Apteka Apptitude

Very shortly after my arrival in Petersburg the task fell upon me of finding a place to buy various toiletry items. Some things I was almost out of (deodorant), some things I just hadn’t wasted luggage space bringing to Russia (shampoo, shower gel), and some things I had, on 2 hours of sleep, abandoned in the bathroom of the Frankfurt International Airport (toothbrush). So I ventured out into my neighborhood in search of a pharmacy, where these types of things can be purchased. (The word for pharmacy in Russian, by the way, is “apteka,” which explains the title of this entry. Learning is fun!)
Pharmacies in Russia are of two stripes. The first, more agreeable, stripe is the modern mini-CVS-type pharmacy, where you can browse the shelves (with a dictionary) and take your selections to the cashier. The second, more prevalent, stripe is the kassa-style pharmacy. I described the hateful kassa system in a previous post last time I was in Russia, but for the uninitiated, the kassa system is a Soviet hold-over in which you go to a counter, tell the person behind the counter exactly what you want, and he or she writes out a check for it. You then go to the cashier and pay for your products, and take the receipt to the first counter, where the first person gives you what you bought. Only insert subsidiary steps 1-10, in which you plow over/are plowed over by the swarming masses of people who are also trying to navigate between the fifteen counters in the store and be always first in line.
Alas, after wandering my neighborhood at some length, a CVS-style pharmacy was not to be had, and I had to go to a kassa-style one. Plaque just doesn’t wait, as it turns out. Fortunately this kassa wasn’t very crowded, but I still had to deal with telling the kassa lady exactly what I wanted. Surprisingly (?), I don’t have an extraordinarily robust vocabulary for dealing with beauty products. So our conversation went something like this:

Me: “Shampoo, please.”
Her: “What kind? Blah blah, blah blah blah, or blah dee blah?”
Me: “Um… I’ll try that one.”
Her: “Blah dee blah?”
Me: “Yeah, the blue one.”

Repeat for shower gel, deodorant, and toothbrush.
I returned home to examine my purchases with a dictionary. I got lucky in the shampoo arena – my hair will now be “luxuriously shiny.” The deodorant also seems to be okay. My other two purchases turned out to be a toothbrush with bristles especially designed for people with braces, and a shower gel made from the extract of something that isn’t in my dictionary, but on the package looks like an orange olive.