Blogs don't burn

I had to do laundry this afternoon (I wore the same black cardigan turned shirt today that I wore out Saturday night even though it wreaked of cigarette smoke (Not mine, Mom and Dad! Remain calm!), because that’s how dire these straits of mine were), and, because the aforementioned cardigan needed to be washed (badly), I changed into this shirt, sold in London for the Olympics, and purchased for me by my ever-enabling family. I don’t wear it out and about in Germany, but I figured it was safe in the dorm.

I couldn’t find the laundry machines, so I staked out the main entrance until I saw someone coming. “Do you speak English?” I asked him.

“Po-russki,” he replied.

And that, dorogiye rebyata, is how I came to explain my life story to the law student Nikita, who knows all too well where and how to do laundry in this building (and who complimented, albeit with great confusion, my Russian—spasibo bol’shoi, Nikita).

And to think that people say there aren’t any practical uses for Russian.