mostly museums

Hi, everyone!

I haven't written in a while, and this update is long. Embarrassingly so. I mean really, this is a stupidly long email. I'm sorry! Maybe break it into little bits and read a little at a time? I'll try to be more regular and less self-indulgent in the future. Maybe. Also, this is only most of one part of what I had planned on writing. Hopefully the rest of this part and the other two parts will come out shortly.

I miss you all and love hearing from you, so drop me a line! Hope all is well!

Love,

Annie

Part the first: in which our heroine samples various of the historical, cultural and intellectual delights of her new city…

Kunstkammer
The Kunstkammer was the first museum in our sense of the word in Russia, and was created as Peter I's collection of medical oddities and other scientific what-have-you. Our tour started in a big room that had a bunch of telescopes in it. I gathered from the length of time we spent in this room that these were telescopes of some historical and/or scientific significance, and gathered from what the tour guide was telling us, in Russian, very little else. I was tired. But the view out the window was fantastic – the frozen Neva flanked by the never-ending green walls of the Hermitage.
We were then led up a flight of rather narrow and tightly spiraled stairs into a room with a big globe in it. The globe was handmade as a gift for somebody or other. (I did actually understand all of this, but the tour was a long time ago and I don't remember a lot of it.) Anyway, it was enormous, and hollow inside, and back in the day you and your hoop skirt and powdered wig could be handed up into it by your be-knickered beaux and his powdered wig and the two of you and select of your friends could sit inside the globe as it rotated around you displaying for your frivolous and bought-at-the-price-of-serfdom enjoyment a highly stylized portrayal of the constellations.
We then moved on to the real heart of the museum – the medical oddities bit. This is the part where you see stuffed two-headed cows and deformed fetuses in jars. I didn't much fancy the deformed fetuses in jars. Apparently Peter I's buddies went around and bought all of these fetuses from private collectors who had, in turn, bought them from surrounding peasants or their midwives. I found this whole thing really unsettling. Not only is it really gross to see a 250-year-old baby in a jar, but I couldn't help but be aware of the fact that the jarbaby was actually somebody's child. And that we were all gawking at it. However, I learned as we were leaving the museum that the collection had been created as a way of educating the Russian peasantry. Peter I, in is tireless pursuit of Westernization, was trying through his museum to help the peasants to understand that birth defects were a natural, scientific phenomenon, and not the work of evil spirits or punishment by the gods for some sort of transgression. So as much as I'm not keen on the idea of a "medical oddities" museum in general, Peter I earned some points in my book for having what I consider to be a good motivation.

Peter and Paul Fortress
There were lots of interesting things on our tour of the Fortress that either a) I didn't understand from our tour or b) have forgotten, but all of which I c) should have probably known external to the tour if I think of myself as a Russian enthusiast. Alas.
The one thing I do want to comment about here, though, is that the cathedral in the fortress is where all of the tsars and their families are buried. But they aren't really buried – they are each in a giant stone coffin set on the floor of the cathedral with a sign marking who they were and either the dates of their reign or their relationship to the reigning tsar in question. Seeing this was incredible and I have no confidence whatsoever in my ability to relate to you how moving it was.
But you read in a book, for example, or in a rambling email as the case may be, that Peter I founded this city on the gulf of Finland. But then you go and you actually see where Peter I lies now, and it all of a sudden becomes real and you understand that there was actually somebody alive at one point in whose brain actually occurred the thought, "Hey, this marsh would be a good place to set up shop and force everyone in this big, culturally and historically rich country to change everything about their way of life." And you see Catherine the Great, and you realize that she actually existed, not as some sort of omnipresent force that you can include in a cause-and-effect diagram for history class, but as a person who lived and breathed and probably had acne growing up.
Then there was a special room for the Romanovs. As I understand it, the Soviets wouldn't put the tsar and his family in the room with the rest of the tsars because they technically weren't royalty when they died, as they had been deposed then murdered. But the people weren't going to swallow just forgetting about them, so an adjoining room was built in which each of the members of the family has a large plaque on the wall, and there is a memorial to their deaths. You can't go into this room, but people leave flowers at the entrance.
All of this was really moving, and was the most real that history has ever felt to me. I didn't want to cheapen the experience by being a tourist and taking a bunch of photos of where the remains of real people were lying, but I also didn't want to forget that I had seen these people and that it had been important to me, so I did take a few photos and I'm glad I did.

