Grocery Store Stream of Consciousness

This update comes to you after my having looked over the previous emails I’ve sent, and realized that I’ve come a long way! I also realized that a lot of what I mentioned before is no longer true. Living here isn’t really a daily adventure anymore – it’s just life. I’m not surprised anymore when my host babushka speaks Russian to me, and I don’t just follow what she’s saying, but actually understand each word that she says.

I don’t think twice about taking public transportation – I’ve taken buses, trams, trolleys, cabs, the metro and marshrutkas, all without worrying about it. (NB: A marshrutka is kind of like a cross between a bus and a cab – they’re minibuses or vans that are numbered like buses and follow the bus routes, but you hail them like cabs and have to tell the driver when you want him to stop.) Also, usually the main streets the bus hits are printed on a sign on the outside of the bus, and I know the city well enough at this point that I can pretty much figure out whether the particular bus is going to take me where I want to go.

Also, if I need to buy something, I know for the most part a) whether it’s reasonable for me to expect to find it in Russia and b) if so, where to get it and c) how to know when I’m being totally ripped off. In example: I’ve spent several weeks questing to find the cheapest Diet Pepsi in the city. Once I found it for 16 rubles a bottle, but that was nowhere near anywhere I go regularly. I can usually find it for about 24 rubles at most grocery stores, but since it isn’t 16 I never stock up, so when I want a Diet Pepsi, which is always, I usually just buy one at school for 30. You don’t have to tell me that doesn’t make any sense, economic or otherwise. Anyway, I’ve gone into every grocery store I’ve passed for about three weeks now, and finally found 18 ruble Diet Pepsi at a grocery store about three blocks from my school, so my quest is over, much to the relief of all of my friends, who are sick of talking to me about my Diet Pepsi Quest.

Of course there are still things to get used to, but for the most part I know what those things are and am either in the process of getting used to them or have given up trying so as to spend my emotional energy on pursuits that promise to yield more fruit than, for example, trying to get used to the fact that I can’t expect to eat spicy food again until June. It’s just to terrible to think about! (Parents prepare yourselves: we’re stopping at Baja Fresh on the way home from the airport.)

But independent of the Great Diet Pepsi Quest, I’ve developed quite a little penchant for trolling about in grocery stores generally. I’ll go into a grocery store and just walk up and down every aisle checking stuff out, be there for upwards of an hour, then leave without buying anything. Sometimes I’ll buy a candy bar or a box of cereal (or a Diet Pepsi) or some other little Russian goodie that I want to try out, but mostly I just like being in the grocery store and looking at all of the stuff they have or don’t have, and looking at the things people buy, how the stores are organized, etc. I know this sounds really weird. Even for me. Especially for me, actually, because in the States I hate grocery shopping and avoid it like the plague and get really overwhelmed and anxious in grocery stores. Which is also weird, I guess. And I know I’m in a city where I could probably go to a different museum every day for a year and see all of them, and I know that there are a million theatres and ballet companies and musical performances every day, and even if I don’t feel like being ‘cultured’ it’s spring and there are beautiful parks and walks along the river etc., and I’m spending all of my free time in grocery stores. I know.

I was planning on explaining my grocery store thing, but I ran into a bit of a technical difficulty – some sort of stream-of-consciousness chain reaction went off in my brain when I started to explain about the grocery stores, so I’m just going to get a lot of random rubbish out of the way, and then I’ll go back to the grocery store thing:

