife into our back, to aside in English that we were doing fine and that we really didn't need help, and that this was working against us, but he just bulled on. I was in absolute shock. To be so royally screwed by someone who had absolutely nothing to gain in doing so. Just an asshole. A and I learned somewhat later that this guy is the owner of Eyrie vineyards in McMinnville. I hope that a boycott would be not too much to ask?
So, after that, the cutoms folks changed completely the agreement that we could just come in, sign, and be done. Now they are insisting to actually see the cars. Which shouldn't be such a big deal, except:
- The cars are in a trailer parked in storage under a different customs organization (there are four in this area; the trailer is in the 'international sea freight' lot, our cars need approval from the 'City of Petersburg' organization, and the two don't have anything to do with each other_
- A and I cannot get a temporary permission to bring the cars to the proper customs lot, as we are not citizens.
- И Ю, who is the legal owner of the trailer, cannot get permission to bring either it entirely, or the cars inside separately, as they are not his cars
- the inspectors from Petersburg customs do not have the authority to inspect on the sea freight customs lot
- the sea freight customs inspectors do not have the authority to file inspections for the Petersburg city customs.
We spent the entire day Friday finding this out, one painfully slow drip at a time. There are several possible solutions still available for the trying, and no one in any of the bureaucratic offices is against us in principle. It truly seems to have come down to an issue of there not being a form appropriate for our specific situation. I begin to understand why О К is able to afford such a nice car. Someone who can play these games well would be nearly priceless.
And that catches us up to today. It's raining out, but hasn't turned cold yet. The apartment echoes a lot less with furniture in it. We ran into one of Z's schoolmates in the store; she saw him first, and yelled "Zakar!" (he's a bit flummoxed why they've chosen to shorten his name so, but he knows it means him) and the two of them made a very little kid-small-talk. And tomorrow we just may blow an entire second day wading through the customs bureaucracy. As О К said, when it started to sprinkle on our way back to Pushkin Friday afternoon, 'the sky is crying at how things are progressing'. But it is adversity that makes for the best stories.
октября 06, 2006
Teaser
10/6 22:09, Pushkin time
So wow. Man, oh man did a lot go down these last couple days. And it's really too late to get it all down.
Our trailer full of stuff got out of customs;
A got in a car wreck in the rental (no injuries);
G started eating at school;
We waited and waited and waited and waited in lines for the whim of various bureaucrats;
Our cars are in town, but still unaccessible to us.
And the details?... Well, we've got a lot of work tomorrow. They just may have to wait until Sunday. hee hee..
So wow. Man, oh man did a lot go down these last couple days. And it's really too late to get it all down.
Our trailer full of stuff got out of customs;
A got in a car wreck in the rental (no injuries);
G started eating at school;
We waited and waited and waited and waited in lines for the whim of various bureaucrats;
Our cars are in town, but still unaccessible to us.
And the details?... Well, we've got a lot of work tomorrow. They just may have to wait until Sunday. hee hee..
октября 04, 2006
Good News, and Not-So-Good
10/4 11:44, Pushkin time
Since the last posting, quite a bit has gone on.
First, on Tuesday morning, preparatory to arranging for a wire transfer of part of my pay on Thursday direct and in dollars to our bank in the US, we did a quick online check of our accounts. To discover that one of them -- fortunately not one critical to our continued supply of necessities-of-life -- has been appropriated by someone else who passed off several fraudulent checks (the credit union even allows you to see scanned copies of the cleared checks online), made several bogus deposits, used the account number to make online purchases, and after a run of maybe a week, succeeded in getting the account closed with an end balance of minus several thousand dollars.
Joy.
This has so far turned out to be not so much of a setback, owing in large part I believe to the very few bank-reliant transactions that go on in Russia. Pay is in cash, and everyone uses cash for almost everything, so we have very, very few apologies to make. Still, doing this kind of thing from the other side of the globe is a bit pain-in-the-ass-ful; for example, the police wanted to talk to us directly to file their report, but refused to initiate an international long-distance call. And if we want to call, we will get to sit on hold until they're ready to talk to us; however long that takes. And so forth.
