So, you know how in my last post I said something about only having fallen once? Yeah, looks like I jinxed myself. Pretty much the entirety of Vasilievsky Island was coated in ice on Friday, so on the way to class that morning, Corinne and I were slipping all over the place. I got tired of it within about five minutes of the walk from the metro. And shortly after that, I slipped and fell flat on my back. Well, no, not *flat* on my back; that would have destroyed the apple I had packed, as well as probably damaging my spare glasses, both of which were living in the little front pocket of my backpack (they both survived the trip). Instead, I fell on my right hip (and, to a lesser extent, elbow). There's a massive bruise there now. Nothing's broken, I can still walk, it's just sore. That happened after turning my ankle slightly on the walk to Mayakovskaya, due to misjudging the depth of a puddle. Yeah. Friday was not a good day to be my right leg.
And obviously, after hurting myself and just generally having a terrible time of it during the day Friday, I decide it would be a great idea to go out with my roommates that night! It's a holiday weekend, what the hell, right? Really, though, it was fun. We met some of Liz's friends at this really cheap bar (and Jorge discovered that a guy he went to [a very small, private, evangelical Iowa] college with is in St Petersburg now with another program), then moved to a club that was grungier and less...weird than RadioBaby. I dunno, it just seemed like the people at this club were there to party, not lean awkwardly against the walls because having fun is so mainstream. I think the bar was called Mad Dog, and the club's name was I think Belgrade or something. Belgrade's DJ seemed to have nothing in his booth but bizarre remixes of 90s-early 2000s American pop music. At one point they played Smash Mouth and that was cool, but all of the other songs were just these crazy remixes; one of them was a mashup of Ciara and the Pussycat Dolls over a reggae/bluesy guitar line. Don't you wish your milkshake was hot like me, indeed. (My girlfriend brings all the boys to the yard.) There were some others but that's the one I remember the most clearly.
We started talking to this random group of Russians who happened to have grabbed the couch adjacent to ours; there were two guys and two girls, and they had apparently gone out to celebrate the birthday of one of the guys. They were all extremely drunk and on their third or so round of rum-and-cokes by the time we started talking to them. I went to the bathroom at one point (basically a hallway with 3 small water closets and one small room full of urinals, and sinks on the opposite wall from the toilets), and ran into the two guys at the sink. They slurred at me in a combination of Russian and broken English, something to the effect of "Hey, girl! You drunk? You like vodka? Haha!" I just kind of laughed and walked away. The bar area was really crowded so I decided to backtrack and head back to my friends through the dance area, where I found the guys again. I smiled and waved at them and then moved on, but one of them yelled something at me and pulled me back up onto the dance floor. Well, okay, why not? I'm at a club, might as well. So I danced a little bit. Just my usual little semi-rhythmic wiggle, nothing crazy--it's not like I started grinding on anybody. Liz's friend accompanied us to the club and she was there, so it's not as if I was suddenly dancing in a crowd full of total strangers. I stayed for a minute or so and then slipped away, back to the couch where everyone was sitting. We chilled at that club until about 2:30-3 AM.
When we finally left (spiriting Liz's friend away from a super-sleazy guy who was too drunk to understand why Liz got all mad at him for trying to grab her drink out of her hand), Corinne tried to find the water bottle of hers that they had confiscated at the door. They threw it away or something (more likely it was stolen, probably by the bouncer), so she couldn't get it back. Sad face. :c It was a really nice steel Kleen Kanteen, too, with a sticker she really liked on it. So we went to get some shawarma to cheer Corinne up and absorb some of the alcohol in everyone's systems. I ate about three bites of mine and then I just wasn't interested anymore; I was dizzy and I had to pee and I just wanted to go home. Luckily, Jorge is a shawarma vacuum, so he finished mine in short order.
I somehow managed to make it home without falling again, although Nevsky wasn't nearly as icy as it could have been. I pretty much stayed awake long enough to put pajamas on and then collapsed into bed and didn't move for six hours. I got a sore neck for my trouble; apparently I fell asleep with my head at a weird angle. But that was the worst of it, really.
I woke up in time to go to the Russian Museum again; Sergei rescheduled the tour to Saturday because Sunday was a festival day! We explored the 20th-century art this time. Most likely due to the current political climate in Russia, all of the Soviet art that is normally on display in the Russian Museum was absent. There was art from the Soviet era, but none of the portraits of leaders or anything really ideologically-driven; just portraits of random working-class folks and abstract pieces.
I was tired after the night out and the museum tour, and my hip and ankle hurt, so I declined to go with when Corinne and Liz announced they would be meeting Elizabeth and going to this bar/club/place that had a bunch of indie bands playing Saturday night. Turns out I made a good decision; the cover charge for that place was 500p, instead of the advertised 100p, so they spent a lot of time just trying to find a bar they could get into. They all eventually came home around 4:30 in the morning on Sunday; Elizabeth spent the night at our place, rather than try to find her way back to her apartment drunk and alone. St Petersburg is a reasonably safe city, but you just never know.
Back on Thursday, when Jorge had his friend Max over, Max mentioned that he wanted to take us to a Maslenitsa festival. That was today, and it was pretty fun! The festival was next to the Peter and Paul Fortress, and they had a ton of little booths selling food and crafts, as well as a massive ice slide, zorb balls, colorfully-dressed people on stilts...you know, the stuff you'd expect to find at a festival. I regret that I never got to play around in the zorb balls, but Corinne and Liz and I did do the ice slide, and that was fun. I really need to get a pair of flat boots; I wore my sneakers today and they got soaked as I waded through snow. Yeah, it snowed today, which I thought was fittingly ironic for an end-of-winter celebration. After we'd seen and done everything we wanted to, there was still about an hour before the traditional effigy burning, so Max led us all over the freaking fortress looking for a cafe that we passed within seconds of entering the gate. It was warm and dry and I could sit down, that was all I cared about. And I got some tea and borscht, so there was also that.
When the time came, we went back outside the fortress; they had people on snowboards and skis going down the ice slide and doing tricks to entertain the crowd before the burning, which turned out to be a fireworks show instead of actually setting fire to a straw effigy of Lady Maslenitsa. But the fireworks were still neat. First, they had some sparklers attached to the edges of the ice slide, and set those off just to get some good smoke going. Then they had snowboarders and skiers ride down the slide carrying flares, followed by dancers swinging more flares on chains and one guy with a wheel o' flares spinning on his back. Then several dozen fireworks attached at various places to the ice slide structure went off. It was pretty spectacular, and (paradoxically) quite a bit safer than setting fire to dry grass in front of a crowd of hundreds. I guess they just trusted that the air would be cool and wet enough to extinguish the fireworks quickly before they fell back to earth. Alternatively, Russians don't care nearly as much about safety as Americans do; such a fireworks display in America would've taken place with all the explosives on the other side of the river and with all of the people safely within the courtyard of the fortress. Meanwhile, in Russia, they're setting off fireworks directly over the heads of a crowd standing mere hundreds of feet from ground zero and everyone's like "lol, nbd."
I'm glad I went, although I'm tired and sore and still probably have homework to do. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I do. Bluhhh. I guess I'll go be responsible and stop having fun now.
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