DAY 1

Ok, for those not in the know, I have decided to move back to mother Russia because for some reason I thought that it would be better than New York City. Mother Russia turned out to be a frozen rainy bitch in November. Each day, my apprehension that I may have made a terrible horrible, no good, very bad mistake, grows. I've been here for approximately 4 days now, though truth be told it feels more like 2 months, and can't say that I don't freak out at least twice a day and start hyperventilating about the fact that I'm here and not say back in my safe warm apartment back in the good old U.S. of A (busted as that shit might have been, at least I wasn't getting threatened with street crime during casual conversation with various members of my family.) All that having been said, I'm going to go ahead and keep a record of the day to day impressions. Hopefully things will look up eventually. So, onto day 1. It was actually my very first night here, straight off the plane. I'm just going to copy what I already wrote to one of you in an email.

I flew into St. Petersburg fairly drugged up, alternating between xanax and Advil PM, the sleepy kind. At the airport, I got picked up by a car that my father's wife sent for me and then it took a really long time to get home. We got stuck in traffic completely, and this is where the problem started because I realized instantaneously that I had to piss like a racehorse, and that St. Petersburg is notorious for not having places to do this. So we're stuck in traffic and tell my mum (who also came to pick me up) that I need to pee and she's just kind of like "well, deal, there's nothing we can do about it." As in "Here in Russia we don't need to pee." So I left my bags in the car, and my mum, and set off on my own, in the dark (oh yeah, it was 5:30 p.m. and dark) to look for some place to relieve myself. My mum handed me her cell phone and told me to look for some street and some building after I've taken care of that, which she had no faith that I would be able to do. Did I mention that I was still severely drugged up?
I then spent the next 15 minutes or so running up to every person I saw and yelling "bathroom?" at them as hope slowly died and I sort of started to prepare myself for the fact that my first act in Russia, will be to have pissed myself. I thought, "that'll be a funny story to tell people after I get over the trauma. Like I got to Russia and immediately pissed my pants, because that's how scary it is." But actually, everyone that I asked was sort of pointing in some direction and going "there". So eventually, I found a public restroom that you have to pay for and because I had no rubles (it cost 15) I ended up paying 5 motherfucking Euros for that shit. So this will forever be known as the most expensive piss that I've ever taken.
But I was very proud of myself for finding this restroom and then finding my way to my mother's apartment all on my own without being
a) beaten
b) robbed
c) raped
d) killed
e) drenched in urine

First night folks.