Boot Purchasing...

Another week has come and gone in Russia and just when I feel like I might be getting the hang of things and my mental list of stuff to do sort of calms down (I gave up on written lists long ago mainly because they just kept growing instead of shrinking), I realize what a clueless loon I am and go into this ridiculous but strangely enjoyable and entertaining tizzy about my lack of competence.

Ex 1. I bought boots on Tuesday. I’m not sure if it went smoother or rougher than expected. Whenever I was walking around town in early September it always seemed as if there were billions of shoe stores. This has nothing to do with shoe stores, but there are also window and door stores everywhere. At first I thought this might be due to the fact that I know the words for window and door, and so I understand those signs in comparison to signs for various other businesses which I don’t know the words for and thus pay no attention to. However, I think I have come to the conclusion that there actually are an enormous number of door and window stores in Yaroslavl. There are also lots of shoe repair stores. Except most of the time the shoe repair store resembles a falling down out-house esque building (only in size, not in smell.) Actually they might smell really bad, I have not yet had occasion to enter a shoe repair building. If I do, I shall report back. Continuing with my boot buying. As soon as I decided to buy boots, it seemed like all the shoe stores disappeared. Anyways, luckily I remembered where two of the larger shoe stores were, so I set off for the first one on Tuesday morning. Upon entering I was overwhelmed by both all of the shoes and all of the bustling about sales women and also the strange man sitting on a chair who seemed to be guarding the other half of the store. I just stayed in the un-guarded area. I was only momentarily distracted by the selection of red stiletto heel snake skin esque knee high boots and got down to business searching out a boot that fit my needs. These needs included “black” because black is classy (as well as being stately and majestic), black also doesn’t really get dirty, and it matches everything and Russian people seem to like black. There also needed to be some sort of heel because after all I am in Russia and these people love their heels. However this heel needed to be solid and durable and not toothpick sized. The boot also needed to have a minimal amount of golden bangles and jangles and silver highlights and etc… It also needed to fit my foot which was sort of a problem because I didn’t really know what size I was. I decided that asking a sales woman for size “большой (big)” was not really acceptable. Luckily there is this amazing system where every shoe has a tag attached to it with not only the price displayed but also this little list of sizes usually ranging from 32-40. So if the size you need is not crossed out, you just approach a kind looking saleswoman and give her the boot and say the size “40” and hope for the best. Then she disappeared into the back room and came back and gave me the box and the boot and…I was unable to get my foot in the boot. Small problem. Then I smiled and gave her back the box and went to find a boot with a size larger than 40. Except I soon realized that not a single tag had a size greater than 40 in the entire store. Maybe the man was guarding the section with the bigger sized boots, but I decided to abandon ship and hope for the best at the next store. This is really a highly ridiculous and unnecessarily long story…Store number 2. Upon entry I immediately made sure that the tags on the boots went above size 40. They went to 42, except 41 and 42 were crossed out on nearly every single boot. At this point, I decided to give up browsing by style or price and just go strictly for something with a size 41 or 42. Then I tried a 41 and I still couldn’t get my foot in the damn boot. At this point, a slight level of panic began to occur. Then I found a 42, it was black and strong-heeled (not toothpick) and has this row of slight sparkly highlights that are fairly unnoticeable. And they fit. Success!!! Then the woman asked me “Вы будете покупать?” and I said “yes.” But ever since it has been bothering me why she used the imperfective tense. I’m not kidding. I still don’t understand why she didn’t use “купить.” Oh well, moving on. Then I paid and spent essentially every ruble that was in my wallet. Also this is another completely unrelated tale, but every day when I walk to the university I walk past this little billboard for one of the stores that advertises the day’s buy and sell prices for the dollar and the euro. And every day the dollar is lower and lower and it is now 24.5 and it used to be 25.5. After my boot buying on Tuesday, I was feeling fairly competent and maybe not ready for winter, but sort of ready for winter.