Russian Museum
Our professor Kiril, he of the three-piece suit and awkward charm, invited our group to accompany him on a Saturday afternoon trip to the Russian Museum. He is an amateur artist, and has several times shown us photographs of his reproductions of famous Russian paintings. The Russian Museum is pretty much what it sounds like – an art museum that contains the works of Russian artists. The Hermitage is the one for the rest of the world.
The excursion was nice. I was a little out of sorts because I was getting over a bad cold/fever/flu-type thing, on which more later, but enjoyed the few hours spent there. They were having a special exhibit on Russian folk art, which I regret having not gotten to, and a special exhibit on Vrubel. I'm not a big fan of Vrubel. He's pretty well-loved among people with taste in art far less pedestrian than mine, but I feel that Vrubel painted a lot of Jolly Green Giants and put some rhinestones in their hair and called them devils… That was unfair. Excuse me. But Vrubel was the set-designer for a lot of the productions of the Ballets Russes, including for the premier of the Rite of Spring, every bit of which everyone hated in every way at its premier, but every bit of which was total genius, so I respect Vrubel for that and respectfully withdraw my bejeweled string-bean vendor comment from the record. But I still don't much care for him.
The permanent exhibit was really great, because we saw all of the paintings that Peter and Abby and I attempted to teach one another about in Russian Culture last semester. And, of course, they were stunning in real life. My favorite was Repin's painting of Stepan Razin. This is why: in Russian culture we learned a drinking song about Stepan (Stenka) Razin, who was a manly-man and leader of revolutions against various and sundry occupiers of Russia. In the song, as far as I can remember (Kira is probably reading this… I'm sorry I've forgotten everything!) our friend Stenka had captured a hot little peasant girl and was bringing her along on the boat with him and his warrior pals. Said same warrior pals were giving Stenka a hard time for going soft over his, erm, acquisition, so he retorted by essentially saying, "Oh, yeah? Well how's this for going soft!" and threw the poor gal overboard and she drowned. Please don't ask me why I like that song so much. I just think it's so funny!

Hermitage
The day after the Russian Museum we went to the museum to end all museums, the Hermitage. I said earlier that the Hermitage is where the rest of the world's art can be seen in Petersburg, and that's not an exaggeration. It's unspeakably enormous. We were on a two-ish hour tour and didn't even scratch the surface. Also, the original building of the collection is a palace, and so it was cool to stroll through the rooms and imagine what the tsar and his family and servants and guests and household staff and squatters (the place was huge and didn't have security cameras. There must have been squatters, no?) used the rooms for.
Our tour was mostly of classical art of various schools, and after the tour some friends and I trekked off in search of the modern art collection. What I managed to see this time around was mostly Matisse and some Picasso. The Matisse collection at the Hermitage is fantastic, and I promptly fell madly in love. Again, I don't know anything about art whatsoever, and so won't pretend to speak knowledgeably about it, but seeing room after room of Matisse just made me feel really warm and happy and alive. I think Van Gogh has been supplanted in the highly-coveted position of Annie's Favorite Artist.
I know that didn't do the Hermitage justice, but nothing can. It's just huge. Just really really big. And full of lots and lots of stuff. I mean lots of it. And it's free to Russian students (which includes me if I show my student ID and keep my mouth shut) so I'm sure I'll be making my way there again several times.

