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Wednesday, June 30, 2004

Moscow, Day 2:

So after a good night's sleep, we all went back to Red Square on Saturday to see Lenin and friends. You can only visit the graves behind the mausoleum when the mausoleum is open (they close Red Square to pedestrians when the mausoleum is open, but I'm not sure why). We were pretty close to the front of the line when we got there, but as most Russian lines are pretty undemocratic, it turned out that we waited for quite a while to get in to see the man himself. There's still this mentality among the Russian powers that be that says, "Let 'ours' (Russians) wait and let 'theirs' (foreigners) go first, so 'theirs' don't have to mingle too much with 'ours' and so that 'they' think things run smoothly in Russia." And if 'theirs' are part of a group, then this attitude is even more prevalent with the Russian authorities. So we had to wait several times while foreign tour groups filed right past the existing line without having to rub elbows with the riff-raff. We also had a Russian 'tour group' ahead of us, which kept growing as the wait time increased. This 'tour group' consisted of a guy who got on line early in the morning and his accomplice, who waited outside Red Square selling an impromptu 'tour' to the provincial Russians who had come to visit Moscow. For 100 rubles per person, the Russians would be able to cut into the line to join the group, they would get a little history lesson by the tour guide so the whole thing would seem legitimate, and the tour guide would hold their cameras and bags for them so they wouldn't have to go all the way to the baggage check area around the other side of the Kremlin. A good deal for the Russians, I guess, but the group in front of us increased exponentially as the line behind us grew longer. Of course, there were also the garden-variety, run-of-the-mill Russian line-cutters, who claimed to be 'just looking' until an opportunity came to slip unnoticed into the front of the line, but there weren't too many of these.

Josh and I were designated the bag/camera holders, so neither of us actually got in to see Lenin, but we'd been there before in 2001, so we didn't really feel the need to see him again. Alison, on the other hand, could probably live in the mausoleum, she loves Vladimir Ilyich that much. At first, in 2001, I thought it was some weird predilection for Communist ideology that made her love "Lemon" so much, but after seeing her obsession with the pickled two-headed babies at the Kunstkamera, I'm afraid more morbid inclinations are at work in that little head.

After the mausoleum, we visited St. Basil's Cathedral, which seems to be getting some major renovations on the external brick




(I guess Lenin isn't the only one who looks very plastic and very fake from up close), then GUM, the Tsarist-era elite department store-turned Communist-era Universal store of the people-turned post-Communist-era elite department store. After GUM, we went to the State Historical Museum at the opposite end of Red Square from St. Basil's, where we saw a 3-D movie of some church that was being restored with the help of some German company. The movie seemed to be a long advertisement for the German firm, but the 3-D effects were kind of cool, sort of like going through a life-sized video game. By the time we finished visiting the Historical Museum, they finally opened Red Square to pedestrian traffic (it's closed until 2:00pm on days when the mausoleum is open), so we finally went for a stroll on what I consider to be the most beautiful piece of man-made real-estate in the world. With St. Basil's (religion) in front of you, the beautiful State Historical Museum (art & history) behind you, the Kremlin (government) to the right, and GUM (commerce) to the left, the effect is just amazing. The square itself has this curvature to it, and when you're standing right in the middle, it almost feels like you're on the top of the world. After we'd soaked in the view, we decided to take the group for a boat ride on the Moscow River. The weather was great, and besides the two drunk Russian dudes who waved frantically and yelled "Khellow Peepul!" every time they saw a boat coming from the other direction, the ride was really pleasant. We got off the boat and headed over to the Arbat, one of the oldest sections of town, to let the students explore and find dinner on their own. The Old Arbat is like Greenwich Village during a street festival, with open-air souvenir stalls, street artists and performers, people walking around with exotic animals for you to look at (and usually asking for money for pet food), sidewalk cafes, and all sorts of interesting things going on.

After we left the students, we met our friend Ura for dinner, and then he took us to see a few of the buildings he designed around Moscow. When I tried to take a photo of one of the buildings, a security guard came out and refused to let us take any pictures (on the orders of the building's manager). Ura got angry (after all, not only are we perfectly within our rights to take photos of anything we want if we're not physically on their property, but more than that, Ura was the architect who BUILT the thing to begin with). After some argument, Ura, cell phone in hand, demanded the manager's phone number so he could call and get permission, and the guard started to get nervous. It's fine to deny access in Russia, but heaven help you if you deny access to the wrong person, or if you can actually be held accountable for denying access. Finally, when confronted with the unsavory possibility of having to give out his name as the person preventing us from taking pictures, the guard changed his tune, "Fine, go ahead and take your photos. What difference does it make to me?" Here's a picture of the building:




Tuesday, June 29, 2004

Moscow, Day One:

Well, there's so much to say about our trip to Moscow I hardly know where to begin. Of course, it's always exciting to travel in a sleeper car, and the students were so excited that it was pretty hard for them to settle down and go to bed, so a bunch of them designated one of the compartments the "party room," and they stayed up a little later than I would have suggested, considering we were going to get to Moscow at 8:00am the next morning and planned to hit the ground running. But they're young and pliable, so they still managed to roll off the train the next morning with happy but bleary-eyed expressions.

We really did hit the ground running, heading right for Red Square and the Kremlin, luggage in tow (well, it was on our backs). There's a place to check bags under the main ticket office at the Kremlin, not just for those people going into the Kremlin Museum but also for the people going to see Lenin's tomb when that's open. You're not allowed to take bags or cameras into the mausoleum at all, unless you can manage to bribe one of the guards, but who needs to see Lenin that badly? Anyway, when we got down to the baggage area, we saw two price lists, one in Russian and another one in English for foreign guests to their fair city. There must have been some mistake in the translation, because the fees listed in the English language price list were double that of the one in Russian. Oh well. When we got to the cashier, we pointed out that we'd read the list in Russian first, and after some friendly chatter and some smooth talking by Patrick, the bag-lady agreed to give us the Russian prices with only the legally-allowed minimum of Russian hassle. There was a policeman down there running all the bags through what he claimed was an x-ray machine, and every once in a while he'd ask one of us to open their bag up, which didn't worry me until Ryan glanced over to get my attention. Of course he had his knife with him, and after some consideration, I told him to leave it in his bag, because even though they might give him a hassle in the baggage room, if they found it on him when we entered the Kremlin, it might be very bad indeed. Sure enough, the cop asked Ryan to open his bag up, and the cop immediately pulled out the knife, which he opened up halfway, glanced over at Ryan, and whispered "Klassny!" ("Cool!") with the slightest nod of appeciation.

Well, we saw the Kremlin, and it was pretty cool, but I was disappointed that they removed the big statue of Lenin posed like "The Thinker" from the garden park by the Tsar Cannon and the Tsar Bell. For those of you who don't know the Tsar Cannon, it's the biggest Medieval cannon in the world, and it sits to the right as you enter the main visitor's area inside the Kremlin walls. To the left sits the Tsar Bell, which, as you might have guessed, is the largest Medieval bell in the world. They're definitely into superlatives here. Well, I suppose we are too. There were all these military officers hanging around the area, such an incredible number of them that it looked like a Shriner's convention, and they all wanted their pictures taken with the cannon. They were taking pictures in front of the bell too, but not so much as the cannon, and they didn't look nearly as happy doing it, either. I wonder what Freud might say. Especially when you take into account the fact that, not only has the bell never been rung, but the cannon (oh the shame of it!) has never been fired. Well, if they have the biggest unused cannon in the world, maybe they're compensating for having the smallest president, who, as it turns out, was the reason for all the military men in the area. There our group was, after having come out of the umpteenth church/museum/exhibit of the day when who should come strolling past, but the man himself (the next word should be uttered with extreme reverence, whispered breathlessly if you can manage it, and with just the slightest roll of the eyes up toward heaven): PUTIN! It took a while to locate the actual president, whose 5'4" frame was dwarfed by his cadre of bodyguards, but there he was, in all his splendor, or so I was told. Instead of getting to worship in the holy glow that is Putin, while everyone else was watching the procession, I was rousting a few students who shall remain nameless (Ed, John, Carolyn, and Joanna) who were dallying in front of a glass showcase full of old garage-sale stuff like the Order of Lenin and various other Soviet medals and military orders. Oh well, we'll all live, but now I feel like the leper who went out to get coffee just before Jesus appeared. But anyway, after the Kremlin, we ate at Sbarro's on Red Square and then went via metro to check into the hotel, Ismailovo Alfa. Of all the things I love about Moscow (and it's a pretty long list), the metro ranks among the very top. The trains come every minute to 2 minutes (they're so sure about this that they have a little timer that starts when one train pulls out so you can time how long it takes the next train to pull in), the stations look more like rooms in palaces than metro stations, they're clean (the metro closes at midnight or 1:00am so the babushki can invade it for a good scrubbing before the morning rush), you can buy almost anything from one of the dozens of kiosks crowding every station entrance and lining the underpasses, and the Russians will always give up a seat for a man with a 5-year-old daughter in his arms. What more could you ask for? Oh, and the Muscovites don't stare at you either. Or, as Josh said more correctly, even if they do stare, unlike the Petersburgers, they have the good manners to turn away and pretend they weren't staring when you look over at them. The stare is also of a different flavor than the "Petersburg Stare." There's no venom in it, no desire to toss you into the Neva, only a mild curiosity, almost like you might have if you saw a strange bird you'd never seen before and were trying to remember its features so you could run back home and check the species in your encyclopedia.