Ex 2. There is really no reason to use the “Ex 2” heading except I felt like “Ex 1” had carried on for far too long, so I will just continue the same story here. Then today it began to snow. It wasn’t true snow. It was what I would call…wintry mix. I wonder if they have the word “wintry mix” in Russian. If I began to speak about the “зимной смесь,” will my бабушка think I have lost my mind? Anyways, there was wintry mix occurring in the улица (street). Somehow “in the улица” sounds so much cooler than “in the street.” But then I began to freak out because of my lack of appropriate head gear for such weather. It’s very strange but certain information and hints seems to always be mentioned in the “get ready for Russia” handbooks, guidebooks, lectures, warnings, etc… one of these hints is about hat use and how if every one else in the street is wearing a hat, you better be wearing a hat or how you can’t go outside with wet hair so put on a hat or how lack of hat wearing in bad weather is the number one case of death of ignorant foreigners…So I have hats here, but they are sort of large and brightly-colored and one has a pom-pom esque thing on the top. Just not really that classy. So then I decided to stand by my window for approximately one hour (perhaps it was longer...this was also a desperate but highly successful attempt to not do my homework) as I watched the passers-by and tried to figure out the appropriate head gear for this type of weather. Except this was complicated by the fact that my window faces the courtyard interior part of our apartment complex and not the street so there were very few people walking about. One man was in fact walking about in a short-sleeved t-shirt and definitely no hat. Then there were also businessmen (probably returning from or going to their бизнес ланч), but they were only getting into or out of cars and they had no hats on. Then there was a small child, but the small children here are usually dressed in full snow suits and hats and sort of resemble puffy snowmen more than actual children. Then there was also a woman without a hat, but with an umbrella. See, the snow was really that lame that you could pretend it was rain and just prance about with the umbrella. After a very long time of watching the window and without coming to any sort of conclusion, I decided to leave and take my umbrella, but not take a hat. There is this hat rack in the entrance way to the apartment that I studied as I put on my boots and coat and got ready to leave. But these hats are my бабушка’s and I probably should not refer to her hat collection for fashion advice on how to properly fit in with the young, hip, Russian college kids. Then when I was leaving, Margarita asked if I had an umbrella (yes) and said nothing about my lack of head gear, so I figured I had made a correct if fairly uninformed decision. My entrance onto the street and immediate presence of multiple umbrellas proved that everyone was pretending it was just rain and there really was no need for head-gear as my blue umbrella would suffice. However, I still don’t know what sort of hat I’m supposed to be wearing. I did notice a lot of hoods (usually with large amounts of furriness) which seemed strange at first, mainly because as far as I know furry hoods don’t really occur on the Midd campus or in U.S. in general. Then I realized that furry hoods allow for maximum warmth and minimal interference with hairstyles. After all, there is no such thing as a “hood-hair.” If the hat question continues to trouble me, I suppose I can just purchase some large fur-hooded coat.

Ex 3. Also today I realized the need for winter gloves. Winter gloves are especially important in Russia, because it especially sucks to have cold hands when you are supposed to be carrying your precious plastic bag and your hand is cramping from the cold and it is just sort of miserable. Also, off topic again, but as Susanna has earlier documented in her fine blog “looncompound.blogspot.com” the phenomenon of the plastic bag in Russia continues to astound me. They were not joking in the handbook when they said people don’t use backpacks they use plastic bags. In fact I don’t really understand how people in the U.S. function without carrying around a plastic bag. I’m not kidding. You can’t put tennis shoes for basketball practice in your purse (no matter how big it is). Actually I take that back, some of Mama Mayer’s “purses” could fit a pair of tennis shoes. Anyways, the plastic bag is very important but white plastic bags from grocery stores are really the least desirable type of bag to carry as far as I can tell (unless you are actually carrying groceries). But Margarita always gives me white plastic bags to carry stuff in and then I have to walk around feeling self conscious of the low quality of my lame white grocery store plastic bag. I feel like if you are not in Russia, or have not been in Russia and seen the plastic bags, you will think I am joking. But I am not joking. Continuing. There is this small black plastic bag in my room for garbage and one day I emptied all the trash into a white bag and took the black bag for the day, but then I couldn’t deal with the fact that I had spent that much time and energy worrying about the caliber of plastic bag and then switching all the garbage into the white bag and then switching all the garbage back into the black bag when I got home so that Margarita wouldn’t make some comment about the different garbage bag (because she invariably would). So then I decided to start using the GAP bag that Ben gave me before I left Boston when I tried to explain to him the importance of the plastic bag (at this point, I myself did not fully understand the phenomenon). Except now the GAP bag is sort of falling apart, it is clearly not up to par with the Russian plastic bags which although they sort of begin to fade and you can tell when someone has had that specific bag for a long time, they never develop huge gaping holes like the GAP bag has now. So now I have to figure out a new bag. Also, returning to the initial subject- I have to purchase some winter gloves which are not ski-gloves like the ones I have, so that I can continue to carry my plastic bag with warm hands.

Finally, in my never-ending search for new procrastination methods I found myself reading “что делать?” this evening, which might be the most intellectually minded procrastination method I have ever involved myself in. And of this I am very proud. I am also proud that I generally understood the first two pages.

Well, this loon circus has gone on long enough.