Ruslan and Ludmilla
I finally got to the Mariinsky Theater! On Friday two of my friends and I went to see Glinka's Ruslan and Ludmilla. I expected this to be a big event, for which we would need to get really dressed up, get tickets in advance, etc., and then be ushered into an overwhelmingly large and exquisitely decorated opera hall where we would sit in awe for several hours and then go home not an insignificant amount of money poorer. This wasn't how it happened. It was so much better.
The decision to go to the opera went something like this:

Scene: the hallway of our university, 4pm Friday
Dramatis Personae: Me, Ashley (a girl on the program who was also here last semester), Titus (a guy from the program who is a double-degree candidate in Russian and piano performance at Oberlin. Read: a distressingly talented piano player with whom its fun to be geeky about classical music but who puts my knowledge of same to absolute shame.)
Ashley: Hey, guys! So I was looking in the paper, and Swan Lake is being performed at the Hermitage tonight. Anybody want to go?
Me: Oooh! Yeah! Can I look at that? Hey, it looks like the Mariinsky is doing Ruslan and Ludmila tonight. That might be cool, instead.
Titus: Yeah, I'd be game for that.
Ashley: Okay, cool. So let's meet at the Mariinsky at 6:15?
Me and Titus: Sounds like a plan.

Ashley went home, but Titus and I didn't really have time to do that, so we went to get Shwarma (I don't know how to spell this and it isn't Russian and it's probably disease-infested and bad for you, but it's the greatest thing to have ever happened to the planet. Lamb and veggies and yogurt sauce in a hot flatbread that you buy in a roadside stand for like $1.50 and which they make right in front of you and which tastes like heaven.) Armed with Shwarma and still dressed in what we wore to school, Titus and I began the walk to the Mariinsky.
I expected the Mariinsky to be positioned on a hilltop, a glimmering beacon of high culture. (side/explanatory note: The ballet at the Mariinsky theatre is the best in the world. Nobody in his right mind cares to bicker about that. The orchestra's pretty hot, too. I know less about opera, but I imagine the Mariisnky isn't exactly at the bottom of the heap.) However, when we got into the neighborhood we had a little bit of trouble finding it! We saw a biggish building with a rounded top and Titus said, "That looks like it might be an opera house…" and I replied, "Yeah, I think you're right. Wow, it's just sitting there inconspicuously like it doesn't know it's the Mariinsky!" Slight pause… "Wait, like the building doesn't know?" I think I take some getting used to.
Anyway, we went in, waltzed up to the ticket counter, and bought three box seats for 400 rubles each. We bought the box seats because they were all that were left since we were wrong about the time and were there 20 minutes late instead of the hour early we thought we were, and thusly paid the 400 rubles (about $16) instead of the 100 that it usually costs students (see student ticket note for Hermitage).
The inside of the theater is beautiful, but pretty unassuming. It's beautiful in the way that a living room decorated with comfortable, well-loved and well-crafted antique furniture is beautiful, as opposed to the way a room decorated with furniture so expensive you only ever sit in it when entertaining and children are never allowed to touch anything is beautiful. That is, it was ornate and stylish, but also smallish and cozy, like you could really feel possession of it as your local theater if you went there often. The audience seemed to me to feel that way, too. I pictured conversations similar to ours among the audience members: "Hey, Ivan, after work ya wanna go shoot some pool?" "Nah, we did that last night. What about the opera instead?" "Hey, that's a good idea. Ruslan and Ludmilla is one of my favorites. Maybe afterwards we can go get a beer or something." "Yeah, cool." I loved that. Classical music is something that you should really get to experience and possess as your own, not something you should have to look at through a glass case. It felt at the Mariinsky exactly the way going to an opera should, in my opinion, feel.
As for the opera itself, the costumes were fantastic, the story and music were very Russian, which I enjoyed thoroughly, but the production on the whole was, to be honest, a little underwhelming. It just wasn't quite as polished as I was expecting. However, I've been told that it's the off-season and a lot of the company is on tour, and that it gets better towards spring. However, regardless of all of that, it was a fantastic show, I was on the edge of my seat and laughing and/or looking in awe exactly as I imagine a six-year-old girl might upon first glimpse of Cinderella's castle at Disneyland, and I'm totally hooked on opera now and, if I could, I would pitch a tent in the Mariinsky's unassuming foyer and just chill and go to the opera every other night.

pictures of my room, including the view out my window at 8 am

keys of doom, but only if doom were an irrational concept

Academics and Miscellany

Hello, everyone!