• In addition to every kind of beer on the planet, you can also choose from a fairly extensive selection of hard liquor at even the smallest grocery stores.
• It’s illegal to buy liquor in a grocery store after 11 pm, but beer isn’t really considered alcohol, so you can buy beer whenever you want.
• You can also drink it on the street or on the metro or in class, despite the law against drinking liquor in public.
• Same goes for mixed drinks, which you can buy canned at grocery stores. Canned Gin and Tonic is especially popular, but there are also alcoholic energy drinks and all manner of your typical mixed drink.
• You can buy beer in little roadside stands that are everywhere. I can’t think of an analogy in the US except maybe hot dog vendors in New York.
• There are also hot-dog-vendor-style huts that sell exclusively dairy products, bread products, tobacco products, and produce.
• The produce huts should not be confused with the random little fruit and vegetable tables: people sell fresh fruits and vegetables in these little improv markets where they sell bootleg videos and nylons and flowers and grated cabbage in large plastic bags. I’m pretty sure everything else sold in these markets is bootlegged, it’s literally just people with a bunch of stuff laid out on folding tables, and everything about the way this particular produce is proffered absolutely screams bootleg. Though I don’t pretend to be able to rightly comprehend the Wallace-and-Grommit style absurdity and intrigue that would accompany the bootlegging of vegetables.
• Although there is bootlegged liquor – any bottle of vodka that costs less than four dollars a bottle, and there are many, is probably bootlegged, which means diluted methanol followed by blindness and/or death, though I think the government has been cracking down on this. “Cracking down” in the actual sense of the word, not in the usual Russian government sense of the word.
• And lastly, stemming from the cabbage in plastic bags: this country, or at least the city, has a weird fixation with plastic bags. Everything comes in plastic bags. I mean EVERYTHING. You can buy milk in plastic bags. And mayonnaise in plastic bags. And salad dressing in plastic bags. And grated cabbage in plastic bags. Bananas come in plastic bags. Clothing stores give exclusively plastic bags. But at grocery stores, you have to pay for a plastic bag to put your groceries in, so people usually bring canvas ones. (Yay!) But the Cult of the Plastic Bag doesn’t stop at the plastic bag as a mere conveyance of recent purchases – oh, no! You can also buy rather more durable and, erm, fashionable? plastic bags at the improv markets described above, right between the socks and the birch bark baskets. So people carry these plastic bags instead of backpacks or briefcases. For example, women always carry cute little purses and NEVER backpacks or briefcases or shoulder bags or anything like that. Instead, anything that won’t fit in their purse they put in a plastic bag.

Whew! That was absurd. Sorry. I initially put all of that in the paragraph about the grocery stores, and they were nested parenthetical statements, but then I ended the paragraph with a dozen )’s in a row and realized that what I had done was ridiculous. So now, back to the kernel of all of that nonsense:

Foreigners don’t go to grocery stores, and I feel like when I go to grocery stores I’m getting to see a closer approximation of St. Petersburg as Russians see it rather than as Americans do. And let me just say, Russian grocery stores are absolutely nothing like American ones. And no two are alike, either. There are “western-style” grocery stores, but that just means they’re bigger than a 7-Eleven and they’re on the less-kassa-like end of the kassa system spectrum. Admittedly, these are the ones I usually go into, but they aren’t organized like American grocery stores at all. For example, there aren’t really snack aisles because there isn’t really snack food here per se. Rather, by the beer aisles, yes that ‘s’ was put there intentionally, (here’s where the first bullet above sprang from) you have beer snacks. Beer snacks include chips, which are either Lays, or these odd but tasty puffed potato things. Also instead of Sour Cream and Onion, they have Sour Cream and Dill flavor chips. But more than chips, beer snacks consist of dried, salted fish. In any number of varieties. A mind-boggling number of varieties, actually. There is also non-dried fish, but that’s a vodka chaser, not a beer snack. I don’t know.

Then, by the tea, there are the snacks that go “к чаю,” (k chayu) which I guess means “with tea.” But this same construction is used to say that this is the jacket that goes with that skirt, or this is the sauce you use for the fish, so it has this idea of matching involved. Or, more accurately, that whatever goes к the other thing has that relationship as its sole purpose and even its destiny – the jacket was made just to match the skirt, or the sauce wouldn’t exist if it weren’t to go on the fish. The snacks in this area are what you’d expect – little cakes and cookies and things like that, but all the same the к чаю phenomenon is something I don’t really understand. Whenever I’m having dinner, my babushka always offers me tea. Then she asks if I want something к чаю. But I thought I was having my tea with dinner, so what do I need to go with the tea? She usually then gives me a little chocolate jam roll or something. I usually think of this as dessert, but she always offers me dessert after dinner, so I think the cake thing was really just for the tea. But then one of my options for what I would like к чаю is always jam, and I don’t really understand what I’m supposed to do with the jam… I know I don’t put it in the tea, because putting something in the tea is a different construction. Do I eat the jam with a spoon? Is there an implied, tacit piece of bread involved? I don’t know.

