Petersburg - homefull!

No pictures again...forgot to bring the camera cord with us, but we've discovered a great internet cafe - ZEBRA! from where to keep contact with the world.

After a couple of days of bumbing around, we decided to head to the Vaux Hall (vokzal = train station) in search of some babushka that would let us rent her apartment for a couple of days. It's a wierd system: for some reason, it's an accepted fact that the only people you can rent an apartment from are babushki, and thus we were on the hunt for old women. Thing is, the economic conditions have changed, and thus, it's not actual babushki who have spare rooms. Thus, the babushki are actually agents, taking a 15 percent commission. We found out later that the militsia (may their name be eternally cursed), have decided to demand 150 ruble daily bribes from these babushki. We found a stealth babushka, however, whose hair wasn't all the way grey and had thus avoided paying the bribes thus far. It was a little cheaper, but not much, it still costs 800 rubles a day, so like $32. So we have a room in an apartment now, with this closet Finnish landlord who doesn't live there. The wierd thing is that it's totally unclear who else lives in the apartment, especially since we keep very....odd hours. They busted into our room at the crack of dawn (a figure of speech, it's always light out) and took a power converter, I have no idea why...but otherwise, it's almost like having our own apartment. We're not registered yet, because the system is asinine, so it turns out there's a $40 bribe to pay every time you get stopped by the cops. It happens constantly to a lot of the other ex-pats, but my Russian's pretty convincing, and I only wear Russian clothes, so I don't stand out like they do. So far, no problems. However, the flip side is that my getup now consists of an addidas track suit, foam sandals, tight tee shirts, and pointy leather shoes. Rock, rock on. There will be some pictures later.