Okay, after a short break (I went out to buy groceries), I feel a whole lot better about St. Petersburg than I had since we got here. I don't know if it has anything to do with the fantastic time we had in Moscow or what, but I decided to go out today and just be happy. People glanced at me on the street and I smiled at them. I opened the door for one woman, who was a bit shocked, but happy. I waited for another person to come out of a store before I went in rather than try to push past each other in the doorway. Granted, it wasn't very crowded on the street or in the stores today, and I'm sure I'll have to sing a different tune very soon, but I was friendly and they were friendly back. I don't care if they're not civil to each other, I'm going to try to be civil to them. In fact, I know why I've had this change in attitude, and Moscow has everything to do with it. There are signs in the Moscow metro imploring people to be nicer. "Smile and the world smiles with you!" read one sign, another one reminds metro riders to treat the metro stations and trains with care, since repairs are costly and make everyone suffer. Well, the Muscovites are a bit nicer to each other, or at least less self-centered and pretentious, than the Petersburgers seem to be, but they're still pretty callous for my taste. Case in point, and the thing that I think changed my attitude: I was running around Moscow trying to find a cash machine to pay for the group's meal at our favorite Georgian restaurant, "Mama Zoya," and as I ran down the underpass to get across the street, I saw a little old lady pulling a heavy cart up the steps one painful step at a time, and the Russians just kept walking past her. I grabbed the cart by the bottom and helped her bring the cart all the way up the steps before I continued on my errand. This is exactly what I would have done at home, and I've decided that I'm going to act like myself while I'm here, regardless of what other people do. I smiled at the people on the street today, and so what if they didn't smile back? We've been trying to blend in so much that I've even been grumping around with a constant grimace. Well, guess what? They know I'm a foreigner regardless of how much I grimace and no matter how good a Russian accent I'm able to fake. We were in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow the other day with the group and I started entertaining Alison and some of the students with some silly descriptions of the icons, and when I got to one room with some really famous icons in it, a Russian woman yelled at me, in English, "Please don't shout!" (She was louder than I was.) I remarked that I wasn't shouting, and she said, in a very condescending, disgusted voice, "Ah, you are American, yes?" Yes, I am American, and maybe I am a little loud when I entertain my daughter in a museum, but let's see the average Russian man even take his daughter to a museum, much less help an old lady with a heavy parcel get up the stairs. It sounds like I'm sour on Russia and the Russians, but I'm not at all. They have their culture and we have ours, and they value certain things over others and we do the same right back. I love lots of things about Russia, but I think I always need to remember to love those things as an American. Okay, sorry about the philosophizing--back to Moscow...

Okay, another sidebar before I get back to Moscow, because we got a call this morning from Bella's cousin Galya from Perm, who has come to Petersburg with her boyfriend Sasha to visit us. We met them in Palace Square this afternoon and took them out to the Kavkaz Bar, a Georgian restaurant we like that I might have mentioned before. It turns out they've been here for a few days and have been paying way too much to stay in a terrible apartment way out on the outskirts, and after a little convincing, they've agreed to stay with us in the center, so they're here now talking up a storm. I catch about 75% of the words and about 25% of the meaning, so I basically stay quiet for the most part. The Permites (I think that's what you call them) speak incredibly quickly, almost like they're afraid you might get in a word edgewise, and I end up feeling a little like Lucy at the chocolate factory, you know the one I mean, where she tries to grab the chocolates off the conveyor belt to wrap them but they're just going way too fast to keep up with them. Well, Sasha and Josh are playing the card game "v duraka" now, speaking to each other in a mixture of English and Russian, and Alison is reading "Frog and Toad" to Galya. Apparently Alison has decided to teach Galya English. Okay, now back to Moscow...

My memory of the trip is already getting all muddled and hazy, so I'll just write a rough sketch. The hotel we stayed at, Ismailovo Alpha, is a weird conglomeration of old and new, like so much of what we've seen in Russia these days. Sure, we had a dejurnaya* on our hall, and sure, it was impossible to change roommate assignments because of the bureaucracy, registration took 45 minutes even though they had 3 administrators working on it, there was no air-conditioning, and we only got one key per room; but there was a casino in the lobby (I won 700 rubles at blackjack! woo-hoo!), the rooms and bathrooms were nicely renovated, there was a hopping nightlife around the hotel, and altogether, it turned out to be a great place to stay. We actually stayed at Ismailovo Beta in 1992 when we first visited Russia and the changes over the last 12 years have been dramatic, to say the least.

That first night, Bella and I took the kids to see our dear friend Darin, who has been living in Russia running study abroad programs for 11 years. He has a beautiful apartment, right near the Moscow zoo, that he has totally renovated in
the most elegant Evro-remont I've ever seen. He invited another friend over, Chris, a British historian specializing in Russian prisons, who is working in Moscow for a few months as a hired researcher. We all had a great time and we mentioned to Chris he might want to check out this really old church-turned-prison-turned-church-again we had visited in 2001 with our great friend Ura and his son Styopa, a place way down the Moscow river called Krutitskoye Podvore. More about that later.

Since that basically wraps up the first day, and since I've got tons more to write, I'll end the blog entry here and post what I've got so far. Coming back to the hotel on the metro at almost midnight, Bella and I looked over at each other and smiled. I knew exactly what she was thinking, and vice versa. We felt like we were back home. We were finally relaxed for the first time since we got to Russia, and we both gave a little nod and a sigh, glad to be back in Moscow and sorry that we'd have to return to Petersburg so soon.



* A dejurnaya is a sort of concierge/room key holder/KGB informer who stays at a little kiosk right by the elevator. You have to turn in your room key when you leave the floor and you get it back again when you return. These days the dejurnaya also runs a 24 hour snack bar/convenience store, complete with cold wine and vodka, sandwiches, and condoms.

Wednesday, June 23, 2004

The rain decided to give it a rest for most of today after partying it up for the last week or so. Boy, if St. Petersburg can be this depressing in the middle of summer after a few days of gray, wet, grossness, then I can’t imagine how miserable it must be in the winter. Well, at least in the winter it snows, which is probably pretty. The rain just makes everything muddy. It might be cool to see the Neva frozen over, but I’m sure that loses its charm after a while. Bella has a sore throat, so rather than cancel class for today, I offered to pinch-hit for her. The class was reading Bulgakov’s Master & Margarita (just chapter one) and Voinovich’s “Circle of Friends,” both of which take place in Moscow, and both of which are two favorites of mine (Master & Margarita is probably my favorite novel of all time), so I could hardly pass up the chance to chat with the students about them. It’s always fun to discuss representations of Stalin in Soviet Literature; he’s sort of like a sore in your mouth you can’t stop rubbing your tongue against. Our always entertaining student Ryan had another mishap the other day that he was kind enough to share with the group, so I figured I’d share it with you. Before I start, I suppose a disclaimer is in order: Today during class we discussed the idea that there are facts and there is truth, and that a bunch of facts don’t necessarily add up to any particular truth. While facts may or may not have happened, they’re just anecdotal detritus if they don’t point to a truth. Conversely, if a work of art gets at some truth, the factuality of the events described isn’t really significant. For example, I saw a bear get on the trolleybus the other day. This is a fact (whether or not it actually happened is irrelevant, but it did happen), but doesn’t necessarily get at the truth of the matter. It took the insights of the Petersburgers who later heard the fact to put that fact in its proper context. Sure, I saw the bear on the trolleybus, that’s all well and good, but was it wearing a muzzle? You get the point, I’m sure, so rather than beat a dead horse (which I haven’t yet seen happen in Petersburg), I’ll just go on with the story. So Ryan, you will remember, is our resident mafia boss spotter (“Vy inostranyets?” “Nyet, ya Mafioso”), but while he apparently can spot a mob boss, he can’t spot a metro handrail to save his life. I’ll explain. So here is Ryan, minding his own business on his afternoon commute back home from school. Now understand I only heard this story second-hand, and was really only paying attention during the funny parts, so some of the actual facts may have been changed to protect the meaning. Back to the train, which by all accounts is packed full of Russians, like so many sprats in a tin. Ryan is sandwiched between a guy directly behind him who is so close he can feel the guy’s chest hairs tickling the back of his neck, and a young lady in front of him whom he is trying hard not to impose upon. The train jerks hard, sending the guy with the oily chest hair slamming into Ryan, who chivalrously grabs out for the handrail to prevent a major collision with this poor girl’s backside. After a second or two (maybe it was longer, who’s counting?) Ryan realizes that the handrail has a fleshy texture. It’s right about this time that the girl realizes that the thing holding her by the bottom is shaped very much like Ryan’s hand. He pulls his hand away as she turns to face him, and all the “eez-veh-NI-teh”-ing (“excuse me”) in the world can’t save him from what he knows must be coming. Without saying a word, without so much as batting an eye, her judgment was swift and her punishment was swifter still. It was right in the middle of his 4th “izvenite” when Ryan felt the knee, a surgical strike, decisive and to the point. I told him afterward he was lucky the train was so crowded, because if she had gotten one of those “shuzy” off the ground, the pointed toe might have lodged in something vital. As it was, Ryan hit the floor of the traincar hard, and rode for the next few minutes on one knee, while people started yelling back and forth (he didn’t know if they were yelling at him or at each other or just because the impetus is to yell when something out of the ordinary happens). The girl had already moved to the front of the train and was gone before Ryan got up off the ground. He says the worst thing (although I don’t really believe him) was that everyone else just stared at him in silence for the rest of the ride home. I’ve ridden on the Petersburg metro enough to know that staring at foreigners in silent, unmasked hatred is the common attitude to take whenever a foreigner is available. Well, after the whole ordeal, I had just one question for him. “Was it worth it?” He said it wasn’t. I didn’t believe him again. But then again, I don’t plan to let a few facts get in the way of the truth (or at least a good story).


On a lighter note, Alison lost her first tooth today. Well, in keeping with the violent nature of the culture (when in Rome…), she didn’t lose her tooth so much as she had it yanked out of her mouth (I did it myself even though there’s a stomatologist [their word for dentist, apparently, although I think they also offer bloodletting and casino gambling at the stomatologist’s] on every street corner). Here’s a picture of the happy girl, who can now eat chocolate and whatever else she wants without it hurting.




