After my semi-disastrous [read: embarrassing and frustrating] marshrutka saga, I returned home much earlier than Tatiana Dmitrievna had expected me. Which was around her lunch time, so I was, of course, instructed to "Иди! кушай!" (come and eat). I'm pretty sure it was like 2 pm, and I'd already eaten in town during my wanderings, but when a Russian expects you to eat, there's really no point in arguing. Besides, it looked tasty.
We then had a great discussion (or rather, I listened to an excellent lecture) about Russian history and politics. As I'm only giving the highlight reel, here are the most interesting subjects we touched on, please feel free to comment below or email me if you want to hear more.
Russia never invaded another country, they were always invited. That's why the empire lasted as long as it did. Specifically, as regards the Baltic States: Russia wasn't occupying their territory, it was defending them from outside aggressors. Gorbachev and Yeltsin were not good leaders. The Soviet system needed to come to an end, but it should have been done better. Especially when it comes to social services--now, instead of good education and health care and universal employment, Russia has oligarchs who got rich taking money from the people. They should give some (all?) of the money back to the people and invest in education and health care.
Another adventure I promised to tell is my trip to the hostel on the outskirts of town. Now, to be fair, this place was not nearly as far from the center as I live, but I'm pretty sure it was about 20 minutes from the nearest metro stop, which seems to be a better marker of level of civilization here that objective distance from the center. Anyway, I walked the whole way, since after my marshrutka experience I was extremely wary of getting on the wrong bus or getting off at the wrong stop. Having checked and double-checked the address (conveniently located on the same street as my university, but a couple hundred numbers away) I set off after school. Seeing the street change as I got farther and farther from Nevskiy Prospect was really an eye-opening experience and a great illustration of the wealth disparity in modern Russia.
As I usually take the metro to and from school, and my wanderings are usually limited to the area close to Nevsky, this was my first glimpse of the progression, and it was quite striking. First, Let me start with some basic geography for those who haven't already fled to google maps or a similar site. The main street in central St. Petersburg (for the nit-pickers out there, I'm excluding Vasilevsky Ostrov) is Nevsky Prospect. At one end are located the Hermitage and the Winter Palace, it then travels past several cathedrals, theaters, and other places of cultural significance, reaches Ploshad' Vosstaniya (or, as Google Translate puts it: "The Area of the Revolution"), and continues to its other end at the Alexander Nevsky Lavra (as a friend explained, "a Lavra is basically a really fancy monastery").
When most people talk about "the Center" of St. Petersburg, they mean Nevsky Prospect and anywhere within a 15 minute walk of it. So when my adventure took me about 1 hour's walk from Nevsky (45 minutes from school) there was a lot to be seen. Of course, now that I'm trying to explain it, I can't seem to describe anything. Maybe the allergic reaction is distracting me. Anyway, here are a few pictures from that walk, hopefully they illustrate the point I'm trying to articulate. (click to enlarge)
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| there's a cat in there |
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| The English really confused me. Only time I've seen it somewhere other than Nevsky |
After all that, when I got to the address that the website said the hostel was at, I couldn't find an entrance to the building. There was a sign that said something about Herzen University, but no visible entrance to the building. Deciding I wouldn't really like to live in that neighborhood anyway (as a girl who would inevitably be going home in the dark at some point) I decided to give up and head home. So I walked a couple of blocks, got on a bus, and got back to the metro stop next to school in about 10 minutes. Proving how slow I was walking.
As is a recurring theme here on Notes from Aboveground, I've not told nearly half of what I intended to. Further highlights: seeing grass for the first time; rediscovering what my neighborhood looks like now that the snow's gone (I'll have to do a before and after for you all soon); new Russian friends; one of the weirdest films I've ever seen (probably made weirder by being a bad Russian dubbing of Czech--it's called Little Otik in English, look it up); adventures in allergy diagnosis (otherwise known as: why have these hives lasted 4 days?); an apparent love of parentheses; a (brief) trip to the Peter and Paul fortress, complete with the noon cannon salute (that took us by surprise and was REALLY loud); and the apartment hunt continues.
So stay tuned and I might go into more detail about that stuff. Or I might just skip to this week's group excursion: Dostoevsky's St. Petersburg, which apparently may involve some mild trespassing. Which just makes it more Dostoevskian. Given the name I gave this blog, that one's going to have to get an extensive entry. Here's hoping it'll be cloudy! (To set the appropriate mood)
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