Well, things round these parts have finally settled into a sort of routine. Since last Monday, every morning I meet Irina and Emily on the fated corner of the last post, which corner I can now find with ease, and we take our beloved number 7 bus to our usual stop, after showing our bus passes to the grumbly lady with pink lipstick and a big fur ball on her head. (Number 7 is "our dear number 7" because, although there are several buses which could successfully convey us to our destination, number 7 is the only one equipped with a loudspeaker which calls out the names of the stops, which is helpful because the windows are not steamed up as I originally and, as it turns out, fallaciously, reported, but rather coated in sheets of ice much thicker than those which greet you on your car windshield some number of mornings during the winter.) We take the bus to campus, where, since Tuesday, we have been engaged in a battery of classes known as the RSL (Russian as a Second Language) Intensive. After Monday's placement exam we were divided into four groups, and each group attends three classes each day, but we take six courses in the group, so for some we met every day and others only once or twice during the course of the two weeks. My group consists of me, and my two good friends Emily and Courtney. Here follows what I'm sure will be a tremendously fascinating account of what those six courses are/were (we will continue to meet for some of these classes throughout the semester, but others were only for the language intensive. I'm unclear on which are which.):

1. Phonetics – The impeccably dressed and boyishly charming Kiril Kirilovich reads a phoneme in his sonorous yet shy voice, which he has us repeat over and over again in an effort to make us sound like native Russians. This call-and-response is accompanied by sidelong glances and muffled girlish chuckles among Emily and Courtney and myself.

2. Conversational practice and writing – Not exactly good for the self-esteem, this one. The goal here is to help us navigate the many idiomatic ways Russians have of communicating on a subject-by-subject basis. The result is the hard-edged Elena Nikolaevna teaching us five different words for the English word "class" and then telling us when to use which, and answering our questions with a sort of disdainful, shocked expression that unequivocally says, "Really? You're asking me that?? Well, I never!"

3. Grammar – The ebullient and endlessly charming Ludmilla Petrovna teaches us the finer points of Russian grammar in a manner that, while extremely enjoyable and inflating of the ego, does very little to forward the end of our mastering advanced grammatical constructions. A typical exchange consists of her telling us the rule and then, rather than explaining us the exceptions to the rule, of which there are invariably many, explaining that it's not our fault that there are exceptions, that we are her wise, beautiful, gentle, etc. girls, that Russian is a dreadful language and that these exceptions are simply dreadful, and best of luck to us darlings! Fortunately we covered at Swarthmore what we are covering now, so I can use class time jointly to review and refresh what I already know and bask in the praise of the red-headed and eccentrically made-up Ludmilla Petrovna.

4. Written language – In theatrically sing-song Russian, our professor attempts to teach us the nuances of academic and/or literary writing. She reads us poems and excerpts from literature, and then assigns us an essay. We usually have an essay assigned each day, so that's been difficult and I'm very grateful to have had some writing practice at Swarthmore to make this a bit easier. For our first assignment we were to use artistically abstract language to write a portrait of somebody, and the rest of the class had to guess of whom. I wrote rather a good little portrait of Elvis Presley, of which I am quite proud, and in which can be found such choice little tidbits as, "he began to eat food as rich as his voice was deep," and "his blue eyes sparkled like his blue costumes under the lights of the stage." Emily and Courtney appeared to have found all of this quite amusing, but the professor, I think, didn't quite get it. Alas.