Josh had a big day too—I took him to a military uniform store where he managed to convey to the lady through a combination of Russian, sign-language, smoke-signals, and I think I even heard some Finno-Ugrian in there, that he wanted a sailor’s cap and all the accompanying paraphernalia that he needed to look like an official Russian cadet. He bought it all himself and even managed to get a smile out of the otherwise stone-faced clerk. He also managed to get some of the “Special” food at the university cafeteria. When we go to the student cafeteria for lunch, they always have the same assortment of junk, but for the past week, there’s been a conference there, so they have the “special” food for the conferees which they serve from a secret cache under the counter. Josh didn’t want any of the usual stuff, but liked the looks of the rice and chicken the lunchladies were surreptitiously ladling out and passing to the conference wrangler, who would then hustle the stuff out past the poor students to the happy, oblivious conferees. Josh, who is otherwise totally oblivious when it comes to paying attention in St. Petersburg (“Josh, watch out for that dogp… Never mind.”), is like a bloodhound when it comes to military paraphernalia and food. Now, there are two lunchladies working at any one time, the good lunchlady and the bad lunchlady. Since the good lunchlady is busy doling out the specialty food, he makes the mistake of asking the bad lunchlady, who you can tell is the bad lunchlady because her face is frozen in a grotesque imitation of Khruschev grimacing at the UN, for some “ris, pazhalasta, i kuritsa” (rice, please, and chicken). Forget that the cases are all wrong, he says what he wants clearly enough, but the bad lunchlady looks at him as if he were speaking Aramaic. “Shto?” she asks. He repeats his request. “Kuritsa?” she asks, as if he had just requested an order of water-buffalo. But the boy stood his ground. “Da, RIS, pazhalasta, (now he’s pointing under the counter at the spot the rice is hidden) i kuritsa!” Now the bad lunchlady (I’ll call her the BLL for short) finally understands the chicken part, and gruffly mumbles, “Ris nyet.” (“no rice”) Meanwhile, there are plates and plates of rice right there in front of her. So finally I point over at the rice and ask what exactly that stuff is, and she finally admits that it exists, but we aren’t getting any for love or money. She tries to give Josh some kasha instead, but he’s a stubborn kid when he wants to be, and he says, “Togda kuritsa, i eto vsyo.” (“Then just chicken and that’s it.”) Well, the GLL hears this poor little kid refusing to eat starch with his lunch, and it’s all she can stand. “What, he wants rice? Why here’s all the rice he can eat, right here!” She spoons a huge helping of rice alongside his chicken and hands it back to the BLL, who would have probably spit into the plate if I hadn’t been staring at her. Well, it’s always something when you walk out on the street in Petersburg, and it’s never the same thing twice. I guess I’ll miss the excitement, but I’m starting to get homesick. It isn’t that you can’t get what you want here, it’s just that there are people who want you to suffer before letting you have it. Ah, our upstairs neighbors have started using their power tools, so it must be midnight. Yup, right on schedule. They have apparently hired Dracula to do their EvroRemont, so he can only start when the sun goes down. Of course, these days, that means he can only work from midnight to 3am. No entries for a few days because we’re off to Moscow until Tuesday.


Oh, lest you start thinking it’s all champagne and caviar around here, I forgot to show you a photo of the bums in our courtyard boozing it up on homemade moonshine.



Tonight there are teenagers getting tanked on canned gin and tonic, but it’s an eclectic town we live in. We never know what slice of the pie is going to be in our courtyard/playground drinking themselves into oblivion at any particular time of the day or night. I guess that's one good thing about the rain--it generally keeps the drinking indoors.

Monday, June 21, 2004

Today the stars were finally favorable, Jupiter was aligned with Mars, and we made it to a Georgian restaurant for dinner. For those of you who now have visions of peach pie, barbecue, and pecans in your heads, I’m happy to say that I don’t mean that Georgia. This is the Georgia of sweet red wines that smell of spice mountains, of beautifully garlicked chicken stews so rich that you get an extra order of lavash bread to soak it up with, the Georgia of khachapuri. I’ll tell you it’s a cheese pie, but really that’s like telling you the Grand Canyon is a big hole. So we went to this Georgian restaurant, called the “Kavkaz Bar,” and it was so hard to choose from the menu we decided that it would be safer to just order one of everything and sort it out later. Unlike the Georgian place we were rebuffed at the other day, this place was an actual restaurant, complete with an amazingly nice waitress and a menu for anyone who wanted one. Unfortunately the khachapuri was merely adequate (after 3 long years of waiting, my expectations may have been just a little high), but the rest of the food, from the lobio (a cold bean and crushed walnut salad) to the dumplings with cream garlic sauce to the chicken tabaka (which sounds like it should come with a surgeon general’s warning, but really means “chicken pressed under a brick”, which also doesn’t sound good, but it’s in fact wonderful). We ate and ate and ate, and when our forks stuck in the table we knew it was time to stop.



But I forgot to tell about the Russian Museum, which we returned to today for unknown reasons. Well, I suppose Bella had to bring the students there so they could do their reports on the various obscure Russian artists nobody in the West has ever heard of. Apparently they send all the famous artists’ stuff out on exhibit to other countries to earn money (sort of the art world’s equivalent of pimping—“Hey baby, want to see my Kandinsky?”). It’s a sad state of affairs, but there you have it. The Chagalls are all out pounding the pavement too, as one of the museum babushki was quick to inform us. The conversation went something like this:



Bella: [in her own perfect, accent-free Russian]“Hi there, can you tell us where the Chagall…”

Babushka: [in something verging on Esperanto] “Kandinsky no. Chagall no. Nicht, nicht.” (we hadn’t yet asked about Kandinsky, but she figured she’d nip it in the bud as long as her mouth was open and she was speaking in tongues.)


Other than telling us what wasn’t there, the Babushki are also very handy when you need to know what you’re not allowed to do. Here’s a sampling of what we heard today: “You’re too close to the painting!” (maybe we were, and maybe we weren’t, but to be honest, we didn’t look like we were in any hurry to move further away from it, either) “You’re being too loud!” “Don’t lean on the windowsill, you’ll set off the alarm!” (five minutes later, I saw this particular babushka leaning on the very same windowsill) “Tell the little girl (Alison) not to touch the phone!” (there is an ancient Soviet telephone in every room in case a fire breaks out or in case the babushka needs to reprimand you from another room) “Why are you all standing here in a circle?” (This was during one of the student’s reports—we explained what was going on and she decided to stand impatiently right next to us until she couldn’t stand it any longer. She interrupted again and told us we really needed to move along because we were in front of a window that she needed to open immediately, which she pushed past us to begin doing.) There was one particular babushka who ran her room like a well-oiled machine. Nobody was going to get away with any antisocial behavior around her. There was even a mafia boss in there who was hugging and kissing his own little flesh and blood Kandinsky right there in front of the paintings. And these were not the sort of paintings that encourage romantic behavior. The particular painting they were reprimanded in front of was a gigantic canvas which took up the whole wall of some battle scene in the snow. The mob boss was duly chastened, his hand immediately pulled itself from off his “girlfriend’s” bottom to fall stiffly by his own side. The girl, half the mob boss’ age, wasn’t deterred, however, and she kept smooching him as the babushka continued wagging her finger at the both of them. Well, after a while, the boss, whose neck was thicker than his girlfriend’s waist, told her to go and look at the pictures in the next room and that he’d follow her in a bit. She slipped off him, and in a surreal, post-Soviet version of the game “rock, paper, scissors,” the babushka won out. She was apparently the rock to his scissors. Or maybe she was the scissors to his… well, you get the idea. Anyway, it’s easier to romance a girl in front of a painting of the Battle of Borodino than in front of a ranting babushka. The mob boss even ended up chatting politely with the babushka for another 5 minutes before going off with his tail (or some such body part) between his legs. Ryan, one of the more cynical and culturally observant of the students, had initially noticed the mob boss and pointed him out to me before the babushka came on the scene. After some joking, we both agreed that it would be healthier not to stare at the mob boss too much, mainly because there was no doubt someone else in the room who was staring at us while we were busy staring at him. Indeed, after a little time I noticed a thick-boned, well-dressed thug pretending to be enthralled by the art, but who clearly did not often enter a museum on his own initiative.


This might be a good time to mention a strange phenomenon we’ve seen in every museum in town. As you enter the museum, you are invariably funneled through a metal detector, and for the life of me, I can’t understand what the purpose of this is. If the metal detector goes off, and you stop to be checked, the guard yells at you to “Keep moving, what are you trying to hold up the line?” Of course, if it doesn’t go off, we’ve discovered that this probably means the metal detector is either not working or isn’t plugged in. Our same resident cynic Ryan, for some reason I didn’t get into, brought a large hunting knife with him to the Catherine Palace, home of the famous Amber Room and all the life-threatening, insane Russian mobs you could ever want. Anyway, when he saw that we had to go through a metal detector, he offered to wait outside for us rather than be interrogated by the Russian security. Bella told him to hang tough and we’d deal with it when something happened, and sure enough, we all went right through the metal detector without so much as a peep, or a beep, as the case may be. The real joke, however, is that there was a second metal detector right beside the first one that was blocked by a chair and had an “out of order” sign on it.


Well, anyway, today I bought a bunch of birch branches to take to the banya on Wednesday. The idea is to whip yourself or a loved one with the birch branches when you’re steaming. They say it opens up the pores, but I think it’s mainly to liven things up.

