This one is a tad long. Sorry. A lot happened.
So last Wednesday afternoon, I left my flat to catch the 4:38 bus, after which I caught a pendeltag (commuter train) and then a tunnelbana (subway) and then another bus, all to end up at Vikingterminalen. Which is where I, along with about 100 other exchange students from all over Sweden, caught a ferry to Turku, Finland. There, we got on 2 private charter buses with the name “Niinimaki” on the side of them. Then we drove for about 4-5 hours, went through customs, and suddenly, we were in Russia! All of the officers on the Russian side of the border were wearing fur hats. We drove for another hour or so, and then we stopped in an empty parking lot next to a white van.
The man in the van opened up the back door and inside were tons of bottles of alcohol and cartons of cigarettes. He accepted rubles and euros, niether of which I am familiar with (Sweden is an EU member, but still uses Swedish kronor (SEK). They found a loophole somehow, and have agreed not to worry about it until 2010.) I figured out later that I had paid approximately $4 USD for half a liter of vodka. In Sweden, because of the government monopoly on alcohol sales, the same amount would probably be around $15 USD. He also exchanged euros to rubles, doing all of the math in his head. It was fascinating.
We drove another hour or so, and arrived at Hotel Ladoga. The building, and many of the ones surrounding it, looked like boxes with die-cut squares punched in for windows. It was dreary. That night we stayed in the hotel, chatting and drinking with friends from Södertörns and meeting people from all of the other universities. In total, from the time that I left my little village of Riksten to the time that I arrived in my hotel room in St. Petersburg, about 27 hours passed.
The hotel was quite funny. The set of keys were genuine keys, with a keychain proclaiming the hotel name and room number, which I think is quite rare nowadays- at least in the United States. I’ve grown quite used to anonymous credit card style keys, that you can lose and not worry about at all. Also on the keyring was a bottle opener, which made everyone chuckle and sigh and say “Oh, Russia.” We walked into the room of another exchange student, and she was chain smoking. I was about to say “You should open a window” when I realized that none of the rooms had smoke detectors. Bizarre! When we entered the room, it was small but comfortable. In the bathroom, hand-cut slips of paper rested in the sink, on the toilet lid, and on the side of the tub, proclaiming that they had been disinfected. Call me crazy, but in the states we just assume that it is disinfected. Well, everyone but my mother, who brings her own cleaning supplies to hotels…..
The next morning, Friday, we woke up and walked out into the bitter cold. Ally, another american girl, and I decided we would walk to the city center for the day, while almost everyone else took a bus to the suburbs in order to see Pushkin Palace. Now, the maps are written half in the Cyrillic alphabet and half in the Latin alphabet. So, unfortunately, I didn’t quite check the scale of the map. It was quite the walk, and we should have taken the metro. Nevertheless, we knew the way.
We crossed the longest bridge in the city, which was terrifying because semi trucks would pass and the entire thing would shake. When we reached the other side of the bridge, there was a very large, busy intersection. The oncoming traffic had no light, and therefore, the pedestrian crossing didn’t either. Ally and I waited for a few moments, tried to take alternate routes, tried to figure out a way to not cross the terrifying road, but there were none. We could either walk back across the freezing, windy, scary bridge, or cross the very fast traffic that was composed primarily of large trucks. After five or ten minutes of indecision, we saw a Russian man approaching, and decided to just follow him and mimic his actions. Well, he just ran across the street. Terrified, we followed suit, I’m sure to the amusement of the full bus station on the other side.
A few minutes later, a very old Russian man with a walker leaned in to speak with us while we were waiting at a crosswalk. We said “We speak no russian” and “english only”, which he understood (I think) but continued to speak russian. Eventually, through charades, I figured out that he was telling us that he could tell we were tourists because we were so bundled up. I think we also probably gave it away that we were tourists because we had no fur.
We decided to find a coffee shop, because it was freezing. En route, a man carrying a large sack of glass bottles did a double take when he heard us speaking English. He stopped, leaned in, and began to sing some old 1950s classic song to us in English. Then he said “Piccadilly? Piccadilly?” When we looked confused, he said “London?” We shook our heads and said “United States.” Then he leaned into Ally, said “I love you”, grinned and blushed and scampered away. Hilarious.
