Let me start, as I often do in real life, with an apology. It’s been a long time since I last managed to get myself together and write. I’d like to tell you I have really good excuses, but the truth is that my only passable excuse is for this past week.
See, in the past two months, I’ve lived in 4 different places. I’ve come to think of myself as something of an expert on dragging one’s possessions, in their entirety, through the snow-and-ice-encrusted streets of a foreign city (and airports. God, I hate airports now.). My plan was to use my new found, hard-won expertise to write not exactly a guide to moving, but a guide to settling in and staying relatively sane while doing so. (Hint: my method involves long hot baths and lots of chocolate. And also wine.)
BUT. I was walking through the city last Monday, in a great mood, thinking about how I was getting back into the swing of everything, when I almost died. For real. This past year, Saint Petersburg, along with most of the rest of Europe, had its worst winter in anyone’s recent memory (here, it was the double threat of the coldest weather in 15 or 20 years and the heaviest snowfall in 130).
Last week the temperature here crept above freezing for the first time in 4 months (or more? I can’t remember the last time). This SOUNDS like a great thing, but in fact it transformed the entire city into a giant, living video game, with innumerable deadly obstacles to avoid. And no cheat codes for extra lives. The sidewalks are alternately icy, covered with piles of snow, or lakes of slush. Cars slip and slide and don’t stop when you expect them to. But that’s not what tried to kill me on Monday. No, I had a more sinister enemy, one that attacks swiftly from above.
As the snow started to melt, huge chunks of it, often mixed with large blocks of ice, started falling from roofs. I’d been trying my best to stay away from the edges of buildings, but some sidewalks are narrow, and people have a bad habit of parking their cars on sidewalks, too. I bet you can see where this is going.
So remember I was walking around in a great mood? Yeah. Well I heard a noise from above me, and I immediately stopped walking. At that second, a HUGE, HUGE block of ice fell not three inches in front of my face. Small chunks of ice and snow landed on my head and in the collar of my jacket. I couldn’t move for maybe a full minute. Then I pulled myself together and scrambled to the other side of the street (a canal, so no buildings around!). I didn’t stop shaking for hours.