Sunday, June 20, 2004

We had most of the students over tonight for what was supposed to be the first meeting of the chess and vodka society, but it turned out that there are no decent chess players in the group. Luckily, what they lack in chess playing they make up for in drinking. Only John Adams, our own personal ambassador to Russia (John Quincy Adams was the actual first US ambassador to Russia), managed something resembling a game against Josh, but he wasn’t drinking, so his game doesn’t count. Tonight was the night that Paul McCartney was planning his little birthday party in town, so we figured it might be better to avoid the center, where 50,000 guests were expected for a 3 hour long concert party in Palace Square. I think I’ve convinced some of the group to venture out to the banya (the Russian steambaths) this Wednesday, so now it looks like I might actually have to follow through and go. I’m a little nervous, but as long as they don’t end up putting me on a plane to Moscow, I should do fine.* Of course, we are expected in Moscow on Friday anyway, so it might save me the train ride. The family also went to the Russian Museum today, which is pretty interesting after you finish wandering aimlessly through the lame copycat 18th Century art. The 19th Century stuff is really cool, and the 20th Century stuff that didn’t fit into the Communist agenda and has been hidden away in storage for decades is finally accessible and is amazingly interesting. Oh, I seem to be destined to write this entry completely backwards, starting from this evening and working my way through this afternoon and now I’m up to lunch. Of course, there’s still Novgorod to tell you about, and that was yesterday. I swear my head is spinning, not just from the chess/vodka either. So anyway, lunch. Bella and I had a little argument about where to go for lunch. We’ve been not seeing eye to eye lately largely because of my frustrations with the language barrier, and my inability to pick up on certain cultural cues she is immediately aware of, but after a little blowout that was totally my fault, we ended up hopping around to about four different places until we ended up in a Georgian café. We sat down and all of their cheerful and prompt waitresses must have been at the Paul McCartney concert. Eventually someone who finally seemed willing to admit to working there slouched over just close enough to the table to toss us one menu for the whole table and wandered off. We perused the menu, and finally decided on our lunch order. I was so happy to finally be eating Georgian food after 3 years, I didn’t mind the rudeness and untidy appearance of the place. Images of lobio and chicken satsivi danced in my head like so many Georgian sugarplums. I didn’t even mind that the other clientele were all glaring angry glares at us. Thus is the power of Khachapuri. If you don’t know what Khachapuri is, then I won’t explain. It’s like Pushkin. It doesn’t translate. Suffice it to say it’s what the gods ate when they were tired of ambrosia. Anyway, the waitress/inostranyets-identifier finally wandered back to our table 10 minutes later to kindly inform us that we could eat if we didn’t mind waiting 40 minutes, since they only had one cook. I’m not sure what the number of chefs has to do with anything besides the spoiling of the broth, and in that case, the fewer the better. It seemed to me they just wanted to get rid of us, and I’m not really keen on staying at a restaurant against the will of the staff. We left, and ended up in a much happier place: A café/cabaret called “déjà vu” that had about 10 different cuisines on the menu. Everything from Russian (big surprise) to Italian (slightly more surprising) to Israeli (quite a surprise indeed), and even though we were the only customers, the place seemed lively enough—I think they were getting ready for a big banquet that evening. Bella had an Israeli appetizer plate with hummus, babaganoush, falafel balls, and a bunch of other stuff that was so tasty and garlicky I bet she can still taste it now. She may even be tasting it tomorrow. I guess now we know why they call the place “Déjà vu”. But seriously, the place was really cool and we had a nice, albeit strange time. Okay, so enough about today. Since I’m going backwards, I guess I’ll tell about Veliki Novgorod next, since that happened yesterday. So they call it Veliki Novgorod (which means Great Novgorod) but that’s sort of a misnomer. As far as I’m concerned, if you have to call yourself “Great Novgorod” then maybe you’re not so fantastic. It’s like when you hear someone advertised as “the world famous Joe Schmoe.” They need to really work on a better name, like “pretty good Novgorod” or “okay, so we’re not Petersburg,” but maybe that last one is too long for the road signs. Well, we spent three and a half hours on the bus there and another three and a half hours on the bus on the way back, and we saw some churches somewhere in the middle. Oh, and our guide was really excellent. She gave us a whirlwind tour of the city, and then took us to a cute little wooden town, sort of like a Russian version of Colonial Williamsburg without the tricornered hats or the blazing heat. Instead they had a guy making baseball caps out of straw or maybe birch bark, and Josh kept begging for one, but that wasn’t going to happen. We did let him buy a little mace (the medieval weapon, not the pepper spray) as a souvenir, though, so we’re not totally heartless. I’m not sure how the mace is associated with Novgorod, but we did see some costumed interpreters wearing some funky outfits that made them look like extras from the movie Alexander Nevsky and one of them was carrying some big mallet, so I guess it was the weapon of choice when fighting off Mongol hordes. So next we had dinner at this weird restaurant in the middle of Novgorod. The restaurant was in the Volkhov Hotel, which is this amazingly upscale hotel in the middle of this totally decrepit Soviet-era town (they even bottled their own mineral water at the hotel), and where the only guests seemed to be this horde of American elderhostelers. Good thing Josh had his mace along. The restaurant was very nice, and we even got some decent coffee. Well, I’m tired and want to get to bed, and this blog entry doesn’t seem to want to be quite as amusing as I’d like it to be, so I’ll just say farewell for now. Oh, and Bella wants me to mention the mosquitoes. I personally avoid mentioning them when I can, but now I’ve gone ahead and mentioned them against my better judgment. There were a lot of mosquitoes. We got bitten a lot. It was not fun. There, I’ve mentioned the mosquitoes. Here’s a word of caution when going to Novgorod: Don’t worry so much about the Mongols or the Elderhostelers, leave the mace at home and bring the Deet instead. Oh, and don’t mention Ivan the Terrible when you go to Novgorod. They’re apparently still holding a grudge. We were also accused of once again being those damned inostrantsy (plural of inostranyets) by some poor discriminated against locals who decided they weren’t permitted to climb up on a bell in front of the Novgorod bell tower to take a picture after they looked at our group standing there near the bell taking our own picture. “We’re not allowed on the bell” one of them grunted indignantly to the other, “Only THEY are allowed on the bell.” Bella (see the similarity in her name and the object they weren’t allowed to climb on?) was luckily around to right the wrong and preserve democracy and the American way, when she snapped back, “Everyone is allowed on the bell, YOURS (meaning Russians) were just on the bell five minutes ago.” The shocked Russians, trying to save face, and wondering how this intruder in their midst had diabolically learned such good Russian, grunted that they couldn’t believe it, and went off in a huff to stand on the bell anyway, defying the make-believe law that forbade them from standing where no Russian had stood before. Oh well, if you can’t feel persecuted in your own country, where can you?


* This is a reference to a film that everyone in Russia knows and loves. The central plot device involves the protagonist getting drunk at the banya in Moscow and ending up accidentally being put on a plane to Petersburg.

Friday, June 18, 2004

I was going to write out a list of things I miss and things I don’t miss but it got to be a pretty dull endeavor, so instead of a list, I’m just going to talk about some of the things that make life difficult here and the other things that can compensate for the hassles. The biggest pain here, and the thing we really take for granted in the States, is reliable, safe tap water. You really can’t get more basic than that. The ancient Romans built aqueducts all over the place and managed to have a reliable, safe public water system 2000 years ago, but here in St. Petersburg, if you want to have a drink, brush your teeth, or even wash your fruit before you eat it, you either have to boil your water for 15 minutes first or buy bottled water to avoid the parasites that live in the Petersburg water supply. Not only that, but there are heavy metals in the water which you really shouldn’t drink, so if you boil the water, you should either let it sit for 24 hours before using it, or run it through a filter to get rid of the mercury, lead, and what-not. Apparently, there’s also no iodine or potassium in the water here, so all the natives have this sort of pallid, grayish skin tone (they also claim they have thyroid problems and are lethargic because of this).



The second thing that’s hard to deal with, which may have something to do with the poor quality of the water, is the coffee. You can usually go to a coffee shop to get a decent cup of coffee (there’s a coffee shop on almost every block in some areas), but it’s really hard to find decent coffee for home consumption. We’ve been pretty happy with the tea here, but for addicts like us, the promise of a decent morning cup of coffee is the only thing that can get us out of bed.



Another thing you really don’t realize the importance of until you don’t have it anymore is a civil society. Sure, there are nice people in Russia. There are very nice people, and it’s a pleasure to deal with them, but it’s perfectly acceptable here to be uncivil, whether you’re a store clerk who refuses to serve a customer, or a customer who cuts in line, or a driver who drives up on the sidewalk and zooms past as he blasts his horn to make the pedestrians flee in terror, or a punk on the street who swills his beer and elbows past you as he blows cigarette smoke in your face. In fact, it seems that the people who are the most uncivil are somehow grudgingly respected by a certain sector of the population. I think they see this as being self-assertive and strong, two very important traits in a Darwinian, alpha-male/alpha-female way. In fact, the people you need to watch out for the most are the old ladies. The old men (the ones still alive) are mostly harmless—probably years of drinking and letting their wives take care of them make them soft. But the little old ladies, these are the ones to watch out for. If they survived the 900 day siege of Leningrad in WWII, chances are you’re not going to be a match for them. Here’s a weird little anecdote that tells you just how far from civil this place can be: When we went to the Catherine Palace to visit the famous amber room, Bella took Alison to the bathroom, where she saw a sign in Russian asking all the Russian guests to please not stand on the toilet seats because they would break them. The toilet seats, and the toilets under them, have apparently been recently installed to satisfy the foreign visitors who aren’t used to aiming at a hole in the ground (which, as it turns out, is the usual condition for Russian womens’ public toilets. Mens’ toilets always have toilet bowls and usually have seats, and I was surprised when Bella told me that womens’ rooms were so primitive. Of course, everything makes sense now that we know the Russian womens’ propensity for using the bathroom stalls to practice their highwire routines.



The last thing that I’ve really grown tired of here is the filth. There’s no getting past it, Russia is a dirty place. They try to keep it clean. I see the babushkas with their dustpails and mops out in the streets every day. But everything is just so damned dirty. We end up coming home with our clothes, lungs, and shoes all sooty. I’m not even sure where the dirt is all coming from, but I’m sure we’ll be bringing back a sample all over our stuff. There’s even a gag gift you can buy in all the souvenir shops—it’s a can of Petersburg air, so you can enjoy the atmosphere of Petersburg no matter where you go.



There are plenty of things we don’t miss, but so many of them have more to do with big city versus small town living, that it’s hard to say how things really compare. In fact, now that I think about it, there were plenty of unreasonably rude people in New York when we lived there too. And New York is pretty grimy (it’s really not as bad as Petersburg, but it isn’t so clean either, now that I think about it). Well, that leaves the water and the coffee. New York has Petersburg beat there. But there are great things about Petersburg, things that New York can’t compete with, like the fact that you can go to the ballet or the opera or the theater without having to spend the rent money to do it. And as I mentioned before, there’s that whole no-beer-drinking-in-public rule in New York. Plus, Russian beer is in general a whole lot better than American beer, especially Baltika #3, which is probably my favorite beer, period. In fact, if America had access to Baltika #3, it might cause lots of States to rethink the whole public drinking thing. As it stands now, if all you’ve got is Budweiser, who cares if you can’t drink on the street. You barely want to drink the stuff at a baseball game. Also, in New York, you can’t make a right on red. In Petersburg, hell, you can make a right whenever the mood strikes you. And if a pedestrian happens to be in the way, well, what can you say? In fact, in Petersburg, unless there’s a sign strictly prohibiting a particular vehicular endeavor, you should consider all systems go.



