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Alert! Alert! Valya has caught on that I like raisins and kuraga! And here I'd thought I'd gotten past the point of rambly posts about gastrointestinal distress…

Last night was a night of general silliness, but thankfully not of the culture-clash kind. See, it's Aisulu's birthday next week, but because of the holiday we celebrated after lessons yesterday. (Yes, for those keeping score at home, yesterday was in fact Saturday. We sometimes have classes on weekends to make up for holidays. Oleg had warned me that yesterday would have the same schedule as a Wednesday, but not that the classes were all 20 minutes shorter, so I was very nearly late to work.) This is a culture where you throw your own birthday party, usually, so Aisulu and friends provided manti, a sort of vinegary carrot salad, another salad that either contained noodles or pieces of organ meat, and one's own choice of vodka or wine. I stuck to wine, in small quantities, because no way in hell am I trying to walk on this ice drunk. I can barely walk on it sober. I don't know if it's because the snow pack is sublimating away in the sunny weather or constant traffic has pounded it hard or both, but just getting to school fully upright is becoming a major accomplishment.

Anyway, birthday. After cake and salads and toasting, people with fourth-block lessons started to take off, and as I was slipping out Aisulu asked if I wanted to go to a café for her birthday in the evening. She told me to meet Tanya and Ira at seven o'clock, "near the college." Remember that part, kids, because it will important later.

After lunch I tried to use the internet, since Zhana Nikolaievna was around, but I got to read exactly one email before the DSL crapped out on us. Rather than wait around to see if it would come back on, I headed home to shower and accidentally had a two-hour nap. I laid down on the couch with a cat, shut my eyes, and the next thing I knew there was a blanket on me and something on TV had totally cribbed the theme from "The Muppet Show." I actually got excited when I heard it, but it turned out there were no muppets, just a semi-comedic ad for a trading house downtown. Ded Moroz was buying a kettle. Well, bugger.

I helped Valya seal the windows after dinner: she made a caulk out of flour and gypsum, packed it around all the seams in the windows and then sealed those over with tape. She told me that she'd heard of plastic weather stripping, but she doesn't believe in it. "Ya boyus," she told me. I fear. Fear what, exactly, I'm afraid to ask, because it all managed to remind me very much of the weather-stripping episode in American Gods except for how Karaganda is actually further north than Wisconsin. (MA and I decided that it's Winnipeg, actually.) True fact: it's already -35C in Yakutsk.

So, 6:30 rolls around, and I figure if I want to meet Tanya and Ira I will have to leave. I tell Valya I'm going to Café Rossianka, the closest to the college, since if we're meeting there that's a logical place to eat. Valya is worried. "Call me when you get there! And call me when you leave!" She thinks it is too dark and slippery. I'm actually inclined to agree, particularly when I discover that the batteries in my safety flashlight are dead, but I said I'd meet them and I kind of want to get out of the flat for a while.

So I set off down Victory Street. There's a fire at a shop two blocks from my flat. I nearly fall like fifteen times. I arrive at the college early, but nobody's around, so I just loiter near the door trying to look harmless and not-American. In the mornings this area is pretty bright because the lights in the building are on, but now it's super dark and I keep thinking about how two PCVs got mugged in the last month and I really should've brought less money with me and also it's cold. It's so cold that my breath is condensing on my hair and freezing there.

At five past seven I decide, okay, I'll look inside Rossianka and then I'll go home. They can't say I didn't try. As I'm crossing the street (and I am positive that if I die in Kazakhstan, it'll be because I slipped on ice in the middle of the street and got run over by a bus) my cell phone rings. It's Tanya. "Where are you?"

"Near Rossianka."

"What are you doing there?"

"Where are you?"

"At the culture house!"

Because, see, when Aisulu told me to meet them near the college, she meant the main building on Jambyl Street. The one two blocks closer to my flat, but in another direction from where I was. "Okay, I'm on my way," I said, and booked it as fast as I safely could.

Ice capades aside, I found Ira and Tanya across the street from the Dom Kultura. At this point I figured we were going to the Kupetz, the café we'd visited during my site visit, since it's one block up from the Dom Kultura and seemed pretty nice. But once we'd established my mistake, they start walking the other way down the prospekt. "Which café are we going to?" I asked.

"The Three Nines."

The Three Nines is located at Lenina and Victory. It's across the street from my flat.

Ba-dum-ching!

