Rodger's Russia

We had a very Russian Day, today. I was going to write earlier, but I had to take Larisa and her mother on a dirt stealing trip.

In the past, Elvira has ordered manure for her garden. Now that we have a car, she decided that it was cheaper to take dirt from a fertile field at a nearby farm. As Larisa explained to me ‘The communists stole all the land here and mother is getting her share back, a bucket at a time.”

So, we loaded Alona, Larisa, Sonia, Elvira, me, a shovel, a bucket, and bags for the dirt into a Lada the size of a roller skate and went dirt stealing. We snuck down a side road next to the farm and parked while the women all got out and dug dirt. Me, I sat in the car trying to look inconspicuous.

Elvira wants to do it again tomorrow. I’ll pass.

It was an interesting day. Its Halloween here, well, not HERE in the sticks. No one here knows about it, but in Moscow…. Russia has never had a Halloween holiday, but they saw it in American movies and the costumes looked cool, and what’s better than a chance to dress up as a witch, get drunk, and have a party? So, some of the day time talk shows in Moscow had guests in costume and had carved pumpkins on the stage. Maybe the holiday will catch on here after the PC freaks and religious nuts kill in it in the US.

In Moscow, a Moldovan taxi driver went on a rampage, hitting at least seventeen cars and missing a group of school children only because a police car managed to get between him and the kids. When the police finally stopped him by shooting out his tires, he stripped naked, yelled something like “I’m flying on the wings of LOVE”, and jumped out of the car. He was yelling “Don’t cover me!” as the police finally did cover him up as he lay handcuffed on the street. LA car chases are boring compared to Moscow chases. Here there is none of that “just let him drive until he runs out of gas” nonsense. An AK47 makes a very effective tack strip.

The other very ‘Russian’ thing was day light savings time – or actually a lack of daylight savings time. The concept has never been popular in Russia and this year Medvedev announced that Russia would no longer turn the clocks back.

We all knew it was going to happen. It was on television and in the papers when it was announced. However, unlike in America or any other sane country, there were no public service announcements as the day approached no billboards, no posters, no in school announcements, no reminders as the fateful day came close.

It was today. No one in Moscow knew what time it was. Half of the clocks in the country, on computers and cell phones, automatically adjusted to daylight savings time and the rest stayed unchanged. People went to work early at places that were still closed, showed up early to schools, missed appointments and generally experienced chaos. Even the railroads weren’t certain what time it was.

Stealing dirt, celebrating a foreign holiday no one understands, crazy drivers, and everyone in Moscow totally confused. A very Russian day.

Later

I was not going to write anything today, but Larisa insists that I correct my last letter. Her mother, she says, didn’t actually steal dirt from a farmer’s field. She took it from the small wooded area on the edge of the farm and next to the road. It was better dirt there she said, because it had so much mulch that it was almost “greasy” dirt. Her mother didn’t steal, she said.

After I agreed to the correction, Larisa reached for her car keys. When I asked where she was going she said, “Mother needs a ride.” “Where does she want to go?” I asked.

“A couple of months ago she saw where someone left a big pile of manure in the middle of a field and…”

I kid you not.