A few things:
- the receipt rage has hit Russia/the fSU. When we lived in these parts four years ago, there was no such thing as a receipt, or returning things, or whatever. When I came to visit the fam in June, I noticed more receipt-giving, and it is rampant here in St Petersburg. Every little shop and kiosk gives you a receipt along with your purchase. But. They are usually tiny scraps of paper, and don't even have the product information printed on them, but basically just the price. And then they have this odd habit of ripping it before they give it to you. The standard procedure is take out the money, tear the receipt off the printer, rip the it halfway down the middle, and hand it to you along with your change. I don't understand this. Is it some kind of proof of purchase that an unripped one is not? Is it to prevent fraud? How? I could just rip a counterfeit one and present it as real. I don't get it. Yet EVERYONE does this. Who decided this was a good idea and decreed it to be the universal practice? Am I missing something?
- This one is not quite so baffling. Almost all tourist attractions - museums, churches, galleries, Peterhoff, whatever else - that charge entrance fees have separate prices for Russian citizens and foreign citizens. They charge foreigners AT LEAST twice as much, and often three or even four times more. This is crazy to me. There is no reason for this other than that they can and there's nothing we can do about it. But seriously. I know some Americans are rich, but some aren't. And not all tourists are Americans. It seems unfair. But, usually I can pay the Russian student price because I am a student at a local institute. But other times they make me pay the foreigner price like at Peterhoff. Stupid.
- I can never go online to look at class listings for next semester because the website is down on weekdays from midnight to 7am. Which for me is 9am-4pm. The exact hours I am ever on campus. Super-frustrating. I'm not sure how I will enroll. I guess I can stay late some Thursday.
- Megan and I have been on a weeks-long search for good chocolate/candy. They sell candy everywhere by weight, so there will be a store or kiosk with boxes and boxes of different kinds which is kind of overwhelming. We were looking for chocolate candy with a creamy center. This is hard to ask for, and we got bad advice sometimes. But after lots of experimenting and candy-eating we may have found just the thing. YUM. I love chocolate. Candy is one of the good things about Russia, along with ice cream and Teremok.
[my translation class is doing funny things to me that I just noticed. As I was reading back through my post I was thinking about the nightmare of trying to translate it into Russian. We talked yesterday about translation of words like "thing, stuff, matter, way, occasion." Harder than it may seem. I noticed how many times I used the word "thing" and was glad I don't have to translate them.]
2 comments:
Did you know that you can still look at classes on the enroll website even when it is down? Just select semester and location, and log in as a guest instead of a student. You can't actually enroll or save anything, but you can at least look at classes and times.
Excellent post. Bring me some of that candy, yo.
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