When it Rains, It Pours

Yup.

Yesterday was my test of steeled nerves. I had to go out into the city of Petropavlovsk all by myself, on buses, to meet the Itelmen woman who wrote me my visa letter so I could get registered with the Federal Migration Bureau. I had everything with me - my passport, visa, migration card, copies of everything, my tablet that has the downloaded version of Google Translate in Russian in case things went south... I was ready.

The world was just as ready for me, though.

I got on the bus out of Yelizovo, with some directions given to me by the woman I was meeting over the phone via my host. I had to change buses at X, get on the Y till "Rospirioda".

I get on my 2nd bus, and I ask the driver to tell me when we arrived at the "10th kilometer" stop. (This line is measured by how far it is from the P-K bus station.) He said he'd tell me. The woman next to me asked me where I was headed, since I prefaced my request to the driver that my Russian isn't very good (regardless of  the truth of that assessment, I find it helps make people take you seriously). I told her and she gave me a really strange look. She didn't recognize the stop, but she agreed I should get on the bus I had been told to. She offered to let me use her phone to call the person I was meeting so she could talk to them and make sure I was going where I needed to. I was like... holy crap, is this for real? Something must be fishy; these folks are FAR too kind. Some of the other women around me (all women, mind you) took interested and decided it was their mission to help me get to where I'm going. Not in a nosy way - but in a genuinely concerned you're-a-young-woman-you-need-us kind of way. It was so kind of them.

I got off at my transfer stop, and one of the women who'd been listening to me pulled me over to the bus I needed to get on. Another women  who was also getting on this bus asked me more about the stop I needed to get off at. I showed her what I had written down but it was in English and she couldn't read it. She pulled out her smartphone and furiously began trying to find "Rospriroda". She found a similar sounding stop, and once she said it out loud, it dawned on her and the bus driver that it HAD to be where I needed to go. I told them I trusted them. Then I got the brilliant idea to text Yulia, who I was meeting, about the stop name. They were right. I gave the ladies some postcards from Santa Barbara I had with me (Santa Barbara was the title of a soap opera that was insanely popular in Russia in the 80s). They didn't seem to think they were going out of their way at ALL for me, and were floored by how thankful I was.

I met Yulia, and we had a traditional Itelmen meal (potatoes with caviar mixed in and raw salmon slices) while she filled out these crazy forms for me. It was super lovely.

Here's where it starts to swiftly slide downhill.

She told me that there was an extra document I needed to fly to Palana, and it wasn't ready yet. My reservation was for Monday, so she suggested I go to the office and change it to Wednesday. She got me on a bus to there, and I had to cross the street and walk across the construction site of a church that was being built.

I was walking up some stairs (they were like wooden park stairs), and suddenly, I was on the ground. When I got up, I had to pull my foot off of a rust iron fence spike (like those garden fences you just stick in the ground, or like tomato plant cage). The difference was the bars on this fence thing were really rusty, and there was literally a hole in my foot about 1cm in diameter. My foot had been impaled, and this tripped me and I had fallen, slicing open my right shin and banging both my knees badly on the gravel. I was in shock. Tons of blood started shooting out of my foot, but I knew that was a good thing - my dad had taught me well how to treat puncture wounds. I made it bleed a lot in case there was bacteria or rust in the wound, and it bled. And bled, and bled and bled. It didn't stop. I didn't know how deep it went, but I could see the fat underneath the flap of skin and my tendon underneath. It missed my hallus, but went between my 2nd and 3rd metatarsals. It had definitely gone right through two of the veins on the top of my foot. I was freaking out - was I really this dumb? How did I miss this? How did I manage to injure myself this badly my second day?

Well, this was gonna have to wait so I soldiered on to the ticket office. God, there was just blood EVERYWHERE. It wouldn't stop bleeding! I had to take my coat off and keep wiping the blood running down the front of my foot every minute or so. It was quite embarrassing, and I hoped no one saw it. So I got to the ticket office, and long story short, they told me they couldn't change my reservation because everything was booked. The woman I talked to was definitely on her last nerve for the day, and she had zero patience to talk to me slowly. She told me to call tomorrow to see what could be done, but I'm pretty sure it was because she wanted me to go away. So I went away, defeated. I had hope that SOMETHING could happen, because my field site was Palana! I had people waiting there for me! Nice people! Koryak people! This was my research, going right out the window.

And my blood coming right out my foot.

I got back on the buses, and it took me about two hours to get back to Yelizovo. I had to keep wiping the blood off and hide my mangled foot from people on the bus. I didn't want any attention. My foot had started to hurt really bad, and there was a giant blood bubble pooling underneath the skin whenever I was standing or didn't have my foot elevated above my shin. Every few minutes I had to "milk" the blood out from under the skin so it didn't clot and cause problems. I was reasonably successful, but the last small walk to my B&B was pretty awful, and I spent a good half hour squeezing more blood out of my foot, and another hour later, it was still bleeding.

So, I was without a ticket to my field site, and I had a gaping hole through my foot. The bleeding finally slowed down, so I put some Neosporin on it and a pressure bandage. I ran through a list of things I could've, should've, would've done, how I could have prevented all of this by being Wonder Woman and omniscient and omnipotent. After a Skype call to Jason, I was a little back down to Earth. It wasn't an easy night. My toes looked like little sausages, and now my fore foot is just filled with edema. I'm hoping it's going to be okay.

When it rains, it pours - that's what I was thinking while I was out trying to get home from the city.

Shit happens - This is what I'm thinking now, and trying to figure something out.