A Few Notes

I've been out of Rostov for the last month or so on vacation in Barcelona and researching/being sick/dicking around in Ryazan. I’ll try to upload a couple pictures when I get back to Rostov and reasonable internet.

1. Dmitrii Medvedev's last name derives from the Russian word for bear. If he was English, his name would be Bearman or something like that. Pretty good in of itself but even better when you realize that Edinaia Rossia's mascot is a giant polar bear. Anyway, when I came back from Barcelona, roughly a month after leaving Rostov and contact with Russian media, Medvedev was all over TV and Putin was relegated to the third or fourth news story of the day, instead of number one, like he had been before.

2. I was working in the Ryazan library regional history department (which is terrifying, because I am flying under the radar registration-wise, using an expired library card and copious amounts of blat--that is, name dropping--to get access to materials) when three middle-aged, bearded academic types entered and filed into the staff office. The regular workers in the department are about ten 35-60 year-old women--as far as I can tell only three of them do anything--and all of them, except the oldest lady who does the most work, went into the office. The last one added mysteriously, "Don't let anyone in here!" Librarian sex/cocaine party?

3. When I got to Ryazan I had been traveling for about a week. For adventure's sake I took the long way from Barcelona: a flight to Bremen, then a flight to Riga, then an overnight train to Pskov and then another overnight train to Moscow. Somewhere in there I caught both cold and flu so by the time I got to Ryazan, things were pretty bad. I had a fever of 103, and not the sexy kind like in the song. But the worst part wasn't being sick, it was being tended to by the lady I'm staying with, a friend's mother, who is a doctor. The trouble is she's also a Russian mother which means she has a whole repertoire of folk remedies in addition to being a real doctor and it was sometimes hard to tell what was real and what was bullshit. I couldn't eat the porridge with a full stick of butter but I did drink the vodka with hot pepper.