So there you have it. When it comes down to it, our cultures aren’t as different as they might seem. Except for the crucial difference: America has good water, Russia has good beer. Take your pick.

Thursday, June 17, 2004

We went to see Carmen last night at the Mussorgsky Theatre. We were running very late thanks to traffic on the way home from meeting with the students. The gridlock was so bad all the way from our apartment to the theatre that we decided to walk instead of trying to catch some public transportation. We actually outpaced the traffic on foot, and barely made it to the theatre with a few minutes to spare. It ended up not really mattering very much because the ushers kept letting people into the show throughout the performance. You’d expect them to be stricter considering how they bark at you for every little infraction of the rules. I know that at the Metropolitan Opera, if you miss the third bell, you’re not getting in until the next Act. Oh well, I suppose they yell here to cover up their naturally soft dispositions.



Back to Carmen. As soon as the chorus started singing, I sensed something strange about the performance, but couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Then all of a sudden it hit me. Those guys had really funny French accents. In fact, it almost sounded like they were singing in some other language entirely. Wait a minute. I understand what they’re singing (sort of), which is strange, since I don’t understand a word of French. In fact, they were singing in Russian. The whole damn opera was in Russian. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for new artistic interpretations but I like my Spanish operas sung in the original French. One of the nice things about seeing operas in languages I don’t understand is that it makes everything sound so romantic and beautiful, even when they’re discussing the weather (unless it’s in German, in which case it makes everything sound so, well, German). Besides that, when Carmen sings “L’amour”, it comes out “Liubov” instead, and really, one can instantly understand why the Russians aren’t known for their romantic passion. But our Russian Carmen was so devastatingly fantastic in every other way, we forgave her immediately for being a foreigner. Seriously, she was the best Carmen we’ve ever seen. She was appropriately sexy, had a voice like a fallen angel, and even danced--no, slinked—so convincingly I almost fell in love with her myself. And for some reason, the crowd clapped politely for her but shouted “Bravo!” for the big fat stiff of a has-been who played Don Jose. The guy was so motionless that Carmen actually had to run at him to impale herself at the end.



Here’s a nice thing about going to operas in St. Petersburg: the companies are opera/ballet companies, and so there’s usually a fair amount of choreographed dancing any chance they get in their operas. There were actually two Carmens in this performance: the singing Carmen and the dancing Carmen. Well, the singing Carmen still danced, as I mentioned before, but the dancing Carmen came out at the beginning, during the overture, with all these toreadors to perform a sort of dumb show foreshadowing the action of the opera. She came out a couple of other times when the staging called for Carmen to bend over backwards or to do a cartwheel, sort of like a stunt double.



Here’s a lousy thing about going to operas in St. Petersburg: everyone brings their cellphones and call each other back and forth during the performance constantly. Not only that, but in Russia, the cellphone rings are so elaborate that they end up competing with the real orchestra for your attention. Once phone even sounded like the Toreador’s Song from Carmen and the Toreador came out on stage thinking it was his cue. By the way, the Toreador’s Song in Russian is really lame. Here he is, looking all cool and slick, his hair greased back, perfect posture, smiling at all the pretty senoritas with those flashy white teeth, and he gets to the part where the French toreador gets to sing “To-re-ador, en ga-ha-ha-ha-harde, To-re-ador, To-re-ador…” Anyway, you know the part I mean. Like when the Skipper sings to Gilligan: “Neither a lender nor a borrower be, do not forget, stay out of debt. Think twice, and take this good advice from me…la da da da dee dee! There’s just one other thing you ought to do. To thine own self be true.” You know that part. Well, the Russian ends up being totally lame. Something like “Toreador, o-sta-ro-ho-ho-ho-zhno. Dvery zakrivaiutsya. Sledushaya stantsia Sportivnaya!” Not much magic in that. But it was fun overall. And the usher/babushka/bouncer/inostranets-identifier was very impressed that Alison stayed for the whole opera. Truth be told, her great endurance was precipitated more by a ghoulish desire to see Carmen get killed than any great love of the music.



Speaking of our daughters’ ghoulish desires, we took the students to the Kunstkamera today, which greatly pleased Alison, for any number of reasons. First, she got to hang out with the students, which is her favorite thing to do. It takes her all of 15 seconds before she’s convinced someone to pick her up and carry her or she’s managed to weasel some candy or gum from another one. Second, and this is a little offputting, a small but important part of the Kunstkamera’s holdings is Peter the Great’s original collection of biological peculiarities, all displayed posthumously in great big pickle jars. Alison, for some reason, can’t get enough of this awful stuff. Malformed heads float nightmarishly alongside two-headed sheep, enormous body parts and giants’ skeletons are displayed next to jars of organs you might at first glance mistake for mushrooms, and Alison loves it all. We eventually had to pry her away from the nastier bits.



Oh, I walked from the apartment to the University this morning to film the students in class. It’s a pretty nice walk (about 50 minutes at a brisk but not overly ambitious pace), especially when you get to the area around the Hermitage Museum. From there, you cross the Palace Bridge and the view of the city from the bridge is spectacular. Anyway, the students were a little tired (it was Patrick’s birthday yesterday, and they went to “The Idiot,” a Dostoevsky-themed bar, to celebrate), but they all performed well for the video. I couldn’t get the teachers to stop goggling at the camera and smiling when I was trying to film them, but I think I got enough decent material. I even recorded the students singing a couple of songs from one of our favorite Russian cartoons, and in all, today’s footage was well worth the hassle of getting up early and walking to the University with all that equipment on my back.



On the way home today, we stopped at yet another art gallery (Bella’s gone art mad—it’s easy to do in such an artistically focused city) and ended up buying a couple of beautiful watercolors of Petersburg. I asked her to promise that we wouldn’t buy any more art this trip, but I couldn’t get her to agree. She has her heart set on buying a little sculpture of “the Little Prince” but I think it’s going to be way too expensive for us. The original, full-sized sculpture is in the courtyard at Petersburg University, and now she can’t stand to look at it because it reminds her that she can’t have her own miniature version.










It’s been raining like mad here the past few days, and yesterday I got caught in a hailstorm, while today Bella and the kids got caught in another one. As is usual, the sun is finally out (it’s 11:00pm right now) and I hear fireworks exploding in the distance. Bella called Darin and Ura today (our good friends who live in Moscow), and it seems like we might be able to see both of them when we visit Moscow next weekend. Of course, we want to see Max and Masha too, and probably any of the other family members who want to see us, so our evenings in Moscow are probably all booked up already. 4 days in Moscow is really not enough.



I’m sure there’s more I wanted to say, but I’ve forgotten half of it while I was writing, so I’ll just sign off. Tomorrow is the Hermitage again, and Saturday morning we have to get up really early to take the students to Novgorod. It’s a tough job but someone has to do it.


Monday, June 14, 2004

Last night I went out with the students to Mollie's Irish Pub, one of the many western-style bars that have popped up practically on every block all over Petersburg. They apparently had gotten two important pieces of information that led them there. First, the bar had absinthe on the menu (which is said to cause insanity in longtime absinthe drinkers), and second, drinks there were cheap. Well, at least they got half the story right. There was absinthe on the menu--4 different types, as a matter of fact (3 Czech and one Italian brand)--but the prices were pretty steep, especially on a student's budget. In fact, the cheapest absinthe was 200 rubles per shot (about $7) and the best stuff was 320 rubles (a whopping $11). Luckily, the prices are high enough to deter insanity, but low enough to permit curiosity. Those of us who decided to partake all figured the cheapest Czech brand (called something like "Green Hypno Genie"--a promising sign) was better than nothing, so we went for it. The barmaid, who seemed to be a supermodel in training, brought us the snifters, along with sugar, glasses of grapefruit juice, teaspoons, and matches. Luckily Mischa, our German student and resident drinking song expert, sort of knew what to do with the stuff, and after some pyrotechnics, we swallowed the vile green liqueur, and chased it with some marinated garlic cloves I brought with me in case of emergency. We all had a good time, more or less (although it would have been more rather than less if the prices weren't so painful), but most of us didn't bring enough cash to both eat and drink at the bar. So after a little altercation with the waitress, who, claiming to have run out of the cheap stuff, tried to charge us for the more expensive absinthe, we recalculated the bill ourselves and hightailed it out of there. If any of you parents of the students are out there reading this, I assure you that your own child acted responsibly and with great decorum throughout the evening. Anyway, today was a dreary day, but everyone was happy to visit the Church of the Spilled Blood, an amazing confection of a building which looks like a gilded, onion-domed ice-cream emporium on the outside and is filled with mosaic tile pictures of the life of Christ from bottom to top on the inside. This is really the most breathtaking church interior we've seen so far, and indeed, visitors spend most of their time there wandering around with their heads thrown back and their mouths gaping. On the way back from our outing with the students, I showed Bella the art gallery I'd found the other day, and we decided to buy a painting that we both really loved. Here's a picture of the painting:



Maltsevsky Market



Amid the neatly stacked rows,

Pyramids, not for the ages but for today alone,

Strawberry, zucchini, garlic,

Strange cheeses, hinting at smells of distant lands

But for the pungent piles, fish, meat, carcasses,

Whose stench dominates the hall,

Overwhelming the fragrant, the delicate:

Fresh bread, cumin, tiny apples

You press to your nose for a smell;

Melons plucked from Eastern vines,

Still warm from the Asian sun. And There--



Thou still unravished pickled pyramid

Of fleshy, delicate rubber

Beside the white chickens; But no,

Not chickens at all, but something else.

I’m afraid to ask.

