I felt very sad being in Russia. China is the only other country that I’ve been to that is not a so-called first world country. So to be faced with the poverty of a nation was confronting. It was all the more sad because there are clearly lots of extremely wealthy people in Russia. It was really disturbing to see women sell plastic bags. You could buy a ‘Gap’ bag or a ‘Benneton’ bag or a ‘Harrods’ bag. I’m not sure why.
We arrived in St. Petersburg at 5.30am. It was really really cold. We thought we knew where we were but as it happened we were wrong. It’s a bit hard to navigate yourself on a map when you think you are somewhere that you are not. There’s those darn assumptions again.
Eventually we worked it out and got the Metro to the station near our hostel. Right outside the station was a line of about twenty middle-aged women holding up jumpers and other knitwear, or with fruit, vegetables or flowers at their feet. This petty trading was everywhere in St. P and Moscow, and I presume the rest of the country.
We were pretty tired after the bus trip from Tallinn but I woke up lickety split quick when a van nearly mowed me down. It was a mistake to assume that the footpath was a relatively safe place to be. Assumptions be damned! Two lanes on the road turned into one, but rather than slowing down, van-man accelerated to see if he could pass on the inside. Unfortunately, the curb and I happened to be in the way, which was jolly bad luck for him ’cause the poor fella had to swerve violently back onto the road.
Apparently there used to be no unemployment in the former USSR. I’m not sure what the biggest tragedy is. The fact that so many people are now surplus to requirements and are forced to sell whatever they can, or to beg. Or the fact that there are so many people still in jobs that are not jobs. The number of forms to fill to get a thing done directly relates to the number of people with jobs. Bureaucracy = employment. Many of the jobs are behind the scenes but we saw a few examples of ‘non-jobs’, the most boring of which was probably the escalator watchers.
The Metro in both St. P and Moscow was amazing. Many of the lines are incredibly deep — so that they could be used as nuclear bomb shelters if ever the need arose. Quite a number of stations are elegantly and extravagantly decorated. Mostly the theme is Lenin or ‘socialist realism’ e.g. the strength/heroism/stoicism of the working people. Since they are very deep, the escalators taking you down are very long. I estimated the long ones to be about 120 metres long. It certainly gave me that creepy vertigo feeling in my coccyx when I looked to the top. At the bottom of escalators is a glass box with a live human being in it. Sometimes they talk on the phone (an external line?) but mostly they just sit and watch. Since I saw one of them turn a knob and the speed of one of the escalators seemed to increase, I can only presume that they are speed regulators and can stop things if there is an accident. And boy do they go fast!! You have to jump on and off so that your legs don’t get swept out from under you. It’s like a being on a sideshow ride.
The typical image of a ‘nice old lady’ wanting to feed you and give you cups of tea doesn’t really exist as far as we could see in Russia. Babushkas (kindly old woman apparently) are mean, hard and could take you out with a glance. What was Kate Bush singing about?
You get used to the staring after a while. At first, having every pair of eyes in a Metro car watch you is a bit disconcerting, but after a while you treat it as a game. The worst is when people stare, then turn away and talk and giggle to their friend, then turn back and stare some more. What are they saying?
It’s easy to tell where older women sit on the socio-economic scale by the way they dress. Women with any money at all will spend it on clothes and make up it seems. What’s the point of being a woman with money if you can’t be entirely glamorous 24-7? Wealthy women just don’t seem to go out in casual clothes.
Many young men are entirely androgynous, with striking high cheekbones and handsome features. In general, though, it seemed that only the most macho men had handbags. There is no other word for them. They carry black leather bags in their hands or under their arms. They are about half the size of a laptop. Who knows what’s inside? Presumably a wallet and keys, but what else? A gun? It’s fascinating to be in a culture that on the surface is very similar to our own, but also has different gender rules. Clearly the macho men with handbags don’t see them as any threat to the perception of their masculinity, as fellas in the west would.
An interesting day in St. Petersburg was the Highland Games day. For some reason a pack of Scots travel around Europe showing off their expertise in caber tossing, highland dancing, tug of war and marching bands. It was totally bizarre. A bunch of Russians were there dressed in medieval garb and pretended to have sword fights over ‘maidens’. They had birds of prey, which they did tricks with and were all together very strange. And totally cool too.
Given that we didn’t feel too safe walking around at night, we decided to spend a night sipping vodka on the balcony of the hostel. This started out to be a good move and ended up being a gruesome time that I never want to repeat. I guess you can figure what happened. There we were chatting away sipping on our vodka from a water bottle because we bought pear and apple leaf flavour (yeah, I’m wondering why now too) and it was disgusting and we had to mix it with orange juice to disguise the flavour. And then all of a sudden, I couldn’t see.
Everything was blurry and my head kept going around and around. Glen and Matty (two nice Aussie guys we met and travelled with) and Tracey tried to cajole me inside out of the cold, but I couldn’t even think about moving. Somehow they convinced me to go to the bathroom and I knelt before the great white cauldron for quite some time. I was more than happy there as well and would have been happy to stay all night. I kept telling Tracey to leave me alone, but thank goodness she completely ignored me. Again, she somehow convinced me to go back to our beds, and that is where I stayed for the next 20 or so hours. It was truly awful. I haven’t touched vodka since and the thought of doing so still sends a shiver down my spine – three months after that dreadful night.
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