One Sunday in the Life of Katya

This post is brought to you by God, since He’s the one that gave me such a fantabulous weekend. To a lesser extent, this post is brought to you by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose classic One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovch has nothing to do with what I’m about to write, other than the fact that my title is modeled after his. (Cool points if you recognized that ahead of time.)

I had an awesome – the Russians would say изумительный (ih-zoo-ME-til-nee) or замичательный (zuh-me-CHA-til-nee) – day. For those of you not glued to Russian weather forecasts, the past week’s weather made my presence here in the motherland official: it snowed. It wasn’t much and it didn’t stick, but there were definitely white things falling from the sky for a few hours. And then it rained and my boots (which I bought here to be my waterproof footwear, only to have the escalator chew a hole into my heel when the woman in front of me stopped suddenly at the top) became water-carrying receptacles. But hey, it’s Russia. Life goes on. Anyway, the weather had been cold, grey and stereotypically European…until Sunday. I awoke to sunshine and large blue patches in the perennially cloudy sky. Awesome-ness number one.

What with the weather being so nice, I decided to sit in my room and read. I know, right? Kind of a waste of precious sunlight. I did enjoy the relatively warm weather and brilliant sun later on, though, when I went out with friends to a cello ensemble performance. As concert buddy and I were walking from the metro station to the concert location, I saw a guy standing in the middle of the sidewalk, holding a sign that said (in Russian), “Hug me.” Ecstatic that I finally ran into the Free Hugs campaign – and in stand-offish Russia, no less – I enthusiastically gave the guy a hug. It made my day. Awesome-ness the sequel. With awesome sauce on the side.

The cello ensemble concert, located in a rather difficult-to-find palace across from Pushkin’s old stomping ground and near the Hermitage Museum, was pretty cool. There were eight or so cellists, but from the first piece they played, I could have sworn there were people playing violins and a viola. It was neat to hear musicians play the full range of the cello, especially when they were playing some of my favorite Russian composers: Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Mussorgsky…They even played a jazzy piece and a blues number that involved rhythmic snapping. Awesome-ness numero tres.

One thing that I must mention is the way Russians clap. In America, whenever an audience wants to let the performer know he’s done a good job, people will give a rousing round of applause, with whistles and wooos! sprinkled in for good measure. In Russia, when a performer does well and the audience wants him to know, they all begin clapping in rhythm, so that it sounds like one person with really big hands is clapping. This simply goes to show that white people do indeed have rhythm. It’s the collective mentality, I suppose. Honestly, though, it feels rather unsatisfying to clap slowly with everyone else. But I guess that’s just my cultural upbringing. *shrug*

On the way back from the concert, it began to rain, so concert buddy and I dashed into a pyshki place, where I had just enough change for one pyshka and one piece of Russian candy. While the sweets were pretty awesome in and of themselves, I count my flawless ordering and correct guessing of what the singular of “candy” was as the true recipient of the awesome-ness the fourth award.

The penultimate awesome-ness of my Sunday belonged to the moment when I ran into another pair of Russian deaf girls in the metro. I watched their conversation, very aware that I was the only one staring, and was able to pick up a few things about guy-behind-me’s hair they thought looked funny. (Isn’t that the definition of talking smack about someone behind his back in front of his face? Lol) Awesome-ness part five.

The crown of my fabulous day was when I saw a piece of junk car rolling down the street…that had spinning rims. Yes, like the ones wannabe ghetto/gangsta/rap stars put on their shiny black Escalades to make it look like their wheels are spinning even when the car is stopped. Only 50 Kopeck (not to be confused with 50 Cent, since technically he’s worth more) had the lamest set of spinning rims ever, and they showed the beginnings of rust, to boot. L.O.L.

Man, I love Russia.

Until next time,

Katya