Things that I wish Russians would do that they don’t: Salt the damn sidewalk outside of my apartment

This dereliction of duty confuses me. I come from a land where the slightest hint of a snowflake begets the marshalling of a hundred snowplows to battle. I know the Russian government is in general non-responsive to specific citizen demands, but I’m not asking for more state television time for opposition parties, a serious investigation into the execution of journalists critical of the administration, or a permit to hold a protest. I can’t hold a protest because I can’t remain standing long enough to register my complaint. Perhaps that is why the city has chosen to leave the ten blocks between my apartment and my workplace frozen solid and slicked smooth. They are either trying to clamp down on actions threatening to the dignity state or attempting to break the record for world’s largest Slip ‘N Slide.

You know, there are spicing shortages in Russia, but salt is not among them. It’s not as if the Russian government needs to cumin the sidewalk. I would understand the difficulty of laying hands on a vast store of, say, tumeric in Russia, a country which tends to sell spice by the food to which you are to apply it (“vegetable seasoning,” “chicken seasoning,” “mayonnaise seasoning,” etc.). But salt is considered an all-times, all-foods, all-purpose flavoring option. Saltiness is not a concept with which Russians have difficulty. Maybe the government is flummoxed by the array of salty things available at the grocery store. Do they purchase just plain salt? Or do they go with “chicken seasoning” (salt that smells like chicken)? Would “fish seasoning” (salt that smells like fish) effectively mask the citywide smell of rancid diesel, or just replace it with something new and altogether more terrifying? If they’re so paralyzed by indecision, they should just put out a neighborhood alert, calling on dwellers to fling their leftovers out the window, the salt from which would no doubt liquefy the ice in an instant and, in addition, satiate the stray cat population. If the government doesn’t act soon, I will shortly be forced to barge into the nearest apartment I can find, grab a leftover chicken breast from the stovetop (you know what, I’m sure it will have been there for three days, they won’t miss it), and fling it before me every time I take a step.

Failing that, my other option is to buy a pair of fabulously impractical black, knee-high stiletto boots, since these evidently have the best traction of any footwear in the entire country. I’m wobbling in my snow boots and these Russian Amazons just stride past me on three-inch-heels as though Tyra Banks were sitting ten feet away, judging their comparative levels of “fierce.” Meanwhile, I have learned to anticipate which dips in the sidewalk are particularly treacherous, which does not actually relieve the difficulty of navigating them, since stepping into the street results in no change in iciness and only adds oncoming motorists to my increasingly lengthy list of things likely to result in an imminent loss of verticality.

Perhaps what I am saying is that my butt hurts from when I slipped and fell on it yesterday. At least now you’ll know what happened if this blog doesn’t update again until spring: it’s safe to assume that I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.

That's Highly Illogical, Captain

So we’re coming up on the end of month two of my sojourn in the Big Freeze, and much to the shock of myself and all my nearest friends and relations, I yet live. (Some of you, noting the recent frequency of my blog updates, may find this news surprising, to which I can only say something childish and indecent about your mother.) Anyway, this can mean only one thing: I have, indeed, been feeding myself. The first month I could pass off my survival on my ability to purchase and consume water faster than a camel with dried-up spit reserves, but the three-week, humans-can-survive-on-water-alone-or-so-I-learned-from-Nickelodeon-Magazine window has officially slammed shut on the fingers of my frozen existence, so some other form of nourishment must be at play.

In any other, non-bizarro universe, the fact of me buying things and eating them would not be interesting enough to make it to the Internet – I have been doing this successfully since the happy day that I discovered that chocolate bars were not solely available by way of magic portal to another dimension guarded vigilantly by my stingy parents, but could be mine whenever I wanted through the much better magic of simple monetary exchange. However, in non-bizarro universes I hear that sales reps actually want you to patronize their businesses, so grab a seat, grow your beard, and let me explain why the Internet should care about my food.

