Scene of the Crime

St. Petersburg has suddenly become a very depressing and dangerous place. Apparently, some young student (his last name begins with an "R", but I forgot what it is) just murdered a poor old pawn broker and her half-sister. Everyone's been talking about it, and nobody's really sure what the motive for the murder was. Anyway, they're sending Mr. R to Siberia. We'll see if that will teach him a lesson.

Whoops! Wrong Petersburg experience! However, I had the great opportunity yesterday to see the cozy apartment where this all began.

Dostoevsky's old abode is fairly near the center of town, and it's much larger than any other Russian apartment I've seen yet. Although I have always claimed to worship the ground on which Dostoevsky stands (stood), I can now say, without hesitation, that I literally have.

Another funny thing happened yesterday. No, this time it was not murder-related. I was walking around the neighborhood when I realized I didn't feel quite right. And then it hit me: for the first time during my stay in Russia, I was hungry. No, I haven't had any stomach difficulties while I've been here, and my appetite has been just fine. It simply occured to me that I had probably gone over an hour without anyone requesting that I eat heavy Russian cuisine. Hence the now-foreign feeling.

But I promise I'm thinking about my studies as much as Dostoevsky jokes and my stomach. For example, I was a smash hit in class the other day. During our grammar session, we students were taking turns "filling in the blanks" for sentences, choosing to use either an imperfective or perfective verb in the sentence. (Basically sort of kind of, an imperfective verb signals an incomplete or in-progress action, whereas a perfective verb represents a more finite activity or something that occurrs only once.) It was my turn, and I had to complete a sentence that was something like "They went back to their friend's house to watch a videocassette that night." My task was—besides laughing at "videocassette"—to choose the right verb for "watch", and I chose the imperfective verb, the incomplete action. My professor told me this was incorrect because it's likely that the group of friends finished the movie, but I argued that we have no way of knowing that this was possible.

"A videocassette, Dasha? I would think they'd watch the whole movie," she said.

"Okay, but let's say the movie is Gone with the Wind."

Worst joke flop of my entire life.

In my conversation class, I got a vocabulary quiz back. This quiz had also presented the fill-in-the-blank challenge, and one sentence I had to complete was "People need to use the comod in order to ____." I learned the hard way that comod is not, despite its striking resemblance to the English word "commode" (and, of course, its bathroomly connotation), the ceramic object I belived it to be. No, comod is a dresser. Therefore, my completed sentence was a major success. "People need to use the dresser in order to go toilet."

Ashamed of my mistake, I quickly tucked the quiz into a folder and decided instead to put the whole matter aside, attempting to rid of my frustration.

"But Dana/I'm-so-excited-because-I-get-to-stop-calling-you-that-stupid-Dasha-name-in-less-than-a-week Dasha," you say, entirely befuddled, "I really thought you have the sense of humor of a five-year-old. Didn't you laugh? Even a little bit?"

I'm angered by this assumption. "Of course not. Don't be ridiculous. I am a very mature young lady."

And by "Of course not. Don't be ridiculous. I am a very mature young lady", I mean "I sniveled so hard and so much in class that I started crying." It's a real shame that nobody in my class has as much of a sophisticated sense of humor as I do. I cackled alone, though my professor sincerely thought this mistake was very funny as well, thank goodness.

Tonight I'm going to see the final "Harry Potter" movie. I am going to watch this movie because 1) I can brag about how I saw it in Russian, 2) I can brag about how I saw it before everyone else because it comes out two days earlier here than in America, and 3) friends are going. I've only read through the fourth book and I'm really not a fan, but I assumed that since I would have no idea what was going on in the movie if I saw it in English, it would be fine to see it in Russian instead.

I don't know what happens in the final book--though I asked a friend for a "brief" summary--but if Harry ends up killing a pawn broker and her half-sister, I'll at least know that this is a special "St. Petersburg-dubbed" edition of the movie. He's a genius wizard, though, so I doubt he'll be punished for his actions.

From the Cupboard under the Soviet Union,

Даша/Dasha/Dana