Monday, December 22, 2008

Pictures from Frozen Hell

Yep. Took some pictures today y'all. It was hard because, and I can't stress this enough, the devil camera won't charge all the way and keeps taunting me by turning on for 3 second at a time, and then crapping out and taking a five minute smoke break. Also, I hate taking pictures with flash. Everything looks even colder and grayer than it already is. I'd rather the picture have the blurry, but warm quality to it. It's cold enough here as it is. So without further ado, here are a few pics from a day in the life of Plusha:

Alright, now the one above is a photo of the escalator leading out of the Metro here. For those of you not in the know, this lovely city was built on a freaking swamp back in the day (which explains the massive amounts of mosquitoes here during the summer). As a result of the swamp, when it came time to modernize and build them some subway stations, they had to dig real deep to get underneath the swamps. So the subways here are way further down underground than they are in NYC. And consequently, the escalators are frighteningly long and fast. I swear, when I have to ride that thing in the morning, it feels like I'm heading down to some level of Dante's inferno, only mechanized.

The weather conditions today were great. I believe the word for it here is Metel. That's like snow wind that blows in your eyes and your face and is everywhere and you feel like you're getting your ass kicked by little pieces of white Satan the whole way to work. But by the time I got out of work, this is what I saw:

And this:
I'm not sure if this comes across through the pictures, but it totally made me think of nuclear winter.

Later, I saw a little bit of pretty on a large street. Someone had lit up some trees with colorful lights:



Naturally, I had to take the escalator again, so here it is just in case you didn't get a good enough impression of it from the first picture. Only difference is that in this one I'm actually going down. Hey, if I have to deal with this shit twice a day, then you do as well, if you love me:
This is me after I bought some pine tree branches (that's going to be our "Christmas tree" this year), and was trying to get home through the throngs of people and freeze:




And then finally, at home, thawed out, with my new "Christmas tree" I'm just grateful that I can feel my hands again:




Happy Hanukkah everybody!