I actually had a pretty nice time, navigation errors aside. Ira is a math teacher who doesn't speak English, but she didn't seem to mind me stammering at her in Russian, and Tanya and Aisulu switched into English whenever they felt I wasn't talking enough. We had dinner and a little bit of cognac—less that two shots' worth for me, by my estimate—and watched the other patrons—in particular, a guy who'd dozed off at his table and three women who were super drunk and loud about it. One of them kept trying to dance and falling down, while another seemed extremely pissed off at Yulia, whoever that was. Tanya got hit on by a miner, and I saw a guy who…well, he was very badly sunburned, but he'd obviously been wearing a winter hat with ear flaps when it happened. It wouldn't have looked quite so odd if his head hadn't been shaved. The food was good, the cognac cleared my sinuses, and they let me excuse myself around ten o'clock so Valya wouldn't have heart failure. (Aisulu wanted to go home too, but the others wanted to dance, so they held her purse hostage while she walked me home.) The total cost of the food and liquor was only 3,000 for the four of us, which surprised me—I'd expected the cognac to cost much more.

I tried to call home last night, because it was my parents' twenty-eighth wedding anniversary, but for some reason my NEO card wouldn't connect even though it showed five bars of coverage. I was afraid to try it with my Beeline card, so I gave up and went to bed after watching a little bit of Russian "Skating with the Stars." (It's actually called "Ice Age," but it's actors and singers ice-dancing with ex-Olympians. Skating with the Stars.) Interesting fact: when the head judge was explaining to Alexei Yagudin why he got a bad score, she used no less that four different diminutives—Sasha, Alyosha, Lyosha and Sashka. Either she knows him really well or she's really obsequious.

Other fun with Russian television: the Russian "Wheel of Fortune" is pretty cracked out, as I think I've mentioned. The host's catch phrase is "V studio!" (Into the studio!) Players, prizes, pretty ladies—everything into the studio! Well, there was a little boy on the show with his grandma, and the host was being very cute with him—calling him "vy" and "Anton Alexandrevich" and just being hyper-polite. The little boy decided to imitate the host, so he waved his arm and started yelling "V studiyu!" Now, studio is an indeclinable loan word in Russian, but the preposition v takes the accusative when it means to, into. And –u is the feminine accusative ending. I'd read about how Russian children acquiring the case system tend to over-generalize the feminine accusative ending for all words, and theories about why, but it gave me a little geeky thrill to actually hear it done.

Today was a lazy day made more lazy by what I absolutely refuse to call a hangover, because I had at most two shots of cognac. Nevertheless, this morning my stomach felt all hinky and my head hurt a little, so I drank some water and ended up taking a three-hour nap with the kitties in which I dreamed that M from Team Awkward Turtle fixed my dial-up. (I actually asked Zhana Nikolaievna about it yesterday, but she had no clue; she suggested I ask at the Kaztelecom office, which, yeah, would happen if I had even half the Russian vocab I needed for this. It's one area where Oleg is probably not going to be able to help.) Still, I finished hemming one leg of my black pants and sewed up a mysterious rip in the ass of my jeans, because buying new jeans in my size here is going to be an adventure. This is my clothing Catch-22: if I lose weight in order to fit into local clothes, I will then be obligated to buy lots of them, because my American clothes will stop fitting. I already have to hem the other leg of my black pants and roll the waistband on my gray ones like a rebellious Catholic schoolgirl. It's odd, because I don't feel like I'm losing weight—I've actually got a bit of a pooch under my chin again—but maybe it's just that the fat is redistributing away from the waistline. Either way, those jeans will not last two years. Maybe MA and I need to schedule a Big Girls' Bazaar Day.

I also helped Valya make piroshki. Well, partway; she bought the dough and I slept through the preparation of the fillings, but I helped actually fashion and fry them, and they are mighty tasty. I must reiterate that I am entirely in favor of fried carbohydrates stuffed with other fried carbohydrates. She also made golobtsi (stuffed cabbage) for dinner, and seemed surprised that we eat essentially the same thing in America—"you must've got that from us!" And, like I said, she caught on that I like dried fruit. She actually bought me a whole bowl of it when I started writing this entry, and made a point to remind me that unlike candy and sweet rolls, it won't make me fat. (No, I'll just poop to death…) I figured out how to tell her that full means full; new target phrase: "I am old enough to manage my own caloric intake!"

Conclusion: if you can walk down the street watching the way the snow glitters and somehow not feel special just to see it, you need to check you pulse. I suspect you are clinically dead.