As I understand it, St. Petersburg has been going through a SNOWY HELL for the second year in a row.
I’m drawing that conclusion because the number of jokes in my friends feed and on Twitter about "knocking icicles down with a laser" is growing exponentially. Auntie Valya and her darling son tagging along, busy looking after their family’s well-being, somehow can’t find time for such nonsense as running the city. dimagubin wrote a good post on the subject: *It’s f....ng unbelievable how quickly this smart, charming, sly, shameless woman—that is, taken as a whole, a model of cynical (= modern) behavior—has turned Petersburg into besieged Leningrad (the city under Nazi siege in WWII), while the goats sweep the road with their beards for her as she speeds with flashing lights from Komarovo to Smolny. And since this woman has destroyed more historic buildings on Nevsky than were destroyed even under Soviet rule, and, it seems, already more than were destroyed during the blockade by Shicklgruber (Hitler’s original surname; here used mockingly) himself (they’re about to demolish Nevsky, 68 now); and since it was she who had an unbelievable number of roads in the center dug up just before winter, and started removing tram tracks in the center just before winter; and caused a transport collapse so incredible, so unimaginable that not even Moscow has seen anything like it; and since people on all sides now call her not “the Glass” or “the Folding Cot” anymore, but “Valka Hitler” — I would like to relieve Valentina Ivanovna of such emotional accusations of Nazism. *And he’s also looking for specific examples of St. Petersburg trashiness to use in his radio show to go after mommy and her little sonny-boy (and everywhere else too). So if any Petersburgers are reading this post, I suggest heading over to Dima’s comments and telling him what’s been eating at you.