Then, yesterday during the day, К mentioned that Z's teacher had told her that Z was fighting with the other kids. Nothing too serious as far as those things go; they broke it up right away, gave everyone a strong talking-to, and are keeping an eye on things. But still... that's very unlike Z. So I stopped at the preschool yesterday to first tell the teachers that I'm not afraid to spend time talking to them to try to understand things myself (and that they therefore don't need to worry about misunderstandings and should talk to me directly; I won't give up on understanding or get otherwise frustrated), and second to find out what this wa all about. Z's teacher was telling me that Z was simply 'very aggressive' on Monday and that he -- contrary to what he told us, of course -- seemed to be initiating things. While she was explaining, I got to see first-hand as Z yelled to another kid (in Russian, I should continue to mention) to give him a toy, please, and then when the kids didn't proceeded to chase after the kid and try to knock her down and take the toy away. We had a very serious talk at home, A, Z, and I. Much of this -- we are presuming -- is coming from Z's frustration with communication (right as he is starting to be more and more able to communicate), but he is being made to understand the importance of being a decent person and dealing with his frustration in other ways. Very interesting, were I better able to take a disinterested view of this, is the fact that beyond ensuring the safety of the kids and the ongoing attempt to change Z's behavior, everyone who has heard about this has not freaked out; rather they are fairly philosophical about the fact that kids go through these kinds of periods, and that this is more of an opportunity to teach Z how to behave acceptably in society than some kind of demonstration that he is a bad kid. As I think of it, you don't generally hear people around here saying that a kid is 'bad'; maybe that he 'misbehaved', but no kind of generalizations on his character. If this is the case, it will be interesting to see how it affects the kids to grow up in such an environment.
On a happy note, G's teacher with a big smile reported that our translation sheet ofr food types worked like a charm. Once G was told that the things on his plate were "Meet" and "Puh-Tehyee-Toze" and "Cheez" (as we wrote them out in Russian letters, more or less), he practically licked it clean. So as one kids starts to give us grief, the situation with the other starts looking up.
Today, the greatest joy for a while. Our trailer of household stuff was driven away from the port in the dead of night (to allow for a "cheaper" clearance of customs...) and was sitting in the lot at my work this morning. Opening it up, nothing at all seems to have moved, and everything is in excellent shape. We've arranged for a smaller truck to be available on Saturday to move a fair amount of its contents to our apartment. Then also, we've made major progress towards getting the cars wrapped up too. Copies of all our vital documents were taken (along with our passports and the customs forms we filled out at the airport, coming in from Poland. We're unsure whether A and I will personally need to go to the port to officially bring the cars in 'temporarily', or whether it can be done for us on our behalf -- this we get answered today. It is, nonetheless, possible that we will be in our own cars by the end of today or the middle of tomorrow. And yet another little bonus -- full coverage insurance over here cost us about US$525 for the two cars for a year. This is the standard 'new driver' rate; after a year, we get a 50% discount, and for every year that passes without an incident, a reduction of a couple percent is applied to the previous year's cost. So that's way cool.
Since the last posting, quite a bit has gone on.
First, on Tuesday morning, preparatory to arranging for a wire transfer of part of my pay on Thursday direct and in dollars to our bank in the US, we did a quick online check of our accounts. To discover that one of them -- fortunately not one critical to our continued supply of necessities-of-life -- has been appropriated by someone else who passed off several fraudulent checks (the credit union even allows you to see scanned copies of the cleared checks online), made several bogus deposits, used the account number to make online purchases, and after a run of maybe a week, succeeded in getting the account closed with an end balance of minus several thousand dollars.
Joy.
This has so far turned out to be not so much of a setback, owing in large part I believe to the very few bank-reliant transactions that go on in Russia. Pay is in cash, and everyone uses cash for almost everything, so we have very, very few apologies to make. Still, doing this kind of thing from the other side of the globe is a bit pain-in-the-ass-ful; for example, the police wanted to talk to us directly to file their report, but refused to initiate an international long-distance call. And if we want to call, we will get to sit on hold until they're ready to talk to us; however long that takes. And so forth.