You tower of vinegared lace,

Soft yet chewy,

Sweet yet salty,

Resist the teeth then yield

Your secret, brined hollows.

What are you, preserved miracle?

“Sparzha” the husky, gold-toothed mouth whispers out

Like a secret lover’s name.

Asparagus. Yet inexplicably,

The taste, so strangely like chicken.


Sunday, June 13, 2004

Okay, I’ll strike while the iron is hot. I’m in a good mood this afternoon after having visited the market down the road. It’s like one of those old fashioned New York City markets with everything from meat to fish to fresh vegetables to bread, you name it, they have it. There are fresh products from all over the country and abroad, and while it isn’t cheap, most of the stuff is much tastier than the same things you can find in the States. The only problem is that some of these people are very good at getting you to buy more stuff than you wanted to. The lady selling smoked fish and caviar was a perfect example. Incredibly friendly, quick with a smile, quicker to hand you a sample of beluga caviar or a slice of smoked fish, and before we knew it, we’d bought half a pound of the good stuff and various hunks of hot and cold smoked fish, for a whopping 2500 rubles. The exchange rate is around 28 rubles to the dollar—you do the math, I’m going to continue pretending it’s monopoly money. We bought strawberries, cherries, produce, honey, bread, this weird dried grape juice thing filled with fruit and nuts—almost like a cross between a fruit roll-up and a candle, but very tasty. We bought lots of pickled stuff too, and the pickle lady threw in a couple of pickled garlic cloves, one red and one white, just as a sample. The Azerbaijani or Armenian or Georgian or Chechen guys who seem to run the booths were all pretty nice, and the Russian women who work for them to do the actual selling are all friendly and eager to sell, which is sometimes intimidating, but a nice change from the Soviet service you often get in the grocery stores. We were even allowed to pick our own strawberries at one stand, which is a big deal here. The guy at the strawberry stand wanted to know where we were from (we didn’t correct him when he suggested that we were Anglichanie [British]), and was impressed that we spoke both English and Russian. I guess the best thing about the exchange was that he was curious about where we were from and not interested in pointing out that we weren’t from Russia. I suppose his own tangential relationship to the Russians (he was a Southerner, probably Azerbaijan) makes him feel more like us, like an outsider. Most of the stands have the prettiest stuff on display, but when you ask for something, they get it from behind the counter for you. This is usually not a problem, but it’s against my nature, being my father’s son, to allow the person I’m buying fruit from to pick it for me. We bought an Asian melon, and the smell of this thing, which is probably the size of a small cantaloupe, is now permeating the entire kitchen, and its all I can do to keep from cutting it open right now. Oh, we also bought spices: cumin, spices for lobio (a Georgian bean dish), and a whole container of spices for shashlyk that I’m hoping to be able to bring home. Oh, I can’t remember if I mentioned the Khvanchkara Georgian wine or the Russkoye Champagnskoye I bought the other day, but I brought it to Tsarskoye Selo yesterday and we shared it with the interested the students, who all liked at least one or the other of them. I’ll probably try to bring some of each home. The students all want to try absinthe next. Yikes!
Today we took the students to Pushkin/Tsarskoe Selo, yet another royal residence turned into a museum. Since the place is way out of town, we had to take the electrichka, or commuter train, to get there. As you might expect, the grounds were beautiful, but the real draw is the newly restored amber room in the Catherine Palace. If you don’t know anything about the amber room, this is, as the name implies, a room covered with amber from floor to ceiling. Very pretty. Of course, the Russians are willing to kill to see something pretty, so actually getting into the palace involved serious threat to body and life. Luckily nothing terribly bad happened to any of us, but the ordeal we had to go through just getting to see the palace was really enough to spoil much of the enjoyment of the place. Seriously, you’d think Elvis had been resurrected and was performing “Jailhouse Rock” in the amber room the way the crowd acted. Probably over a thousand Russians and some few hundred foreigners (an important distinction) all pushed and squeezed for over 3 hours to vie for less than the 500 tickets they sell to people without advance group reservations. People without groups reservations can only enter the museum between 4pm and 6pm, and I’ve seriously never seen such mob insanity. I’m sorry, but it’s my third entry in which I have nothing good to say about the Russians. But, as they say, if you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all, I will give honorable mention to the Russian dogs. If the Russian people act like beasts, the Russian beasts act very civilly. They’re all pleasant and charming, and always seem to have a calming effect on us as we walk past them on the street. In fact, even when the Russian dog owners don’t have their pets on leashes (strange in such a big dangerous city), the Russian dogs are always well-behaved and well-mannered. Well, again, Bella reminds me that I really need to mention Natasha, as the really truly bright spot in our day. Natasha, last year’s language house tutor, is a student at Petersburg State University and has been showing our group around the city. Well, today, she was given an unfunded mandate by her superiors at the University to take us to Tsarskoe Selo, and she was an absolute angel. She waited in line from 2:30 until 5:30 (the first hour she waited by herself just to hold our place in line so the students could at least enjoy some of the park), and then still had the strength after our 3 hour long rugby match to give us a guided tour of the palace. Natasha is certainly one of my favorite people in this town, and if there were more like her, then maybe St. Petersburg might be as nice to live in as it is beautiful to look at.

Friday, June 11, 2004

We went to Peterhof, the Tsars’ summer residence, early this morning on the “Meteor” hydrofoil, and, true to its name, that thing is fast. It’s totally cool to see a big hydrofoil come up out of the water and ride on its skis, and almost as cool to ride on one. When we got to the park, we paid the fee to enter the lower gardens, but apparently there’s a charge for every single building and garden in all of Peterhof. Since we had tickets to the opera this evening, and since it was sunny, we figured our time was better spent outside, where the kids got to play in the fountains and I got to film some of the best footage (I hope) of the trip. The hydrofoil is one of the few attractions in Petersburg where foreigners are treated the same as Russians at the cash register, so that was nice. Of course, once you get to Peterhof, it’s a different story. We didn’t have any trouble paying the foreign student prices when we showed our passes, but it’s just infuriating that they have this double-standard in pricing based on whether or not you look or sound like a foreigner. This exclusionary attitude is even evident in the architecture around here, with each building constituting its own mini-Kremlin, complete with a gated courtyard, and usually some type of gargoyles out front. Sometimes these gargoyles are stone, sometimes flesh and blood. The whole idea is to keep outsiders out, whether they be people from another country or, apparently, the building next door. And if they can’t keep outsiders out, they’re going to make sure they feel unwelcome or at least try to make them pay for being so, well, un-Russian. So anyway, we bought tickets for tonight’s performance of Prince Igor, my favorite Russian opera, and we got all dressed up and took the kids out to the Mussorgsky Theater, and I handed the lady my tickets, and she looked at the tickets and then looked at me and once again I was informed that I was an “inostranyets,” a foreigner. I’m really thinking of wearing a big badge from now on proclaiming my foreign status. Or maybe I’ll make Josh a t-shirt that says “I’m with the Inostranyets” with a big arrow on it pointing at me. Our students were also given a hard time at the ticket-taker’s station tonight (6 of them also bought tickets for the same performance), but they all got in okay. You know, it’s a beautiful city, and there are many nice people among its citizenry, but the culture of xenophobia and distrust is so pervasive, and the stereotype of the stupid, rich foreigner who should be forced to pay extra for the privilege of seeing it is so engrained in the minds of most of the Russians that it’s becoming increasingly harder to remain a Slavophile. It used to be understandable that the people were xenophobic in the days of the old Soviet Union, because there was a real danger for the average citizen if he were seen communicating with a foreigner. I’m not sure what the justification is today, except that maybe they really do dislike foreigners and would prefer if we just didn’t visit. Cetainly the developing trend of ultra-nationalist Russian cinema would lead one to believe such a hypothesis. Anyway, I’ll probably feel better about St. Petersburg and Russia tomorrow. At least I hope I will. Oh, I almost forgot the big news. We met Max and Masha (Bella’s cousin and his girlfriend) at Peterhof, and we found out that not only are they married (at least that’s what Masha told Bella), but that Masha is 3 months pregnant. Those Russians are so tight-lipped. I remember our good friend Ura in Moscow was equally tight-lipped. We got a letter from him twelve years ago with a picture of a girl pushing a baby-carriage. The girl, who we had never heard about before, turned out to be his wife Natasha, and the baby-carriage, who we also never heard about before, turned out to be their son Styopa.

