happy man.

13 hours of sleep makes me a happy man.

on another note, I recall a conversation I had with a & k sometime ago. we were at a cafe, and I was just about to select a dish from a menu written ONLY in cyrillic.

me: I hope I make a good choice today. all the time, i've been making choices that turn out to be bad.

a & k: hahaha.

so let me try to recount the bad choices i've made during the trip so far.

we were at the central market in st petersburg and I saw the row of shops selling cheese - and there was this thick fat gob of yellow solid which looked like cheese, and more importantly, mozzerella cheese to me. so I bought half a thick fat gob and gleefully went back to the tour group to bite into my treasure. as my precious yellow pearl emerged from the clingy translucently white plastic bag, I noticed that the solid yielded easily to the touch and it seemed a little oily. was it butter? elena the tour guide, confirmed that it was butter. how was I to eat a gob of butter half the size of a fist?? shite. obviously, my year over experience in restaurants that stored mozzerella IN WATER did me no good. fool.

at a tepemok stand ( a fast food chain of bliny selling shops), my first buy of a bliny with the filling of ' cold boiled pork and horse radish' turned out to have a nice generous chunk of fat. wah lau.

I had some tea at a 'chic tea salon' ( quoted from lonely planet, or LP) that overlooked a 'quaint courtyard'. in my mind, the courtyard would be a rolling meadow, with butterflies and daisies abounding, and with little shrubs here and there where pretty birds make their nests. but this was in the city, thus I had to 'wake up my idea'. and looking at the cheapest drink, iced tea that cost 50 r, was not a choice, as they were out of it. thus I chose from the next gp of teas that ranged from 75 to 105 r. and I knew rooibos tea was kind of expensive, so I chose matte tea, which was the first in the list.( the price list for that gp started from 75 to 105 too). turned out drinking my tea was like drinking cigarettes, and my choice of tea was the most expensive of the gp. shite shite. always like that. I know that having expensive taste might be a good thing ( ahem, ahem) but to have a puffed up ego with a hole-ly pocket cannot beat the feeling of being full.

oh well, to learn is to live, eh?

-l