Then, yesterday during the day, К mentioned that Z's teacher had told her that Z was fighting with the other kids. Nothing too serious as far as those things go; they broke it up right away, gave everyone a strong talking-to, and are keeping an eye on things. But still... that's very unlike Z. So I stopped at the preschool yesterday to first tell the teachers that I'm not afraid to spend time talking to them to try to understand things myself (and that they therefore don't need to worry about misunderstandings and should talk to me directly; I won't give up on understanding or get otherwise frustrated), and second to find out what this wa all about. Z's teacher was telling me that Z was simply 'very aggressive' on Monday and that he -- contrary to what he told us, of course -- seemed to be initiating things. While she was explaining, I got to see first-hand as Z yelled to another kid (in Russian, I should continue to mention) to give him a toy, please, and then when the kids didn't proceeded to chase after the kid and try to knock her down and take the toy away. We had a very serious talk at home, A, Z, and I. Much of this -- we are presuming -- is coming from Z's frustration with communication (right as he is starting to be more and more able to communicate), but he is being made to understand the importance of being a decent person and dealing with his frustration in other ways. Very interesting, were I better able to take a disinterested view of this, is the fact that beyond ensuring the safety of the kids and the ongoing attempt to change Z's behavior, everyone who has heard about this has not freaked out; rather they are fairly philosophical about the fact that kids go through these kinds of periods, and that this is more of an opportunity to teach Z how to behave acceptably in society than some kind of demonstration that he is a bad kid. As I think of it, you don't generally hear people around here saying that a kid is 'bad'; maybe that he 'misbehaved', but no kind of generalizations on his character. If this is the case, it will be interesting to see how it affects the kids to grow up in such an environment.
On a happy note, G's teacher with a big smile reported that our translation sheet ofr food types worked like a charm. Once G was told that the things on his plate were "Meet" and "Puh-Tehyee-Toze" and "Cheez" (as we wrote them out in Russian letters, more or less), he practically licked it clean. So as one kids starts to give us grief, the situation with the other starts looking up.
Today, the greatest joy for a while. Our trailer of household stuff was driven away from the port in the dead of night (to allow for a "cheaper" clearance of customs...) and was sitting in the lot at my work this morning. Opening it up, nothing at all seems to have moved, and everything is in excellent shape. We've arranged for a smaller truck to be available on Saturday to move a fair amount of its contents to our apartment. Then also, we've made major progress towards getting the cars wrapped up too. Copies of all our vital documents were taken (along with our passports and the customs forms we filled out at the airport, coming in from Poland. We're unsure whether A and I will personally need to go to the port to officially bring the cars in 'temporarily', or whether it can be done for us on our behalf -- this we get answered today. It is, nonetheless, possible that we will be in our own cars by the end of today or the middle of tomorrow. And yet another little bonus -- full coverage insurance over here cost us about US$525 for the two cars for a year. This is the standard 'new driver' rate; after a year, we get a 50% discount, and for every year that passes without an incident, a reduction of a couple percent is applied to the previous year's cost. So that's way cool.
октября 02, 2006
The Weekend
Saturday Morning, Z finally harassed me into taking his brother and him out for a walk -- in the wet and chill -- down a block from our apartment to get his picture next to his favorite billboard.
A pizza delivery service.. He's absolutely tickled every time we drive past one of these signs (and there are a number of them around town), and has been asking for a picture to send back to everyone since our first week here.
After breakfast, we took a drive out semi-aimlessly, toward the west. As it turned out, Петродворец ['Petrodovrets'] is very nearby, and we made it all the way to the Summer Palace there. The weather was crappy, and the site right on the Bay of Finland is really not the best place for a trip when the weather is crappy, but the ticket people were willing to let us in on the 'Russian Citizen' price after I explained that we're not tourists, but are living here for at least a couple years. I'm finding that this reasoning works realy well, if one is willing to try it; I suspect that in the city itself, it might not go over so well, but I'm sure we'll have a chance to check that out before the winter is out. We did a quick walking trip around maybe half of the grounds -- maybe less, it's a big place -- hit the highlight fountains, and back out to get lunch. You can see a couple of pictures below. For lunch, we bought 'cheeseburgers' (russian sidewalk vendor variant) for the kids. On the way out, we came upon a lady walking a camel -- two-humped, presumably Chinese version -- through the park. G got to find out the hard way that hungry camels are willing to eat cheeseburgers if one walks by; A just barely managed to jump away before the half of his lunch still-unfinished would have been snatched by the hungry critter.
Sunday we poked around town, and found a real, honest-to-goodness shopping mall (with food court and everything) in the southern part of Petersburg. Also, we've been spending effort with G and Z to get some food item words down. Unexpectedly, it is G that is having the most difficulty making the Russian sounds -- particularly at this point, the "Х", which sounds like 'kh' or the jewish 'ch' (like a clearing-your-throat noise). It's kind of a bummer, since the word for bread is хлеб and he says it 'kleb', which doens't really sound very close at all to Russians.