5. AVK/SMI – I have no idea what those acronyms stand for other than boredom and gloom and unhappiness. We learn to read Russian newspapers. Mind you we learn how to read them. We don't actually read them. The course is taught by the one and only Kiril Kirilovich who, poor soul, is reduced to reading us the driest and dullest textbook that has ever been produced by the hand of man or beast, or for that matter vegetable or mineral, and then selecting for us as homework those of the exercises which, in his estimation, we might be able to stomach doing.

6. Lexicography (maybe? this is just my translation…) and word formation – this is my favorite course. (It would be, eh?) We spend two or three class periods learning about one root, and how it relates to different prefixes and suffixes to make different words. I like it. Grammar is a close contender for favorite class, just because I happen to be a bit of a nerd for such things as participles and word formation, but Vita, the professor at issue for this course, is a might bit better at professing than is Ludmila Petrovna, if maybe the worse for ego-stroking.

On Monday we take a big exam to place us into RSL courses for the semester. Then on Wednesday the semester proper begins. We will be taking eight credits of RSL, and then up to twelve credits of anything else. The program requires that I be registered for twelve total to stay on, and Swarthmore requires that I be registered for fifteen for my financial aid to continue to transfer. I registered for Russian Literature of the 1920s and 1930s in Russia and the West for four, International Law for four, and Democracy and Dictatorship: the last century of the Roman Republic for four. All three of those courses are taught in Russian. This was incalculably stupid of me. But there are a bunch of other classes I want to take, and there is a two-week shopping period in which our registration can change. So things will probably have changed a lot by the next time you hear from me. I might sign up for piano lessons, I might replace International Law with Gendered Aspects of Human Rights, and there is a course in the music department that, pending knowledge of its prerequisites, I really really really want to take, called (more articulately in Russian) Russian History in the Mirror of the Opera Stage. There are also a couple of intro. level philosophy courses I might attempt, a course on international human rights protection organs, and a course on the literary museums of Petersburg. So, considering that that is about three million credits all in Russian, and further considering that there are time conflicts to take into consideration, it's basically as though I haven't registered for anything yet. I think I'll end up taking sixteen credits in all, so I'll have to settle for two of the above-mentioned courses.

I'll wrap up this rather uninteresting update with some of the mildly amusing adventures and accomplishments in my life over the last couple of weeks:

I successfully bought a bus pass. Turns out I bought the wrong bus pass, but I did get the one I wanted and asked for, I just wanted the wrong one.

Similarly, although I have now mastered the art of getting from the metro to my apartment, I have yet to figure out how to take the bus home from campus without using the metro. Baby steps. I have, however, successfully made my way onto Nevskij to meet up with people or go to cafes or shopping or whatever several times. Always taking the metro home, of course.

I finally figured out how to use ALL of the keys to get into my house!!! This is by far the biggest accomplishment of the last two weeks. Remember there are five or six of them, depending on whether my babushka is home, and they all work in different ways, none of which even remotely resembles an American key. I took a picture of them, which I will post on my blog when I get a chance

My babushka, much to her chagrin as she believes one ought not to drink cold beverages in winter, purchased for me some requested apple juice. It is "My family" brand, and on the carton is posed what appears to be a family of four Aryan-race Amway salesmen clad all in white who seem very pleased with the thought of making available to me that special happiness which only their apple juice can provide. Turns out they are right. It is, in fact, very good apple juice, much more resembling fresh-pressed cider than anything you'll find in the typical American grocery store.

My friend Emily got sick the other day, and her host mother offered to put a cabbage on her head to help her feel better. Better than a cat, I suppose, which is what other Russian host mothers have offered to do.

I saw on television this morning that there is a Russian television equivalent of the show Judge Judy. Just think about that. The two thoughts that popped into my head: 1. the Russian legal system works now, does it? and 2. it's a "show" about a "trial." put those words together and see what turns up.