Anyway, back to the grocery store. They all pretty much have the feeling of scaled-down Costco or, for my east coast readers, Sam’s Club without the negative Wal-Mart association. Yogurt isn’t refrigerated, but rather just set up in a pile in the middle of an aisle. The stores aren’t usually big rooms with aisles, but rather three- or four-room mazes lined with shelves. Also, you can usually buy jewelry and cell phones at grocery stores.

So I like going to the grocery store, just because it’s different and I feel like I’m absorbing the “real Russia” without actually having to interact with people, which, although it invariably ends well, is really scary. But lately my grocery store addiction has grown more serious, and it’s been harder and harder to get a fix. The “western-style” stores just aren’t satisfying anymore! I need a new kind of store – a more exciting grocery store – a non-Western grocery store! So yesterday, in a froth of grocery store craving, I boldly entered two of the grocery stores by my apartment, which stores I had been eyeing ravenously in secret for some time.

The first was just overwhelming. I went in but was only in there for about 10 minutes, because there was just too much going on and I couldn’t figure it out. It was a giant warehouse of a grocery store, but everything was kassa system. So there were probably over 100 counters, each selling a really narrowly defined subset of groceries, and they were all jammed together, and it was just incredible. I think that particular store was a few levels above my current grocery shopping abilities, but I’ll go back when my Russian is better and after I’ve experimented with a few less-intimidating kassa-style grocery stores.

The second store is my new favorite. It was also a little overwhelming, and I’ll probably wait a few weeks to go back because I was kind of intimidated, but all the same it was my favorite grocery store experience so far. The basement of this particular store was a building store. (I saw a man coming out of it as I came in carrying some two-by-fours in a plastic bag. No, I’m not making it up for literary cohesion.) It was organized about like the other stores, but it was in a sort of run-down shopping complex, and so the clientele was different. By different, I mean drunk middle-aged men. Not exclusively, but there was definitely a good-sized contingent of drunk middle-aged men in need of groceries. They were all very good-natured shoppers. Also in this grocery store, there were two things I hadn’t seen before: first, bulk frozen vegetables. As in, a bin of frozen vegetables in the freezer instead of bags of frozen vegetables, and you take your scoop and take out as many scoopfuls of green beans or chopped potatoes or sliced mushrooms or berries as you want. That was really cool.

The second new experience was samples. In American grocery stores samples are pretty common, but I hadn’t seen anything even remotely resembling sample-giving in Russia. This particular sample was a mayonnaise sample. I was looking at the frozen bulk veggies, and a middle-aged woman was talking to the mayonnaise women, and the mayonnaise women called me over to try the mayonnaise with the middle-aged woman, and the four of us stood and chatted about the mayonnaise for awhile. By “the four of us chatted” I mean, of course, they chatted, and I smiled and threw the occasional nod or chuckle into the mix. The mayonnaise, which came in a plastic bag with a picture of olives on it, was quite tasty as far as mayonnaise goes.

After the mayonnaise, I made a cursory cruise around the rest of the store, grabbed an ice cream and a pack of gum, and got in line to pay. I was waylaid in making my purchases, because a crazy old man was standing at the exit chatting up the check-out girl. He started by singling me out to tell me about how he had been in school with the guy ahead of me in line, which made said guy laugh, and said check-out girl divert the conversation back to her, as she could tell I was a bit taken aback. The guy ahead of me finished paying, and the check-out girl asked if I could wait for a sec, because the old crazy man wanted to buy something without waiting in line, and none of us in line were about to impede his progress towards that end. This was a very good natured old crazy man, but crazy all the same. At this point a dog ran by. We’re still in the grocery store, mind you. The dog ran up to the line, from the area of the frozen bulk veggies, and came up to sniff my feet a bit, then ran over to the crazy guy. The check-out girl asked if it was his dog, he answered it was, and asked if he could have two Snickers bars. I was standing by them, so I gave the check-out girl two Snickers bars, she ran them up for him, and he paid for them, offered to buy one for the check-out girl, she politely declined, and he left. I paid for my gum and ice cream, and walked home in an extremely good mood!

I wasn’t actually intending that whole post to be about grocery stores. In fact, I was a little embarrassed by my grocery shopping habit, and so wasn’t going to say anything. But I’m glad I did, because look at all the fun stuff we got to talk about as a result! It was a fruitful topic, as it were. Haha.