Thursday, June 10, 2004

Last night we went out to the Shamrock Pub again, but with all the students this time. Everyone had a great time. Alison got passed from lap to lap (much to her delight) and Josh tried a little too much beer. He apparently is partial to Guiness. Micha, our German student, taught the whole crowd to sing a German drinking song and how to pronounce Lowenbrau correctly. I still haven’t gotten it right. The Russkii Standart vodka we started our meal with was cold and smooth, and strangely served with a wedge of lemon, which, on principle, I didn’t eat. I’ve decided to bring home some as souvenirs if I can manage. Today I took the kids to an out-of-the-way museum, the Museum of Decorative and Applied Arts, which is actually housed in the same building as an art college, the students of which are working on restoring the museum. It seems to be a nice symbiosis, and the museum itself is a hidden gem. They’re not used to having foreigners there, either. As a matter of fact, if you’re not looking for the museum, you wouldn’t even know it existed. We walked past the entrance the first time, and went into the next entrance, about 50 yards further down, because we saw a group of students standing out front. When we walked in, a big guard automatically leaped up from his chair and blocked our way, wondering what the hell a middle aged man with two kids was doing in an art school. I asked him if he knew of a museum that was supposed to be around there somewhere, and he replied, in typical Russian fashion, with a question of his own. A question I’ve been asked over and over again since I’ve been here. “Vy inostranyets?” (Are you a foreigner?). They say this with a slight smile usually, as if to say, “ha ha, you’re not fooling me for one second, I can tell you’re a foreigner, so don’t bother to deny it.” The woman at the Peter & Paul Fortress asked me that question when I wanted to buy tickets to get up on the ramparts, and I said, “Da, konechno,” (Are you kidding me? Of course I’m a foreigner. Can’t you hear my outrageous accent? Can’t you see the cheerful, please-charge-me-extra look on my face?). However, I followed this immediately with an offhand, “no, ya studyent, zdes v Piterburkskom Universitete” (but, I am a student, here at St. Petersburg university) and showed her my student ID card. She was very impressed, and after asking me a few more random questions to make sure I really did understand Russian, she let us all in for student prices. Anyway, back to today. The guard, after his astute observation of my otherness, sent us around to the first entrance, which was totally unmarked. Some guy was loading furniture into his van right in front of the entrance, so I asked him if there was a museum in there. He said there was, and we went in. However, when we first walked in, we saw no signs of a museum. It looked like an art gallery shop, with paintings laying around for sale all over the floor, and a grinning man who had dollar signs for eyes came up quickly to see what the foreigners might want. “Isn’t there a museum of decorative arts here somewhere?” I asked. “Oh, that. Hang on. The girl has the key.” And he walked off. I still wasn’t sure what the hell was going on, but sure enough, behind piles and piles of paintings, I saw a big wrought-iron gate and this young woman came over with one of those big skeleton keys and unlocked the gate. She didn’t look at us, and she barely pushed the gate open a few millimeters, and then she walked off. I assumed this meant we should go on through, which we did, and we were immediately met by a little old lady in a red apron. “Vy inostranets?” she reminded me. Yes, I’m the foreigner. Apparently the guard next door had phoned ahead. “You can buy tickets over there.” She pointed down this dingy hallway, where I saw another little babushka, in a matching red apron, sitting at a desk. The first woman, after directing me toward the second woman, decided that it might not be a good idea to trust the foreigner to make it all the way down the hallway unescorted, so she came with me, all the while pointing out the second lady, until we finally were all standing in front of the desk. “Here she is.” I thanked the first woman, who continued to offer helpful commentary as I asked for tickets for me and Josh. Alison, as a 5-year-old, is completely invisible to museum workers until she gets too close to an exhibit. And the second woman, after yet again asking if I was a foreigner, allowed me to pay, and asked if we didn’t want to pay to take photos as well. I paid to take pictures, but to tell you the truth, from the looks of things, it seemed like all we were going to see in this museum was a dingy corridor with some old junk in it. The first lady then took me on a little guided tour of the main room on the first floor. There were several locked gates into other areas of the museum, but only one corridor that wasn’t locked. “After you’re done in here, you can go into that corridor” she smiled. Okay, so I decided to make the best of things. There was literally nobody else in the place. But the stuff was actually pretty cool, and the museum was beautiful. We went into the next corridor, and that stuff was even cooler. We circled around and noticed that one of the gates that had been locked was now open ever so slightly, so we went in. There were other locked gates that were all of a sudden ajar, one after the other, and the museum was actually really great. There was a beautiful collection of Russian dolls that Alison liked, and after about 45 minutes, we had seen the whole museum and were back at the front desk to collect our bags and Josh’s jacket. “And how was everything? Did you like the dolls, my little one?” the ticket lady asked Alison. “Oh, she loved the dolls. Everything was very beautiful,” I offered. “Okay, now you can continue through that door,” the lady suggested, pointing to a totally unmarked, closed door past the cloakroom, leading to what looked like a utility closet or the director’s offices. We opened the door and there was another set of stairs and another beautiful area of the museum, with a grand ballroom, a circular staircase brought from one of the Tsars’ summer palaces, and other treasures. This was also the area the art students were still renovating, so it was cool to see some of the work in progress as well. It was such a strange experience, from beginning to end, but so totally Russian. “Vy inostranyets?” “Da, konechno.”

Here are some photos
So here are some random thoughts: Being in St. Petersburg is very often like being the persecuted character in a Monty Python sketch. You know, the one who walks into the office because he wants to have an argument but ends up getting hit on the head instead, or the one who walks into the “Cheeses Of The World” shop and asks for every kind of cheese possible only to be told they don’t have any. Finally, the owner of the shop offers to help: “Ask for Muenster” he suggests. “Okay, do you have any Muenster?” the customer finally asks, ready to at least get something. “Sorry, fresh out of Muenster,” the shopkeeper sheepishly admits. And so on like that. Anyway, sometimes things that don’t make any actual sense somehow make perfect sense to the Russians, and I suppose I know it’ll be time to leave when these things start making sense to us too. Of course, that’s a Catch-22, because if they make perfect sense to us, then we won’t realize that they actually don’t make sense inherently. Here’s what I mean: Remember that bear story? You know, the one I wrote about a few days ago when the bear gets on the trolleybus and rides standing on his hind legs? Right, that one. Well, it turns out that Bella has been telling that story to all of our Russian acquaintances. And it turns out that they all ask the same question immediately upon hearing the story. “But the bear had a muzzle on, right?” Okay, so a bear riding the trolleybus without a muzzle = bad. A bear riding the trolleybus with a muzzle on = no problem.

Tuesday, June 08, 2004

Yesterday, Bella’s cousin Max from Moscow called and asked if we wanted to meet to go for a boat ride that evening. He had managed to arrange a business trip to St. Petersburg for him and his girlfriend Masha (although Masha doesn’t seem to have any work to do here). We decided that they’d come over for tea instead, and we talked until late in the evening.






It was great seeing them, and we plan to see them again tomorrow. Today we went to the Peter & Paul Cathedral, final resting place of most of the Russian Tsars, including Peter the Great, Nicholas the Second, and everyone in between. I was able to videotape the students doing their presentations and talking about their first week here, but it ended up costing me $10 because I decided to use the tripod. Oh, well. The guy who showed me where the kassa was asked me if I was from Russia, and I told him I wasn’t, so he asked if I was German, and then started speaking German to me. When I told him I was American, he seemed sympathetic enough, and complimented me on my Russian. Patrick (one of our students) did a great impression of the actor who plays the foreigner in “Russian Ark” for the video, and there were a couple of good stories from some of the others, so things are really coming along. Now I have to find the time to start editing. We stopped for dinner at a really good sushi restaurant right down the street from our apartment. This place was much more authentic than the place we went to last week, but the sushi was served warm, which is a bit disconcerting. Everything was tasty, and our waitress, who looked Japanese to me, spoke flawless Russian and her nametag said she was Tatiana. On the way home we stopped in to buy a couple of ice cream bricks, one with black smorodinoe berries (if you don’t know what they are, I can’t really explain it—they’re sort of like hard, slightly sour blueberries, but very tasty—we picked them by the bucketful and ate them by the fistful at Darin’s dacha when we were in Moscow in 2001) and the other one was the flavor of the year here—Crème Brulee. Everything is Crème Brulee around here. It basically tastes like French vanilla to me though. Max has promised to take me to a famous bar around here in the next few days, the “Steamer Trunk of a Pregnant Spy” is the rough translation, as I understand it. With a name like that, how could it NOT be famous?

Monday, June 07, 2004

Today we split up. I took Alison to the park in the morning and Bella took Josh to the University. I’m much better navigating the city when I’m on my own, and my Russian is actually not too bad for getting around on an everyday basis. After the park, we walked around and I took photos for the film project. I’m trying to shoot interesting monuments, building signs, and stuff like that as stock footage for the film, and I’m getting some really interesting stuff. We found a statue of Dzerzhinsky, the first head of the KGB, right near a new building construction site, so I took his picture in front of the new capitalist symbols. One thing I love about Russia, and something the students noticed the other day when we were out showing them Nevsky Prospect, is the incredible diversity in the way things are done. There are lots of new business ventures vying for the Petersburgers’ disposable income, and they’re all doing things slightly differently. Some shops, bars, cafés, and theaters are becoming very western, others have some of the trappings of western ventures, while others are still quite Soviet in the way they do things and treat customers. Each of these styles seems to have its adherents, and it’s nice to see a culture that isn’t quite as calcified in its commercial habits as the US is. If you go into a café in the US, no matter where you go, things pretty much work the same way, especially if you go to one of the national franchises. That’s not the case even from one street to the next in Petersburg, where the culture can vary from shop to shop. Anyway, today Alison and I saw a line of people queuing up in front of a window with a sign for bread above it. Well, since these aren’t the bad old days of rationing, and since you can buy bread in about 10 different places on every city block in St. Petersburg, I decided I’d wait on the line and see what the fuss was about. It turned out to be a little retail outlet for this particular bread factory, so I bought some cookies and a loaf of their black bread (Leningradsky). Well, we’ve already sampled the cookies, and its all I can do to keep from ripping open the bag and eating the rest, so if the bread is anywhere near as good, then I may never leave. I’ve gotten my Russian waiting-in-line mentality back already, and to tell you the truth, these Petersburgers are pushovers compared to the Muscovites. I’d really have to fight to hold my place in line in Moscow, but its much easier here in Petersburg.

Josh and Bella went to see Harry Potter in Russian last night, and they both loved it. Some of the students who went weren’t quite sure what was going on because their Russian isn’t that good yet, but Josh has read the books enough times that he was actually able to explain some of the action to Bella, who was apparently not always able to follow the story line.

Saturday, June 05, 2004

Ah, Saturday in St. Petersburg. What a beautiful day it was. We went to St. Isaac’s Cathedral (I’ll post a picture at some point) with all the students, and we all got in for student prices. The old lady taking tickets demanded to see our Ids even after we had shown them to the woman at the kassa (cashier’s booth), and still didn’t want to let us in. When I showed my student ticket with my student ID she glared at me and said “a chto eto takoi?” (translated: “And what exactly is this?”, which means in this context, “what is this baldy doing with a St. Petersburg student ID card?”) To which I glared right back and said, in a very good accent (and an even better shoulder shrug, thank you very much), “Nu, ya aspirant” (roughly “What do you mean? I’m a grad student.”), and everyone was happy. We also went up to the top of St. Isaac’s for a magnificent panoramic view of the city, and everything was just swell. Took some great photos but I’m too tired at this point to post any just yet.