I'm in Russia, where people drink tea. I was so looking forward to drinking lots and lots of yummy Russian tea. I even declined to bring some of my beloved Lady Gray to Russia with me, thinking I would be too busy drinking authentic Russian loose-leaf from a samovar. Everyone here drinks Lipton's. Everyone. Lipton's. It's everywhere. I have Lipton's every morning at breakfast, Lipton's at the internet café, Lipton's in hotels… Lipton's. But then one evening I was sitting in a café, (interesting side note: the café is called Кофе Хаус – Kofe Haus – Coffeehouse) ordered some black tea, and it came in a little teapot. So I poured myself a cup, and what should pop out of its spout but a tea leaf! A TEA LEAF!!! So I opened the lid of the teapot and found tea in there! There were leaves just happily floating and bobbing about! It was a good day.

Well, that post was pretty long, so I'll desist. But we've been on a couple of interesting excursions, the post regarding which is guaranteed to be much more interesting, so stay tuned and don't get scared or bored reading the subject line of the next email I send.

Love,
Annie

Dr. Zhivago eats his weight in borsch

Yesterday I moved in with my host mother, Alla Alexandrovna, the babushka I had been hoping for! She lives in a big Soviet-style apartment building on Vasilevsky Island. There are two rooms, a туалет (tualet – toilet) and банная (bannaya – bath and sink) and a kitchen. My room is sort of the library/study/living room. There is my bed, two chests of drawers, a wardrobe and a bookshelf. As in most Russian apartments there aren’t any rooms designated only as bedrooms, so the space she cleared out for me consists of three drawers, the wardrobe, and two shelves, although I’ve also annexed the windowsill and the top of one of the dressers (on top of the other is a television). There are also two chairs and a little table where I can do my homework. Her room is not much different, although a little bigger – she has a bed, a chest of drawers, a bookshelf and a television. (I’ll post pictures on the website.) Overall I am very comfortable here. The apartment is very old, and its in pretty bad shape – peeling wallpaper, holes in walls, etc. But she is very proud of it and keeps it very tidy. Her husband died of lung cancer when he was 40, so she was a single mother who worked three jobs in order to be able to afford to put her son through school and eventually buy this apartment, so it is understandably very important to her.

Alla Alexandrovna and I get along extremely well. She lives alone, and so hosts students in order to have somebody to dote on, which she does very effectively! I think the main pleasure in her life is watching me eat. Yesterday when I arrived, she offered me обед (obed – the main meal of the day around 2 or 3 pm). I sat down in the kitchen, and she served me an enormous bowl of homemade borsch, which was delicious. Having heard a million times during orientation that not finishing food that has been served you is extremely rude, I finished the entire pool-sized bowl. Then came everything else. She followed the borsch with a chicken breast, some creamy, cheesy mushrooms, and an absolute mountain of fried potatoes. All the while I’m drinking cup after cup of tea (I told her I like my tea with milk and sugar, so she heats milk for me at every meal). It was a lot of food! I ate as much as I could, and tried to run some damage control by telling her that I don’t usually eat that much, and she seemed more or less to understand. I had heard warnings about her and her food-loving habits from the people on the program, so I knew I needed to stand my ground early to avoid bursting from too much food! After dinner we chatted for a long time. I followed most of it, I think… it was interesting to hear about her life and I told her what I could about mine. She was four years old and living in Petersburg (then Leningrad) during the blockade, and after the war she went to school and became a radio engineer and translated German technical documents. It will be interesting to hear, or at least understand!, more about her life as the semester goes on.