Anyway, I hope everyone is well and enjoying spring weather. The weather here has been fantastic, and the city is all the more beautiful. I’ll try to write again soon, hopefully about something mildly interesting!

If anybody has a request for a literary style they would like to see employed in my blog please let me know

Boy, have I ever been delinquent in my email-writing! Sorry to have disappeared! But I haven’t written in so long mostly because I’ve been busy with lots of adventures, about most of which you, my captivated (more likely captive!) audience are now to be subjected to reading:

For my last post, I had devised a terribly clever organizational structure. You never got to see this structure in its full glory because I spent four pages writing about the first bit and never got to the rest of them. Since then, my list of things to write about has grown to an unwieldy full page in Microsoft Word, and I’m simply not up to organizing that. So, instead, I present you now with a collage of tasty morsels of Russian experience. A series of vignettes, if you will. (A thought here occurs to me: perhaps if I took less pleasure in writing full paragraphs of self-indulgent prose conveying absolutely no knowledge or meaning whatsoever this whole blogging business would be a bit more streamlined and I would be better able to achieve my goal of communicating to my readers the various goings-on in my life without causing them to be bored out of their gourds. Well, as my grandma says, (Hi, grandma!) “Things are tough all over!”) Onward!

Sex, Drugs, and 19^th Century Russian Literature
Our group recently took a tour of the Dostoevsky museum. The museum consisted of two parts: first, the apartment in which he lived with his family, and second, the neighboring apartment which has been snatched up by the museum for the purpose of housing the “literary exposition” portion of the museum. The first part was pretty straightforward. I gathered from the tour guide (though I can’t stress enough the fact that what I translate for you as having come from the tour guide is in no way intended to be taken as having been fully or in any way accurately understood, and any resemblance to an accurate translation is pure coincidence) that the furniture etc. in the apartment was not so much Dostoevsky’s as remarkably similar to it. This is true with the notable exception of, among a few other things, a package of tobacco and cigarette papers, on which package Dostoevsky’s daughter wrote that he had died at a particular date and time, and which package now lives under a big plastic bubble. The other exception is the divan on which Dostoevsky died, and the clock that was in his room and was stopped, according to Russian-famous-person custom, the moment of his death.

The literary exposition portion of the museum opened with a giant wall-map of St. Petersburg, on which were demarcated the locations of various of the plot elements of Dostoevsky’s novels. Dostoevsky was really into describing geography to a tee, and you can take a Crime and Punishment walking tour of the city so you can visit the apartments where all of the characters lived, etc. Except for the wall map, which was pretty cool, the exposition consists mostly of life-sized dioramas of all of Dostoevsky’s novels. At one point on our tour, we were standing by a window and happened to look out and see the neon lights of a sex shop right across the street. We all started to giggle a bit, hoping the tour guide wouldn’t notice that we were acting like pre-pubescent boys by being amused by the fact that we were on a tour of a literary museum and looking out the window at a sex shop, when the tour guide actually pointed out the sex shop to us! She then started a commentary about how Dostoevsky had written not about the high-society, politically minded Petersburg of Tolstoy, but rather of the poor, dirty, sin-ridden side of the city, and how his neighborhood had over time turned into a neighborhood that would be found in one of his novels! She concluded by saying that, in her opinion, Dostoevsky would be pleased to know that there was a sex shop across the street from his museum.

A Three Hat Day
I’ve noticed that the шапки (shapki – fur hats that are exactly like the fur hats you would expect to see Russians wearing in winter) that people wear here tend to closely mimic the wearers’ eyebrows. Old women with thin, wispy eyebrows generally have thin, fluffy, wispy hats. Young women with elegantly plucked and shaped eyebrows have elegantly shaped hats. My favorites are the old men with unruly, bushy eyebrows wearing giant, unruly, bushy hats.

Meta-McDonalds
So I’ve given in to temptation. I’ve been to McDonald’s here. Sometimes you’re homesick and you just need a cheeseburger. But it’s always a really weird experience for several reasons, including but not limited to the fact that if you don’t ask for ketchup they give you cheese sauce for your fries, there is a walk-up window, and people here actually treat McDonald’s as a restaurant as opposed to a “fast food joint.” All that’s fine, but what always weirds me out about going to McDonald’s is that by ordering a чизбургер (chizboorger – you’ll never guess what the English translation is!) I’m saying a word that is an American word that has been Russianized, and I’m saying the Russianization with an American accent. Just roll that over for a bit. It’s a source of endless amusement for me.