We found a Starbucks-esque coffee chain called “Republic of Coffee”. We went in, and to our delight the menu was written in both Russian and English. Ally asked for a latte. The woman, who spoke decent English, said “No, we have no coffee.” The coffee shop had no coffee. She said something about no hot water. We ordered hot chocolate. I’m still a little unclear on how she was able to make hot chocolate, but not coffee. We continued our trek to the city center.
We walked around, gawking, and then got hungry. We ate at an Italian restaurant. I pointed at the Irish coffee on the menu (It was freezing! I really needed something to warm me up!). The waitress shook her head and said “No coffee.” Interesting. No coffee in Russia. The pizza was hardly cooked.
Then we went to Kazan Cathedral (Каза́нский кафедра́льный собо́р, for my Cyrillic reading audience). We thought it was a capital building perhaps, due to the dome. We decided to wander in. It was amazing. It didn’t appear that congregations take place there, rather, people walk in at their convenience, do their thing, and leave. There were idols covering the walls, and a line of people waiting to go up to the altar. Under many of the pictures of the saints, there were large golden candle holders, with space to fit fifty or seventy thin tapers. They sold the tapers in varying lengths, made of beeswax, for 10-20 rubles (25 rubles = approx $1 USD). People would stand before an idol, make the sign of the cross, bow, and then melt the bottom of the taper on an already burning taper, light the wick, and then stick it into an empty space. It was quite nice to watch. The cathedral felt very peaceful. It was definitely odd to see all of that idolatry and lavishness, having been raised in a protestant culture.
Ally and I continued our trek. We ended up in another cathedral- St Isaacs. This one had been converted into a museum, and so I didn’t feel awkward taking pictures, because there was only a small area in the corner with worshippers.
At this point in the day, Ally and I were supposed to catch a bus at the hotel with a bunch of the other exchange students to go see a Russian Folk dance at Nikolayevsky Palace. We had walked quite far that day, so we decided to take the Metro back to our hotel- it was only 14 rubles! Less than 75 cents! Compare that to London, where the underground was the equivalent of $8 USD. I think that in Stockholm, the tunnelbana is somewhere around $3. Taking the Metro was pretty interesting. Apparently, it’s the deepest in the world. It took 3 or 4 minutes on the escalator just to get down to the trains! Once we got down to them, we had to figure out which side we were supposed to get on, and where we were supposed to transfer, etc. It was difficult, and nerve-wracking, because apparently thievery is a huge issue on the metro. It was packed with people, too. Trains came every minute or two, and they were all extremely overcrowded.
We had to hurry to the bus. There was a horrendous traffic jam- we were on the bus for an hour and a half. I remember looking out the window after sleeping for forty five minutes, and we had only moved a hundred yards or so. We ended up getting to the show fifteen minutes late, but they waited for us, which was very nice. The organizers handed us our tickets, and printed on the back was a map of the surrounding area. The palace was only two blocks away from St. Isaac’s Cathedral! We had no idea. That was a little irking.
The show was great though. Full of men jumping and kicking and women twirling, stomping and yipping at an extremely high pitch.
The next morning, we had to be up early for a bus tour of the city. Getting up was, err, difficult. Beverages sometimes flow a little too freely in Russia… The bus tour (or the parts of it I was awake for) was really cool. We drove around and saw some palaces and (more) cathedrals and nice views of the river. While we were at the river, a man was selling some souvenirs, and he had a brown bear cub on a leash. The baby bear had a muzzle on and was sucking milk from a bottle. He was quite dexterous, and very adorable,but the whole thing made me feel a bit sick. But seeing the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood (Храм Спаса на Крови) made me feel a bit better!
Neat!
Then we went to the State Hermitage Museum, which is located in the Winter Palace. They have 2.7 million pieces of art. Seriously. It was awesome. So much Matisse, so much Picasso, so much Van Gogh, so many cool mummies and paintings and mosaics and sculptures. Amazing.
We ate dinner at this little cafe, and I got a cabbage pancake. It was really really good! It was like a non-sweet crepe, stuffed with really savory shredded cabbage, dipped in a dairy-based sour-cream-esque sauce. Yum.