This morning, dropping them off at the preschool, Z's teacher was asking where he went this weekend. He didn't understand the question, so I prompted him to tell her about the palace (of course, everyone here know most of the palaces). She asked him about the fountains; he did pick up the word for fountain -- which is really, really close the the english word -- and told her that he saw the one with the лев ['lev' - lion]. Not quite conversation, but he's getting there. A is going back into town today to continue her language lessons here; I am very happy to relate that her current state of misery didn't stop her from making the effort to at one point order some food for herself at a cafe. The clerk asked a question in response, and she ended up needing bailing-out from me, but she seemed nonetheless to have been more pleased with herself for the attempt than discouraged by the awkward results. Having been through that kind of thing myself some numerous times before, I can definitely say that this represents significant progress for her, too. And you really couldn't get better people than Russian to practice language on; in almost all cases, they're perfectly willing to let you have all the time you want to try to figure things out, they don't get easily frustrated by semi-competence (or even almost-total-incompetence), and they're most usually willing to help you out if you ask. Willingness to risk failure and just try is absolutely the hardest part here (says the guy whose grammar is only slightly better than Tarzan's at this point...).
A pizza delivery service.. He's absolutely tickled every time we drive past one of these signs (and there are a number of them around town), and has been asking for a picture to send back to everyone since our first week here.
After breakfast, we took a drive out semi-aimlessly, toward the west. As it turned out, Петродворец ['Petrodovrets'] is very nearby, and we made it all the way to the Summer Palace there. The weather was crappy, and the site right on the Bay of Finland is really not the best place for a trip when the weather is crappy, but the ticket people were willing to let us in on the 'Russian Citizen' price after I explained that we're not tourists, but are living here for at least a couple years. I'm finding that this reasoning works realy well, if one is willing to try it; I suspect that in the city itself, it might not go over so well, but I'm sure we'll have a chance to check that out before the winter is out. We did a quick walking trip around maybe half of the grounds -- maybe less, it's a big place -- hit the highlight fountains, and back out to get lunch. You can see a couple of pictures below. For lunch, we bought 'cheeseburgers' (russian sidewalk vendor variant) for the kids. On the way out, we came upon a lady walking a camel -- two-humped, presumably Chinese version -- through the park. G got to find out the hard way that hungry camels are willing to eat cheeseburgers if one walks by; A just barely managed to jump away before the half of his lunch still-unfinished would have been snatched by the hungry critter.
Sunday we poked around town, and found a real, honest-to-goodness shopping mall (with food court and everything) in the southern part of Petersburg. Also, we've been spending effort with G and Z to get some food item words down. Unexpectedly, it is G that is having the most difficulty making the Russian sounds -- particularly at this point, the "Х", which sounds like 'kh' or the jewish 'ch' (like a clearing-your-throat noise). It's kind of a bummer, since the word for bread is хлеб and he says it 'kleb', which doens't really sound very close at all to Russians.
This morning, dropping them off at the preschool, Z's teacher was asking where he went this weekend. He didn't understand the question, so I prompted him to tell her about the palace (of course, everyone here know most of the palaces). She asked him about the fountains; he did pick up the word for fountain -- which is really, really close the the english word -- and told her that he saw the one with the лев ['lev' - lion]. Not quite conversation, but he's getting there. A is going back into town today to continue her language lessons here; I am very happy to relate that her current state of misery didn't stop her from making the effort to at one point order some food for herself at a cafe. The clerk asked a question in response, and she ended up needing bailing-out from me, but she seemed nonetheless to have been more pleased with herself for the attempt than discouraged by the awkward results. Having been through that kind of thing myself some numerous times before, I can definitely say that this represents significant progress for her, too. And you really couldn't get better people than Russian to practice language on; in almost all cases, they're perfectly willing to let you have all the time you want to try to figure things out, they don't get easily frustrated by semi-competence (or even almost-total-incompetence), and they're most usually willing to help you out if you ask. Willingness to risk failure and just try is absolutely the hardest part here (says the guy whose grammar is only slightly better than Tarzan's at this point...).
Driveway of the Summer Palace
East Wing Cathedral
The Central Fountain
G and the Lion