After St. Isaac’s, we took the whole crowd to this weird new place for lunch where you pick the raw meat and veggies, sauces, spices, etc. and the counterwoman piles it all up in a bowl for you. Then you walk down the counter to the chefs who fry everything up for you. The whole thing is like a Russian Benihana (or actually more like Homers International, for those of you who have been there before), and the food is actually really good. Lunch was pretty reasonable (150 rubles or about $5 per plate), and I’d personally like to go back again. The curry sauce was particularly good. The place was clean, the staff was friendly, the bathrooms were first-rate (always worth mentioning), and the ceilings were to die for. Beautiful vaulted red domes trimmed in white. If we go back I’ll take a picture for you. While the staff at Myasorubka (Meat-grinder) were friendly and showed the new cheerful face of Russian entrepreneurism, on the way to the restaurant, we got a bit lost and when I asked for directions from a lady selling ice-cream on the street we got a little reminder of the old face of Russia. Here we are, tired, lost, hungry, 12 students, two leaders, and two little kids in tow, and this woman selling ice cream is just standing there doing absolutely nothing. No customers, nobody around for blocks, in fact. I sidle up and politely ask, “Izvenite, vy ne znaite gde restauran Miasorubka?” (“Excuse me, would you happen to know where the restaurant Meatgrinder is?”). To be honest, before the first word had finished crossing my lips (granted, “izvenite” is a relatively long word to say), I already knew I should just walk away, but something made me finish the question and wait for the answer. She rolled her eyes, smirked, and we both waited for the question to end. She finally knew why she had bothered to wake up this Saturday morning and stand there on the street corner with no customers to yell at. Maybe it wouldn’t be a total loss after all. Through as snotty a sneer as she could muster while still managing to look bored enough to drop dead on the spot rather than speak to me, she looked past me, rather than at me, and said, more to the giant tallybook in the sky than to me or the group, “And how exactly am I supposed to know the location of this particular restaurant that you’re talking about?” Zing! Victory was hers! Life had meaning once more. She was no longer low man (woman) on the totem pole. Neither of us knew the location of this particular restaurant, that she acknowledged, and therefore she wasn’t ahead on that score, but, ha ha, there’s where our equality ends. I wanted to know where that restaurant was. You might even conjecture from my question and the 15 people I had in tow that I wanted to GO to that restaurant. And that’s where she had me. She was not interested in going to that restaurant, and therefore the knowledge of its location was of no consequence to her. She, the newly crowned Empress of Ice Cream, had played her trump card. And all that was left for us to do was to bow in homage to her greatness. Oh well, so I thanked her VERY much for her great service, Bella said she was a very nice woman indeed. Anyway, worse things happen than being used as a personal ego-booster for the underemployed, but I expanded on this little episode because this sort of nastiness is pervasive in Russia, and it’s something the locals have to deal with on a daily basis. It’s particularly problematic in places like post offices, where the workers expect everyone to know all the rules, and yell at you for not knowing the rules (which happened to Bella already during this trip), but it can strike anywhere. Well, that’s my little spiel for today. The day was really great, and I was actually amused when the woman answered me like that. I think I just feel bad for the people who have to live with this sort of attitude every day of their lives. Especially in a place as tough to live in as Russia. All for now.

Here's an example of Russian "Shuzy". Notice the woman is wearing the shoes in the gravel path.
She was also busy running after her toddler.


Friday, June 04, 2004

Yesterday we went to the Hermitage Museum. The real wonder of the museum is not the collection, which is of course massive and much of it is beautiful, but the building itself is the real star. The Hermitage Museum, which as you may know, is housed in the former Winter Palace of the Russian Tsars, and the rooms, hallways, staircases, ornamentation, everything, is just incredible. The art is sometimes poorly displayed, with paintings behind glass displayed opposite open windows, so that the glare from the windows makes it all but impossible to see the art. But it’s really great to walk through the place and just soak it all in. Even though the museum is full of people, it’s so huge that most of the rooms are pretty empty unless tour groups are wandering through, and when the tour groups are Japanese, it can be downright dangerous to get in their way. Anyway, it was a great day and I got a lot of good stuff for the project. Alison was a trooper and walked almost the whole way, and we must have been there for over 5 hours with just one stop for lunch and another break at the end at the very nice internet café in the gift shop area. At 20 rubles for 20 minutes, it isn’t the cheapest place around, but it isn’t too expensive. The coffee is only fair, but the M&Ms were first rate, according to Alison. Anyway, they say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here’s my short story about the Hermitage.



Today’s math quiz: If a picture is really worth a thousand words, and if words are a dime a dozen, then how much would it cost to take a photo with a guy dressed up like Peter the Great? Apparently 30 rubles if you use your own camera, 300 if you want a Polaroid. Regardless of the exchange rate, here are 60 rubles worth of pictures taken after our day at the Hermitage. Does this girl look tired to you?




Today we met the students, who all looked much happier and excited than the group from Rochester looked the other day when we first went to the University. The students took a placement test and they had a little welcoming ceremony, and then we went for a stroll that somehow turned into a 4-hour death march when Natasha (last year’s language house tutor) went a little crazy and took us on a wild goose chase. We ended up hungry and tired at Pizza Hut, and unfortunately it's as good here as it is back home.


Here’s my observation for today: Anyone who’s anyone in St. Petersburg has very expensive, new, pointy, painful-looking shoes. Shoes that look like they’re almost as much trouble to get kicked in the shins with as they are to wear. And if you’re really in style these days, your shoes should point slightly up (must be a feng shui symbol of upward mobility—or at least a symbol that the person wearing these shoes doesn’t actually have to walk more than a few feet over the course of the day, sort of like pale skin used to be a sign of wealth in the 18th century, since the tanned people were all out in the fields working their tails off.). In actuality, the people wearing these shoes usually end up walking great distances, and it’s becoming a bit of a sport for us to see who can spot the most ridiculously high heels or the pointiest toes, or the most unstable gait on Nevsky Prospekt.




Since today is a double-entry day, I’ll share another observation. You can treat it like the second epilogue in War & Peace if you like. This city reminds me more and more of this Old English poem I studied back in the day. The poet is an inhabitant of the British Isles sometime around 900AD and he’s writing about these giants who left behind all these structures, great amphitheatres, aqueducts, buildings, that have since crumbled for lack of care or knowhow or money since these giants have gone away. Of course the poet is referring to the Romans who came and colonized Britain hundreds of years earlier but then abandoned it when they had to go back to fight off invaders on their homeland. The crumbling structures were left and were the only signs of the once-great culture that had sprung up there. Don’t misinterpret me here, I’m not a Tsarist, but I look at the way these people take so little care of community space and how obsessed they are with individual gratification and care so little about their civic lives, that there always seems to me a tremendous disconnect between this beautiful city and the people who live in it.



Wednesday, June 02, 2004

Today we had the best day yet. After a comfortable night on our new mattress (we left off the last “S” for “slipped disk”) we went to Tauride Gardens, a childrens’ park where I filmed and photographed some stock footage for my project and the kids had a great time using the very new and well-kept playground equipment. We stopped for a snack of chicken and lamb shashlik (I’d call them shish-kebabs, but they’re more like the nectar of the gods when they’re done right, which they were today) from one of the many little open-air cafes that make a day out in Russia special. Sometimes I wonder if we couldn’t learn something from them in that area. To sit there in a park in the middle of the city on a warm summer day eating shashlik is a sort of microcosm of everything that’s right and good about Russia. I shot a ton of pictures for the film, and have even started editing some of the footage I got over the last few days. After another stop at the store for candy and some other necessary items (bread, milk, etc) we had a light meal of red caviar sandwiches and went off to the center to meet Marietta, our former colleague at William & Mary, who lives in St. Petersburg, and is a dear friend of Tony and Vivian’s. We had a good time with Marietta, catching up on things. It rained while we were at Marietta’s apartment, a grand pre-Revolutionary affair with these gorgeously high ceilings and domed windows with stylized wooden frames, but as the weather has been doing lately, the rain let up at exactly 9pm while we were walking along the Neva Riverbank by the Hermitage, and the sun came out dazzlingly for about 45 minutes while we walked and I took another ton of photos. Good thing I bought an extra memory card before we left for Russia. Here are a few examples.

Tuesday, June 01, 2004

Today we were almost robbed by a gang of Georgians on the bus. First one guy actually offered to hold Bella’s money while she got out the bills to pay for the ride, and then they went after me. Here’s the way they worked it: there were about 5 of them all together, and they all stood near the entrance of the bus (which is actually at the middle of the bus). Two or 3 of these made a human basket, holding onto the railings around me so I couldn’t get past them. Then a couple of the others started reaching into my pockets from either side, casually holding their jackets in front of them and innocently standing up against me. I noticed what was going on from the start, but when I tried to get past the thieves into the front of the bus, the big ones held the railings tight so I couldn’t get through. After a few light shoves and some “izvenites” (“excuse me,” pronounced “eez-veh-NEE-tyeh”), the guys forming the box around me still wouldn’t move, pretending not to notice, so I ducked under one of the massive arms and out past the thieves into a safer area of the bus. As I went past, the smaller guy trying to pick my left front pocket took a swat at me and yelled, “Where the hell are you pushing?” All five of them got off the bus at the very next stop, no doubt to wait for another mark. Anyway, I felt lousy for the rest of the day, and we decided to walk back from the University instead of try the bus again. We went to the Kunstkamera, the very first museum in Russia, created by Peter the Great, and I got some great film footage of the various rooms, including the room that holds Peter’s original collection of oddities and biological anomalies, like two-headed fetuses and malformed body parts. Really gross. Anyway, we also saw Veronika Dolina, a famous Russian bard singer, in the Kunstkamera, but I was too shy to say hello. We saw her perform at William & Mary last year and she has a concert coming up in Petersburg. On the way back home we did some more filming and as we walked down the street toward the Cathedral of Spilled Blood Bella overheard two more thieves discussing a “camera bag” and “professional equipment”, and she thought they were planning to try to steal my backpack, but it turned out they were talking about some old German tourist with a big beige camera bag, so we managed to avoid any more excitement for today. Oh, on a lighter note, the shopping spree continues: we bought a mattress pad after sleeping for the past few nights on a sofabed originally owned by Fred Flintstone, so we’re hoping our backs will forgive us in a day or two. All for now…

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