When I checked the weather this morning, it said 40 percent chance of precipitation. What does that mean? In WNC it means that there is a 40 percent chance something will fall from the sky. Perhaps here it means there is a 40 percent chance of mass accumulation, or a 40 percent chance that said precipitation will last longer than 50 percent of the day. We're getting into some crazy algebra now. An easy equation to stand by though, there is a 100 percent chance that something will fall from the sky. I will attempt to sort out the weather mans math.
So life is wet to say the least. My housing is, well a constant source of annoyance at the moment. Should I stay or should I go. Pros, dinner is included, Russian is spoken in the house (although they have zero ability to slow down. They seem to speed up when I ask them to slow down, or they speak in broken English.) Around the corner is a nice pub. Its sickly expensive, but the barkeeps are decidedly less "Russian" than a lot of the people I meet. They are super friendly and put up with my fantastic ability to butcher the hell out of their language. But unfortunately, I have to fold my bed up every day and other minor annoyances, like not being able to cook my own food, and therefore eating meat paddy products nearly every day. The other place would be own apartment, but on the ass end of town. Full of students, but that leads to the trap of speaking English all the time. I think I've pretty much decided to stay where I am and just buy a transport card so I can go out to the ass end of town to visit friends.
School is going pretty well. I have one teacher most of the time and she is fantastic. The other teacher we have for only one session. I think I'm older than her, and slightly less bitchy. She seems to enjoy confusing us and then acting put out. She's quite talented with making the Asians feel like assholes for not understanding her. Its kind of sad really, both teachers give them a harder time. But then sometimes just let them say things completely wrong. I don't know if they get fed up, or just realize that it is fairly impossible for tongues trained certain ways to unwind and redirect themselves.
A few nights ago we had a bonfire by the "sea". Crazy? Yes. But we had a blast. You know when your alcoholic beverage, that was room temperature when you left, starts to form ice crystals, it may be too cold to be covorting outside. At some point I said something about bringing Richard Simmons videos next time to keep warm. While the most useful method would be to use them for firewood, I did mean to do excercises. A guy from China asks me who Richard Simmons is. I explain that he is a raging homosexual that does excercise videos. Later we were discussing rock music. After explaining that Avril Lavigne does not qualify as punk and that in fact Rock is dead, and pop has sadly taken over as some sort of Hermaphroditic Tsar of Music; I made the comment that a gay man (Freddie Mercury) rocked harder than Chad Kroeger could ever hope to even after drinking a bottle of jack daniels and snorting 2 bags of coke. (Unfortuneately, this was sad much less colorfully, one must speak stiltedly when in these International soirees.) After I made this comment, he accused me of being obsessed with gay men. I'm not sure that was warranted. I got to the point of frost bite and bid my adieus, because, if you were not aware, "adieu" means "to god", and at that moment, I wasn't sure that I wasn't on my way to a meeting with the big guy. I frigidly, and completely stiffly, walked to a bus stop and jumped on the first one to the metro. I did not die. I did however take pictures in the metro station, which I found out today is completely illegal and had the police seen me, they probably would have taken my camera.
So death and camera removal avoided, I am safe and thawed in St. Pete.
How are you?
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