Balalaika redux....

Or not!

Yesterday I went to the central post office here in St. Petes to mail off some books that I had no intention of dragging back to Moscow on the train. Now, some of you may know the story of my balalaika adventure 8 years ago. It was a truly Soviet experience and resulted in tears.

So this time I came prepared with my own box! Turns out you can only ship 5 kg at a time in one box and I was over, so not all the books got to go home. But now they have all of these cute boxes for sale that have "Pochta Rossii" all over them. Its nice to know they've modernized recently. So 5 kg of books will eventually get put on a boat and float across the Atlantic home. I expect them sometime in September!

Meanwhile, I've been trying to wrap things up here, in preparation for going back to Moscow. By wrapping things up I mean photocopying everything I can get my hands on. I was going through a journal the other day called "Soviet Museum" (don't ask) and I needed to copy some articles. In order to spend 170 rubles to copy these articles, I needed to pay the Periodicals department 300 rubles for the permission to make the photocopies. I assume that this is a way of trying to recoup wear and tear on older books, but if that's not a racket, I don't know what is.

And the Communists in the archive lost one of my files. Yup. They misplaced it. The one file I still needed to work with. If this were the 1930s they'd be sent to to gulag for something like that! Geez.