Breakfast was another adventure. She had made me kasha with mushrooms, four бутерброды (buterbrody – open-faced sandwiches, sort of… a piece of bread with meat and/or cheese on top), yogurt, and tea. I was still getting over obed from the night before! So, again, I ate what I could. I told her last night that I wanted to try lots of different Russian foods and “eat like a Russian,” and she is really excited by the experiment. So she tells me over and over again that if I try something and like it we’ll make it again, but to tell her if I don’t like it. So I did what I could to again tell her not to make me so much food all at once!

Okay, enough about food. On to today’s adventures. Today we were tasked with getting to the university on public transportation. Fortunately two of my friends, Irina and Emily, live near me so we decided to take the bus together. I left the house in the morning to meet them on the corner right by my building. However, upon leaving the building I was not on a street but rather in a big courtyard with fifteen different playgrounds and buildings all over the place, and had no idea which way to go. So I headed for the first street I saw, thinking I could then figure out where I was and go from there. So much for that. Street signs are overrated, anyway. After not too long I got out my map anyway just to look at what might have happened. So I’m standing near a playground, looking at my tiny little pocket atlas (which the program gave us and is extremely helpful – it’s about as big as a passport but all the pages are blown up so you can see everything) when a woman walked by and grumbled «что ты!» (shto ty) This literally means “what are you” but it’s sort of a rude-ish shocked type of expression that basically means “who do you think you are?” or “what are you thinking?” or something like that. I, however, decided that in this situation it must have meant she wanted to help me J. So I asked for directions to the appointed corner, and she pointed me in the right direction. Off I went with a renewed sense of confidence, only to find that a building was blocking the outlet. So I found a way around said building and eventually made it to my corner only 15 minutes late! Oh, boy. I’ll have to leave earlier tomorrow…

So I met the gals, and we trotted off to the nearby bus stop. We successfully boarded and paid for our bus ride. However, it being freezing outside and not quite as freezing inside, all of the windows were steamed up so we couldn’t see where we were going AT ALL. So Irina asked the driver to please let us know when we got to our stop, which she obligingly did about 20 minutes later and we successfully arrived at the university exactly on time, absolutely no thanks to me!

The afternoon was pretty uneventful – we had a placement exam to decide what level of Russian classes we would be taking starting tomorrow. Regular courses start in two weeks. Then a bunch of us went on some random errands – ATMs, electrical adapters, ID card photos, etc. Pretty uneventful.

Then it was time to go home. I was on my own for this part, as Irina and Emily had already left. So I decided to take the metro so I would know where to get off, so it would be easier not to get lost. Famous last words. I got to the metro station, where there was a herd of people about 150 strong crowding to get in the door. So I jumped right in and pushed and shoved my way into the station and onto the escalator. St. Petersburg was built on a marsh/swamp, so the metro tunnels are extremely deep. I timed it, and it takes over two minutes to ride the escalator onto the platform. I found my train successfully, and took it successfully to the appropriate stop. At this point I’m feeling pretty proud of myself. I spoke Russian while buying things all day, I navigated the public transportation system successfully… go me!

But when I got off the metro, it wasn’t what I expected at all. I expected to come out of the station on a street corner, where I would be able to see what streets I was on and make my way home. I had a route planned out on my handy atlas map and everything. But when I came out of the tunnel, I was in a giant market of some sort, and had absolutely no idea where any street was, much less the one I wanted. I eventually found a street, and on it was a sign pointing towards a street very close to mine, so I followed the sign. After crossing a bridge (tiny bridge – just a canal) and walking for quite awhile, I finally figured out what street I was on and pulled out my atlas. Unpleasantness followed. I had gone way out of my way, backtracking was not a workable option, and instead I had to go out on this big old loop in order to get on my street. I had already been walking probably 15 minutes by this point, and keep in mind that it’s St. Petersburg in winter at night. But, as I am an intrepid explorer by nature, and bearing in mind my blinding success with purchasing a power adapter at a kassa-system electronics store that afternoon, I kept my spirits up and started trudging. I trudged for a while. Then I trudged back over the canal from before, but via a different bridge. I trudged past a grocery store. I trudged past a park. (Is the theme song from Dr. Zhivago ringing in anybody else’s ears yet?)

