CBSH Part Two

Hello again ladies and gents! It's time for installment #2 of "Commie Bastard Story Hour." This segment is entitled:

Sunlight and Healthy Eating Are Now Illegal

I left this story off on the very first day of my first visit to Russia. While that was my only experience of physical violence in the Motherland, the trip did not improve from there. It was snowy and people were mean and growly. Biiiiig surprise, right? Let me show you an excerpt from my emails to friends during this time (lack of capitals due not just to general laziness but to Russia gradually sapping my will to live - when you're contemplating suicide, suddenly capital letters lose their importance):

it is snowing and dirty here. i mean really dirty. people smoke cigarettes constantly and then just throw them on the ground. and the cars let off black exhaust. and people drink beer at 11 am and throw the beer bottles on the ground or in the river. we walk a lot every day because the metro stations are really far apart and the bus system seems to have neither rhyme nor reason (or a map, which would definitely help). the worst is that everything is in cyrillic and the only word in english russians seem to know is "no." it took us three days just to find this internet cafe (internet at the hotel costs about 10 dollars for half an hour, and you can only use it in the lobby which is filled with smoking men who look like mobsters and seem to have nothing to do but drink and stare at you).

Oh man, I had forgotten about that hotel lobby. Those men were so so so stereotypically Russian. They all had leather jackets and beer/vodka bellies and they all had tall skinny blond mistresses who wore miniskirts and knee-high leather boots despite below-freezing temperatures and 6-inch deep snow/puddles. I would hate them too, except somehow they all seem to eventually morph into short fat middle-aged ladies with fur coats and 18 shopping bags, so I figure it's even. The rest of the emails I sent were in a similar vein, mostly complaining about how I hadn't seen the sun in two weeks and I could feel my heart hardening from all the fatty and deep-fried foods they seem to guzzle over there.

This prompted one of my most hilarious friends (codename: TwigOnTreeTrunks aka TOTT) to email back with this gem:

Russia sounds gritty and raw, like a modern day Wild West, where the only justice is street justice.

While I feel that this statement completely over-romanticizes my Russia experience, I had to include it because TOTT is one of my favorite people in the world, and it taught me that apparently even when I'm describing my complete misery, it can come across like a Clint Eastwood movie. So if that's the impression you're getting from the CBSH, correct yo'self fools! That is not the way it went down.

So cut to week two of Hatter's Russia tour. I hadn't seen a vegetable during that entire time (other than beets and cabbage, which I do NOT count as worthy of the name vegetable. I mean, you don't see either of them cropping up in the multitudinous cast of Veggie Tales, do you?). I was craving something fresh, not boiled or fried or baked. So, I trekked through the snowy streets of Moscow to find a supermarket, and I found a bin with the most beautiful delicious looking apples I have ever seen. In hindsight I realize that these apples may have looked more like this, but I was so starved for the crisp juicy taste of a piece of fruit that I probably just didn't care. At any rate, I selected the plumpest prettiest one of these and brought it to the checkout. And guess what? That apple cost 450 rubles. Now I happen to be relatively quick when it comes to converting between currencies, but I was for a second unable to believe my own calculations.

Here's how it works. There are 30 rubles to the dollar. If an apple costs 450 rubles, the apple is 15 dollars American. FOR ONE APPLE. I was so desperate I would have paid quite a lot of money, but I draw the line when some cheating scheming Russian supermarket a**hole tries to pay for his next carton of cigarettes with my hard-earned apple money.

Now I ...totally... understand, what with the 8 bajillion acres of Russian farmland available, it must be hard to grow apples or broccoli or cucumbers when you have to keep your entire population fully stocked with french fries and vodka. I mean, that's a lot of potatoes. But if you're going to force me to be fat and drunk, could you at least let me be a happy drunk with a 1 dollar apple every now and then? Of course it should come as no surprise that the answer to this question is a resounding NYET.

And that's reason #2 why I will hate Russia until my dying day. All I got out of that trip was indigestion, a vitamin D deficiency, a muffin top, frostbite, and deep depression. What a country.