These Boots Are Made for Walking?
I threw my American fashion-sensibilities (what, you didn’t know I was a fashion diva?) to the winds and bought a new pair of fur-trimmed Russian-made boots. I love them. What I don’t love is the Russian boot ethos. Women here as a rule where knee-high leather boots with spiked heels and all sorts of crazy embroidery or beads or studs or other decoration. “Gasp!” you say. “How can they wear heels when there are three inches of icky brown muddy slush on the sidewalk, which slush we remember from your impossibly clever and endlessly interesting story about tucking your pants into your boots?” Well, that’s a fine question, but the real question is, how can they wear said boots without there EVER being even a SPECK or a DROPLET of mud on them? Not even a SMUDGE??? Seriously, there is not a dirty shoe in this entire country unless that dirty shoe is on an American foot. Women carry mini shoe-polishing kits and brushes in their purses and whip out the brushes on street corners while waiting for a light, and break out the polish on the bus on their way to work. I tried to keep my Russian boots in Russian condition, but I can’t help but miss the boots that these fur ones replaced. They were great – fashionable, comfortable, sturdy, etc., but their real virtue lay in the fact that they enabled me to tromp through mud puddles and bound over icy patches of slush with reckless abandon. Well, when in Rome…

The Great Fare Negotiation of ’07
The Metro closes in Petersburg around midnight and opens again around 6 am, regardless of the day of the week. So if you’re out past midnight and don’t want to stay out until 6, you take a cab home. But, while there are official cab services, they’re really expensive and it’s usually cheaper and easier and more convenient in every way just to take what is known here as a “gypsy cab.” Gypsy cabs are basically just people driving around who decide they want to pick up a few extra bucks by driving somebody somewhere. So when you hail a cab whoever happens to be out and about will stop, and then you negotiate your fare and get in. If they won’t give you the fare you want, you just say never mind, they drive off, and you start negotiating with the driver of the car next in the line that is invariable at least three cars long. I’ve actually gotten to be pretty good at negotiating cab fares, which is odd, because while I’m a fearless cab fare negotiator, I’ll go into a pharmacy for nail polish remover and wander around for an hour without buying anything because I’m afraid to ask a salesperson for help finding it. Anyway, now, for your reading pleasure, a re-enactment of my proudest fare-negotiating moment:

Our fearless heroine; quick-witted and graceful, which is to say, me: How much to Kazanskij Sobor?

Driver trying to fleece me: 200 roubles (about $8).

Heroine: 200? I don’t think so. Let’s say 80.

Fleecy: Fine, we’ll say 100.

Heroine: I can get to Vasilevsky for 100! (NB: This isn’t actually true. I’ve never gotten less than 150.)

Fleecy (unlocking back door): Okay, get in. 80 it is. (about $3.25)

Woot!

I Probably Shouldn’t Complain Too Much About This One Because I Still Don’t Actually Know the Order of the Letters of the Russian Alphabet Anyway
I had to buy some books for one of my classes. They were all novels in Russian, so I just went to a big bookstore downtown. As you’ll remember from the last story, I get really nervous asking salespeople for help. But I knew the authors and titles of the books I needed, and they were all fiction, so I figured I should be able to just find the fiction section, go along alphabetically by author, and then find the particular novels I needed. This didn’t work. I haven’t yet figured out how novels in Russian bookstores are actually organized, but here are some conjectures: a) by paper weight, b) by number of colors on the cover design, c) by date the publishing company in question decided they might consider printing the particular edition of the novel. So I had to ask for help. The saleswoman I talked to was quite friendly and helpful, but that doesn’t change the fact that my pleasure in lolling about in bookstores has been reduced for an indeterminate period of time.

Well, I’ve written upwards of three pages in Word at this point, so I think I’m going to cut myself off for now. But I hardly made a dent in my list, so never fear! Your excuse to not do your homework/your laundry/your taxes is not anywhere near to running out of material. I hope everyone is well!

Love,
Annie