Around this time last month, within four hours of arriving in Russia, I was banging on a door like a crazy person.
The St. Petersburg apartment in which we rented a room has a really stupid lock, granted—but the lock was not nearly as stupid as the assholes inside who locked it stupidly, preventing us, as well as two people from Australia, from re-entering the apartment. We knocked. We banged on the door. We rang the doorbell repeatedly. We alternated, so at some point each of the four of us had wailed on the door. We called. We woke the neighbours. Nothing. NB: After finally making our way back into the apartment a couple of hours later after the fucking idiots decided to unlock the door, we did a test to know if they could have possibly heard us, our test proving they must have been deliberately avoiding opening the door, because it was fucking loud. NB #2: the next morning, they did not even do so much as apologize for the hassle. At least they left St. Petersburg the morning after we arrived.
It was a great start to our séjour in Russia.
First, the apartment: we had a pretty small but comfortable room in a four-room apartment, of which only three were inhabited (totaling six people, including us). Our room was a bit weird, though—upon entering, you were greeted with some kind of insane toilet/shower/sink combo encased in a tiny glass box. I mean, the shower head was placed nearly directly above the toilet. And the sink wasn’t even connected to the water piping. I attempted a pee in the bizarre toilet cubicle mostly out of curiosity and my knees were pressed up against the glass wall. Needless to say, we did not use it again.
The owners of the apartment, Sasha and Andrej, were like ghosts. We knew of their existence, but rarely saw them. It was weird. I guess I understand they don’t want to spend their lives surrounded by transient people coming in and out of their apartment, but I expected them to be around more than they were. They also asked for payment in Euros, which is technically illegal in Russia (you can specify prices in foreign currencies but you are not to accept actual foreign currencies as payment), and so it left us with a feeling of malaise. We paid them in Euros anyway, with which they were very pleased. My impression of Sasha and Andrej is that they are sort of relatively well-to-do bohemian socialites who chain smoke and hang out with the art crowd and talk about the new revolution. Which is, you know, fine, particularly since we never saw them.
The apartment was comfortable, pretty clean and very homey (though perhaps a little cluttered). Lots of books, tapestries and personal touches marked the place. It was definitely nice to come back and have the entire place to ourselves a lot of the time, and to be able to buy groceries to save some money on meals. It had a good location, but it was on the top floor of a particularly tall four-story walk-up. It was pretty clean, though I remarked a couple of weird/gross things: 1) there were a number of flies buzzing around, or perhaps one or two extremely persistent ones. 2) I found a watermelon in the hallway leading to our room; I took it out and placed it on the table so they could do something with it (it has just begun to go bad), and it had disappeared when we returned that night. 3) Whilst sitting at the kitchen table relaxing, a bug that I can only presume was some kind of cockroach fell on my head and into the book I was looking at. I ended up finding it the next night and murdering it mercilessly. But all in all, it was a nice place. You can’t go to a foreign country and expect it to have the same standards as what you’re used to at home, so even though I was super grossed out by that insect, at least I don’t have bed bugs *knocks wood.*
ANYWAY. Enough about the apartment.
As in Moscow, we did a lot of touristy things in St. Petersburg, as well. We went to the Hermitage, The Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood (which resembles St. Basil’s but is actually infinitely nicer, especially the interior!), the Dostoevsky House-Museum, St. Isaac’s Cathedral, the Russian Museum, the main shopping district of Nevsky Prospect which is home to the Gostiny Dvor mall. We ate bliny and pelmeni at two tiny neighbouring restaurants somewhere along the Fontanka, we took a boat tour of the canals. Most memorably, though, is the ballet we attended at the famous Mariinksy Theatre (it was Swan Lake, for the record)—I don’t typically enjoy these kinds of artistic presentations, but it was so incredibly beautiful. I will never forget it. We did not, however, witness the opening of a St. Petersburg drawbridge, mostly because we were always asleep when they ceremoniously opened them. This disappointed the wife, but I was just too tired to stay awake, especially since we’d have to walk back to the apartment afterwards and everything is sooo far (They typically open them between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m.).
Lesson #1: Don’t let Russians tell you something is “10-15 minutes away.” It is NEVER 10-15 minutes away. Time must be an abstract concept in Russia, because when someone tells you “10-15 minutes,” what they really mean is “30 minutes to infinity.”
Though I’ve never managed to get through any Dostoevsky tomes so far, I really enjoyed his house-museum. The wife, being a fan of his, enjoyed it even more. She even successfully convinced me to walk all the way to an unmarked and otherwise common apartment building where he famously killed one of his characters in Crime and Punishment (see the “plot” section in the linked Wikipedia entry).
The Hermitage, housed in the Winter Palace, is extraordinarily gorgeous. The palace itself is at times more beautiful and interesting than the art inside of it. That said, when one is constantly surrounded by grand palaces gilded in gold and gems, it gets a bit hard to see the forest for the trees—I found the opulence a bit numbing after a while, which is too bad considering pretty much EVERYTHING was dripping in precious metals and jewels.
Admittedly, knowing more of the history of St. Petersburg would have helped immensely in my enjoyment of certain historical landmarks, which is essentially the entire city. Every single building felt grandiose and just simply massive, whether they were government buildings, palaces, shopping centres or apartment complexes. St. Petersburg’s signature architectural style is incredibly imposing, even more so than being surrounded by skyscrapers in a city like Chicago. The buildings along the canal are all these weird Easter-pastel colours, and so uniform in their design, but they’re long and tall, and it takes ages to walk a single block.
Lesson #2: Bring comfortable shoes, and if you expect rain, bring TWO pairs of comfortable shoes.
I’ll never know how Russian women manage to walk in stilettos. They go everywhere in them, but the cobblestone, long blocks and endless staircases and escalators make me respect their determination to wear stilettos even more. They must have the grossest feet inside their shoes, though.
The metros in St. Petersburg are just as deep, if not deeper, than the ones in Moscow, since they run underneath all the canals. And there are not that many stations, so you may find yourself facing a 20-to 30-minute walk to your final destination, even after having taken the metro to the closest possible station. Stepping onto the metro escalators is terrifying, since they move so quickly, and looking up is vertigo-inducing. I could never look up for more than a couple seconds without getting dizzy. If you’ve been anywhere in Europe or North America with a metro system, you have STILL not experienced the depths of a metro system like the ones in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Maybe you never will.
All in all, I learned a lot of things while in Russia, especially about myself:
• I really hate being lost. It’s frustrating, confusing and exhausting. And it happened every single day.
• The people in St. Petersburg are way nicer than the ones in Moscow.
• It’s really not nearly as scary as people make it out to be.
• It’s impossible to see all there is to see in a handful of days, or probably even a handful of weeks. However, it’s extremely tiring and alienating not being able to communicate with those around you in an effective way, and so even though I felt I had seen but a fraction of St. Petersburg and Moscow, I was eager to leave them. Had the language been easier to understand, perhaps I would have been more sad about leaving. I felt, and still do feel, badly about not having enjoyed it as much as the wife did, but we can’t win ‘em all, right?
The St. Petersburg photo album on Flickr is available here!
Tags: Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood, Dostoevsky, Hermitage, Russia, St. Isaac's Cathedral, St. Petersburg, travel
