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.