kravietz 🦇 on Nostr: Here another one who wrote to me the day before yesterday. It’s a Russian I know ...
Here another one who wrote to me the day before yesterday. It’s a Russian I know from expeditions in the mountains - he blocked me in 2022 and now suddenly as if nothing ever happened ‘all the best, what’s up’ etc.
I politely wrote him back - life, children, work, war. ‘But no politics,’ he stipulated. Then he complained a little about the interest rates on mortgages (‘we fortunately took at 8% but now it’s 24%’). Then he wrote that in the summer they wanted to go somewhere by the sea. For Muscovites, ‘by the sea’ means Gelendzyk, Anapa and the like (because Crimea has got a bad name lately, with something burning and exploding there).
I say to him ‘well, I guess you like mazut medicinal baths’ because it’s is already all over the Azov and Black Sea coasts on the Russian side.
He replies that ‘it’s nothing, they will clean it up’. This is the kind of first-level message that every Russian keeps on the surface of consciousness for retorts in passing. I responded with this. He understood.
Then there was silence for a while, he must have searched in Yandex that they won’t ‘clean it up’ after all, because what’s on the coast is a trifle that only volunteers clean up and the administration makes theatre of, while most of the mazut has sunk to the bottom. And it will surface as it warms up.
Then he wrote without conviction: ‘there is hydrogen sulphide at the bottom, it will decompose it out’, which must be some surreal theory of the “reach over your right shoulder with your left hand and scratch your ear” (the so-called “mnogochodovki”) genre that the Russians love so much.
A few moments passed again and before I could close my mouth, open in astonishment, he wrote, ‘I think we’ll go to the Caspian after all’. And then he added, ‘I’ve always wanted to see Derbent’.
I politely wrote him back - life, children, work, war. ‘But no politics,’ he stipulated. Then he complained a little about the interest rates on mortgages (‘we fortunately took at 8% but now it’s 24%’). Then he wrote that in the summer they wanted to go somewhere by the sea. For Muscovites, ‘by the sea’ means Gelendzyk, Anapa and the like (because Crimea has got a bad name lately, with something burning and exploding there).
I say to him ‘well, I guess you like mazut medicinal baths’ because it’s is already all over the Azov and Black Sea coasts on the Russian side.
He replies that ‘it’s nothing, they will clean it up’. This is the kind of first-level message that every Russian keeps on the surface of consciousness for retorts in passing. I responded with this. He understood.
Then there was silence for a while, he must have searched in Yandex that they won’t ‘clean it up’ after all, because what’s on the coast is a trifle that only volunteers clean up and the administration makes theatre of, while most of the mazut has sunk to the bottom. And it will surface as it warms up.
Then he wrote without conviction: ‘there is hydrogen sulphide at the bottom, it will decompose it out’, which must be some surreal theory of the “reach over your right shoulder with your left hand and scratch your ear” (the so-called “mnogochodovki”) genre that the Russians love so much.
A few moments passed again and before I could close my mouth, open in astonishment, he wrote, ‘I think we’ll go to the Caspian after all’. And then he added, ‘I’ve always wanted to see Derbent’.