If it's sunny and July, then why is it cold and snowing?

First of all, no, no, it's not true. A frigid wasteland Russia may be, but not between the months of June and August. Temperatures here are hitting record highs (80-90 degrees, I think, although the Russians are ridiculous and metric, and heck if I know what 31 degrees Celcius means), and, for a city that sits-slash-sinks proudly into a marsh, we've been remarkably precipitation free. The storm of good weather has, however, created a flurry of questions for me, and chief among them are 1) What is this white, fluffy stuff that falls from the sky and collects in drifts on the gound, and 2) Why am I freezing at night?

You see, Lucy had it right all along when she told Charlie Brown, "The snow comes up! Just like the flowers!" St. Petersburg loves snow so much that it just can't let it go, even for a measly two months of the year. Unfortunately, St. Petersburg can't have snow when the weather is otherwise focused on sucking every drop of moisture out of the city and it's inhabitants. So, we get the next best thing: пух (prounounced "poox," translates to "fluff").

At first charming and quaint, пух rapidly became deeply annoying when I realized that it wasn't going to go away after I was done finding it charming and quaint. Пух is white fluff that falls from some sort of tree that, judging from the shear volume of пух in the air, apparently covers every surface in and around the city not otherewise physically occupied by some sort of monument to Peter the Great. At times, walking around in St. Petersburg is literally like walking around in a heavy flurry of snow that doesn't diffidently melt away when it touches your skin. There are people in St. Petersburg who cannot leave their apartments during the day, they are too allergic to пух. There are people who use пух as an excuse not to leave their apartments during the day and thus have the energy to party all white-night long. Пух is in the air. Пух is in the trees. Пух is on the ground. Most importantly, пух is on my clothes, in my eyes, in my hair, and up my nose, and I want to it go away now.

But St. Petersburg, land of the 6-to-8-month winter, doesn't end it's quest for winter year-round with new-fallen, allergenic snow. We here in the city (and I use the word "we" here to mean everyone who isn't me) miss our sub-zero temperatures outdoors in February, and since no airconditioner in Russia is powerful enough to cool the whole city (let's face it: no airconditioner in Russia is powerful enough to cool my university classrooms--airconditioning is really not a Russian speciality), we try to re-create the feeling with sub-zero showers.

I don't know why it happens, and I don't know who to blame, but when I find out the answer to these questions, there will be bloodshed, and this is Russia, so I don't have to make it look like an accident. On a staggered schedule, every neighborhood in Petersburg loses hot water for a 2-3 week period over the summer. Ours got shut off yesterday and apparently won't get turned back on until July 24, five days before I leave for Moscow. I received no warning from my host family, who I think assumed that I would expect to have to plunge myself in a shower of ice daily for a small eternity. When I asked why this happened, all the host mother could tell me was, "Eh. That's Russia," which is the answer to far too many questions about things that go wrong around here. She seemed to take some solace in the fact that the entire neighborhood was suffering with us, which I thought was actually very German of her. The point is that it's hotter than toast outside and sunnier than...than...a really, really sunny day (take Abby's Petersburg Blog Challenge! Come up with a better metaphor than that!), and yet I come home covered in white fluffy stuff and go to bed with blue lips and frozen extremities. In conclusion, only in Russia.

Fun international moment: The internet cafe that I used is often populated almost exclusively with loud English foreigners who don't know a word of Russian and who are forced to interact with a staff that knows just enough English to take your money and not enough to give it back to you if there's a problem with your computer. I make a point of ordering my time in Russian, and it's always fun to see the look of relief on the cashiers face when she hears someone speaking a language that she speaks better. The way it works is you tell them how much time you want and they assign you a computer. The other day, telling me my computer (which I had ordered in Russian), the clerk (who I think was new), went, "Number sixt...uuuhhhh...извините, номер шестнадцать (sorry, number 16)." For a brief, shining moment, I convinced a Russian that I was one of them. Score.

Addendum to the fun international moment: Of course, today I ordered in Russian and a different cashier answered me in English, so the war is not yet won.