Gross.

My first long-term stay in Russia, a month's trip to Petersburg, we often ate lunch in a little café in one of the academic buildings of St. Petersburg State University. The café was fine, but the building's entryway was absolutely awful. I would take a deep breath right before entering, which I would try to hold all the way down the hall to the café, against a horrible stench which I did not recognize at first as cat urine. It didn't take long to work out; right inside the building's entrance there was an assortment of dishes filled with dry cat food and raw meat trimmings. Soon enough, we started actually seeing the stray cats and their litters of kittens that inhabited the stairwell.

Anyway, yesterday I walked into the entryway of my apartment building, which appears clean and freshly painted (the most you can ask from a Russian apartment building entryway, as they are public spaces for which nobody has been responsible since the Soviet era) and was met with an oddly familiar stench. I couldn't put my finger on what it was until I came back from my run this morning and saw in a shaft of light streaming in from the courtyard two neat little dishes of cat food.

OH, F*** NO, PEOPLE. If I weren't a guest here, I'd throw it outside myself. But as it is, I think I'm going to call up the woman who actually lives in my apartment (who has repaired to her dacha on the Volga for the summer) and ask her if there's anything I can do about it. I will absolutely play the "I'm horribly allergic to cats [really, I am] and the apartment is right on the first floor near their pee-soaked lair" card. But first I have to figure out how to say "pee-soaked lair" in Russian.