Leaving language and customer service issues by the wayside, where I hope they are picked up by an ill-shaven, odiferous trucker who does unspeakable things to their person before abandoning them five miles from civilization somewhere in the backwoods of Kentucky, there are two big problems with shopping for food in Russia. The first is the utter lack of correlation between price, quality, and quantity. Paying more for something is no guarantee that you will real receive a bigger or better something than a similar, cheaper something, it is only a guarantee that you will subsequently have less money. The best example is bottled water. I could go to the store and purchase a 0.6 liter bottle of water for 15 rubles. Or I could purchase 1.75 liters of the same brand. For 13 rubles. If I wanted to have my wallet gauged with a bulldozer I could even go to a restaurant, where, in exchange for a mere 60 rubles, I could be the proud consumer of 0.25 liters. Or I could save some trees and burn some calories lugging a 9-liter, 72-ruble jug of water home from the supermarket. No matter what, I am hydrated and confused. Don’t even get me started on the amount of food I could purchase for the price of one eggplant. There are starving children in Africa who could be fed for a year for the price of one eggplant.

Now, I am a person who likes to know the worth of what I am purchasing so that I know how much I’m willing to shell out for it. In Russia, this instinct is flummoxed for normal reasons—I just don’t know what goods/brands are more difficult to come by or considered more luxurious in this part of the world—further diddled with by abnormal reasons—we’ve a bit of an economic crisis on our hands and the ruble is in free fall against the dollar—and then clubbed over the head and left unconscious by Abby Normal reasons—
WHYCANYOUBUYMOREWATERFORFEWERRUBLESWHYGOD
AHHHHTHECAPITALISTSUPERSTRUCTUREISALIEANDINEED
ANAP!!! The result is I end up setting arbitrary price floors and ceilings for myself to help me decide what to buy. This has brought me mixed success. On the one hand, I have delicious yogurt for 8 rubles a pop. On the other, an American friend of mine and I tried to buy a bottle of white wine a few weeks ago using the strategy of “pick the first one you see over 150 rubles.” Thankfully, the blindness has receded, and my wine price floor has been reset at 200 rubles.

The second problem with food shopping is variety. As is to be expected, you can’t find certain staples of the American diet in Russia. (And to be fair, you couldn’t find certain staples of the Russian diet in America; when I’m especially craving granola bars, I am consoled by the thought of ex-pat Russians cruising up and down the aisles of their local Safeways, muttering, “Where the fuck are the Lays Red Caviar Flavored Potato Chips?”) I don’t necessarily have a problem with this, but I do have a problem with the illogic of what you can and cannot locate. I cannot find any salad dressing to save my life, but every grocery store I’ve frequented—and there have been many—has had kiwis. I cannot find any hot dog buns, but I can purchase Ahava Dead Sea Skin Care Products, which are supposedly only sold in Israel. I know that hot dog buns exist, because you can buy a hotdog from a sort of WaWa-like store called V-Mart, and trust me, they’re not baking ‘em fresh, but they must be getting their buns from some sort of top-secret hot-dog-bun holding facility that doesn’t supply the rest of the public.

The only known food product to which none of the above rules of shopping in Russia apply is mayonnaise. Mayonnaise, no matter where you go, is always cheap and available in wide varieties. You think I just mean, perhaps, Full Fat, Reduced Fat, and Fat Free? Oh ye of little imayogination. Here is a picture I want you to look at:



Do you know what this is? This is an entire aisle in the enormous grocery store out by the Ikea filled with nothing but mayonnaise. What you cannot see is that this aisle actually wraps around to the left and continues displaying mayonnaise wares for another ten feet of shelving. Almost every food item in Russia has a different, enumerated flavor of mayo that’s supposed to go with it—mayo for your chicken, mayo for your steak, mayo flavored with chicken and steak, but you put it on your meatballs, etc. I’m pretty sure there are food-specific mayo products designed and sold in Russia for food that you cannot actually purchase in Russia—mayo for your Cheerios, mayo for your Pho…I could do this all day. In contrast, this ginormous food warehouse (think Costco) had six bottles of one brand of salad dressing available. And it was Thousand Island.

So, naturally, mayonnaise has been strictly banned from my kitchen. If not mayo, what exactly do I eat? Will I spend all of my money trying to find a white wine that doesn’t taste like pee? Is my grandmother offended by the level of profanity in this blog entry? All that and more ahead. Stay tuned!