Then about 50 of us got onto a canal cruise. They gave a bottle of sparkling white wine and a half liter of vodka to every table, and then there was more Russian folk dancing! It was pretty neat. At one point, I looked out the window, and thought, “Oh goodness, he’s not going to make this turn, we’re about to hit the side of the canal”. Now, usually when I have thoughts like this, I’m just being paranoid. Not so, this time. Our boat actually collided with the canal wall. It was an interesting boat ride to say the least.
We got back to our hotel at 7-ish. We decided to all meet up in the lobby at 10 and go to a club together. We took the metro to a club called Club Metro which was confusing. We walked up, a security guard nodded at us, and then we went into this little arctic entry, where ordinary looking people wearing blue jackets lined the walls. A girl my height grabbed my jacket casually and pulled me towards her, then nonchalantly began patting me down. It was a much more invasive procedure to get into a club than I’ve ever witnessed before. A friend of ours had her gum confiscated. Then we went to the cashiers, who we couldn’t see because they were behind a metal barrier with only a small money slot. If you got there before midnight, it was supposed to be 240 rubles each, after midnight 300. It was 11:50. I was paying for a friend as well, so I stuck a 500 note in the slot and my hand, gesturing two. The woman (I could tell it was a woman by her fingernails) wrote 600 on a scrap of paper and handed it to us- which was frustrating, but I wasn’t about to argue with someone who probably doesn’t speak english, can’t hear me over the music, and has the ability to kick me out. She handed us 10 yellow slips. Some of our friends got 3 slips each, some got 4, we got 5 for some reason. Turns out that the slips get you free pepsi- but there is no set number for how many slips you need. A guy we know had to give the bartender four slips, but other people only had to give one. Others gave three. It was pretty weird.
This club was MASSIVE. Three floors- each had a huge dance floor and two bars which each had enough space for 50+ people to be at the bar, let alone all of the tables. The dance floor on the third level was playing techno, and we all piled into the very packed mass of gyrating russians. After dancing a few moments, we noticed that on balconies above the dance floor, four well-greased men wearing hot pants and hard hats were dancing. Well, not really dancing. They were moving very slowly, as though they were doing a photo shoot or something and they wanted to look very suave. They are apparently called “Angels” and the club is a bit famous for them.
The average age of the club-goers was about 16. I felt too old to be there. I’m 19! At any club in the US, I would feel way too young. And all of the 15 and 16 year olds were dressed up like prostitutes! They were wearing bras and very low jeans and nothing else.
So, we had some drinks and danced a bit and then we all met up outside around 2 am to take a taxi home. The bridges go up at around 2:30, so we needed to beat them. Well, in St. Petersburg, every car is apparently a taxi. You hail a taxi, and then someone pulls over, and then you negotiate a price. We were told that we should be able to get back to our hotel for somewhere around 300 rubles. There were a few guys who obviously work the clubs every night, because the metro shuts down at midnight, and so we tried to negotiate a price with them. We said 300, then he laughed and said 1000. We walked away, and then walked back, and he said 500. We agreed. He took three of us, and two Kazakh girls who were going in the same direction. He shoved me and one of the boys I was with (who I had only met the night before at the hotel) into the passenger seat, and the other three into the back. There was no seat belt, the driver smoked the entire time with his window rolled down, yelling on his phone. Apparently, the bridges had already gone up. He drove roughly 80 mph through the empty city. It took 20-30 minutes, and there were quite a few times when the guy I was jammed into the seat with and I said “Do you feel like we might be being kidnapped right now?” The driver pulled up to the hotel and then, quite aggressively shook his hand at us, wanting payment. Immediately. Overall, it was a very funny experience.
The next morning we left. 24 hours (and a stop at the duty free) later we were back in Riksten, severely exhausted and quite happy.
Russia was interesting. It was really cool to see, because the history of St. Petersburg was so obvious just by looking at the buildings. There were tons of lavish palaces, next to dreary boxes that were built in the Soviet era, next to things like this.
I loved it. I maybe got 18 hours sleep total for the entire five day trip, was inebriated for twice that amount of time, was nervous of my surroundings most of the time, and was freezing the entire time, but I loved it.
I stole some of the photos above from people on facebook. So, if I stole it from you, then thanks!
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I still need to get some sleep.
