Written While Waiting for Sluggish Internet to Load E-mail

Hope you all have a nice Thanksgiving, blogreaders. I thought about you, probably.

I had another cultural experience to check off the list on Thanksgiving day: the Russian medical system! It was sort of a process. Actually most of the process involved my sitting around being incompetent and Elisabeth, the RC, putting up with me, when she probably wanted to be cooking Thanksgiving dinner. I think she started calling clinics at 9:00, when they opened, and finally found a place that would take me that day around 10:00, and then we tramped about looking for the place- we went into the wrong side of the building first, which was a big deal apparently. ‘Twas an ear nose and throat doctor. We got put on the list, were told the doctor was out somewhere and that we should come back around 1:00 and he might be back. I went back to Elisabeth’s apartment with her and slept as she cooked Thanksgiving things. I tried to sleep without breathing on her bed, as I thought infecting another person with strep might not get me onto her list of things to be thankful for. Then we went back to the doctor’s office, which seemed like rather a long snowy trek to me but most likely wasn’t. I couldn’t really hear anything due to clogged ears, and also was acting sort of goofy, so in all I was not the best conversational partner. So, after a long walk of the only things I understood being “so, if they think you have dyptheria they’ll put you in the hospital in quarantine for 3 days” and “have you ever had mono?” we got back to the big, pretty red and white doctor’s office, and proceeded to wait for many hours, as every single person who had gone there that day had been told to come back at 1:00, and friends of the receptionist got in first. There was some amount of disorder because they had run out of the little blue plastic things that Russians love to make you put on over your shoes, so everyone was afraid to walk in without them, but we were all forgiven, until they found new ones (I think). I’m not sure what happened, but all of a sudden we all had to go pay 3 ruples for the blue slipper things. And then they yelled at us all to take our coats and put them in the “coat room,” which was actually some coat racks behind a piece of glass, but Russians are great believers in coat rooms. Especially the people who work in the computer labs in the Mezhfak. I’m not entirely sure why coats are considered to be so dangerous to public health and safety. Elisabeth and I read Pravda, and watched the boots of the other waiting people, and played hangman on the borders of Pravda, with words like Communism and Victory and Tovarish. Elisabeth was handicapped by my not really knowing how to spell. Eventually we got into the doctor, and as was the case most of the day, I didn’t really understood anything that was said, from a combination of not being able to hear and not really knowing Russian and not really being in the mood by that point to try that hard to understand to understand Russian. Why do doctors, as a rule, try so hard to be jovial and humorous? I would think that sick people, as a rule, are one of the groups least likely to be amused by teasing. Anyway, after poking various parts of my head for a while, he pronounced that I had strep. He seemed surprised that we’d heard of it. Then he prescribed an unnecessary-seeming number of medicines and we left. We then went to a weird pharmacy guarded by an armed security person, where the pharmacist gave me the large number of medicines and then some more of her own devising, such as these little shreds of metal that I’m supposed to mix in tea until it turns pink and then put in some salt and gargle with it. Uh-huh. I’ll be sticking to the alarming-looking yellow substance the doctor is already making me gargle with.

Then I went home on the marshrutka and was not in a very good mood, and therefore bought a Novosibersk icecream bar by the entrance to the apartment building. When I got to the apartment Katya acted like I was crazy to have gone to the doctor (“In America people never just have sore throats?”) and then yelled at me for eating ice cream. And then I went to bed, and listened to an afternoon of intense home repair and rearrangement. This later turned out to be because Nastya had bought her mother a new wardrobe to replace the old falling-apart one, and the girls were getting it into place, with the help of some neighbors or something, to surprise their mother when she came home. This was very sweet, and it’s a very pretty wardrobe.

So, since then I haven’t been doing much. I watched “The Mexican.” It would have been really dumb except that it was the first movie I’d seen in a while, and I watched it in English. I look for funny names in the Russian Old Testament. I recommend this as an activity, it’s very entertaining. If only these people spoke English, like the ancient Hebrews, they would know the right names for these people. Also, kings are always referred to as tsars.

Oh, I forgot to mention that late Thursday night Adrianne brought over leftovers from Thanksgiving dinner, which was very nice of her.

The Cafe Fiesta people made me buy food and beverages to some enormous value, 150 rubles or something, to get the internet password today. Especially annoying as I do not at all wish to eat, being sick and all. As soon as I can go back to the Mezhfak I’ll be back to my boycott.