At this point I might note that trudging in snow is tiring. So a snow-trudger might consider moving to the parts of the sidewalk where the snow is thinner and either passers-by have packed the snow really tightly, or the snow has simply melted away from all the people. However these inventive snow-trudgers will be disappointed, because at 8pm the clear patches are not clear patches, but ice patches, and the snow-trudger might fall on his or her bum, and then be thankful that he or she was wearing a big puffy coat to break his or her fall, although his or her wrist might be a bit sore afterwards. This is all theoretical, of course! But the snow-trudger will invariably get back up, and continue on his or her merry way. Past some apartment buildings. Past several more grocery stores.

Finally I reached a street that looked like it could very well be the street I was looking for. A man walking his dog happened to pass me, so I used my Mad Russian Skillz to ask for directions, and successfully obtained them. So I continued on my way, and finally found my street! Yay! Now it was just a matter of finding my building. So, naturally, I just looked for the giant, cement, run-down, Soviet-style apartment building. Well, that didn’t work. So I looked for the brightly illuminated signs clearly demarcating which building was which. Hmmm… for some reason I couldn’t find those signs… so I found a woman walking her child and asked her which was building 45, and she pointed it out to me. Another success! Now it was just a matter of finding my entrance! After passing two or three exceedingly unfamiliar doors, I finally found one that looked a wee bit less unfamiliar, and tried my key. (This particular key is a little metal circle that you hold up to another little metal circle, and if the door beeps then you can go through.) It worked! So in I go and onto the lift. Now it was just a matter of finding my floor!

My apartment is number 315. I assumed that would be the third floor, as it would be in America. But I remembered Alla Alexandrovna reminding me in the morning that it was actually the fourth floor. I reasoned to myself that maybe there aren’t apartments on the first floor, so that makes sense. So I go to the fourth floor. Outside the elevator is another locked door. My outside the elevator key, a small key with bumps on the handle, didn’t work in this door. Then I noticed something curious – there is an intercom outside of every outside the elevator door for each apartment behind the door. The apartments listed were in the 250s. That was odd… why would a 200 apartment be on the fourth floor? So I thought perhaps it wasn’t organized by floor as in America, but rather by section. Perhaps if you went through one door you got to the 100s, another door the 200s, etc. So I had found myself in the 200 section and needed to find the 300 section. I felt very clever. So I went back downstairs, out the door, and around the corner to the next entrance. But my round circle didn’t make the door beep. Instead the door buzzed angrily. Something was amiss. Maybe that first door was my entrance after all?

I slowly and confusedly went back to the original slightly-less-unfamiliar-looking-door. I made the door beep and went back into the lift, trying to figure out what the heck to do next. I had found the metro station, I had found the street, I had found the building; how was it possible that after all that I couldn’t find my apartment? I was in my building for crying out loud! Then it hit me: the numbers don’t make any sense at all and get bigger as you go up. So on the fourth floor are the 250s, and on the fifth the 260s, etc. I knew I remembered Alla Alexandrovna saying something about four and floor, and so I decided to try the fourteenth. Success! There was apt. 315 written on the intercom. Now all that was between me and home was the smallish bumpy key through the outside the elevator door, then the long pole key with a single tooth which, if you twist it in a particular combination of ways and pray to the right gods will unlock the top lock of the apartment’s outside door, then the smallish smooth key that would unlock the bottom lock of the apartment’s outside door, then the long pole key with two bumpy teeth for the top lock of the inside apartment door, then the long key with the holes in the pole that would unlock the bottom lock of the apartment door. So, naturally, I rang the buzzer so that Alla Alexandrovna would unlock all of the above-mentioned impediments to my arriving at home and let me in.

And after my long trek home after a long day in the city, I was ravenous. Which I think made Alla Alexandrovna very happy.