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March 26, 2005
st. pete
Well, tomorrow is Western Easter. I think this is the first time ever that I'll miss Easter dinner at Grandmom's. I'll be thinking about everybody.
Our clocks move ahead one hour tonight, one week ahead of the US. (In the fall we move at the same time.) So for one week in the year, the time difference with Eastern Time is nine hours instead of eight.
So, at last, a summary of my trip to St. Pete.
I took a photo of Leningrad Station in Moscow just before hopping on the train. As you can see below, Lenin's bust, as well as a few words about the heroic acts of Lenin's role in the formation of the Soviet government in Moscow, still great those arriving from St. Petersburg (and locations in between).
There are plenty of Lenin statues still around Russia. Calling it nostalgia for the past would be oversimplifying things. First of all, it costs money to take down statues and replace the world "Soviet" with "Russian" in signs, especially those engraved in stone. It's all a bit part of Russian history, so if you leave up monuments to czars and other figures of the pre-Revolutionary period, you should leave up some Soviet monuments too.
Lenin used to great you when arriving in St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad), but now there's an oversized bust of Peter the Great in that station. I stayed at the October Hotel, right near Moscow Station in Petersburg.
The conference was just as disorganized as I predicted it would be. I ended up helping the non-Russian-speaking conference attendees with a few difficult language situations, but I wasn't able to do everything. So, for example, two women were severely overcharged for a taxi ride. But I made some good contacts which I'm in the process of following up on.
Met up with some Fulbrighters who are studying in Petersburg as well as Надя and Оля, who I met in 2000 when I was last in the city. We had some intensive English lessons at a coffeeshop and two jazz clubs during my stay. Good to see everybody.
On St. Patrick's Day I met a bunch of Americans (not all Fulbrighters) at an Irish pub -- there are a fair number in Moscow and St. Petersburg -- for drinks. When I got back to the hotel, the security guards in suits hanging around the door (to be found at nearly any major place of business in Russia) stopped me to check if I was indeed staying there. Before I could pull out proof that I was staying there, I took off my hat and they immediately decided that I was indeed staying there. I was very puzzled, but they said they could tell by my face that I was foreign, therefore decided I must indeed be staying there. I was pretty ticked off that I broke my record for fooling people into thinking I was Russian.
Now, I wonder if they would have given me a harder time if I had a Russian fur hat.
Sunday morning, when the downtown wasn't crowded, I took a few shots of Nevsky Prospect. Unfortunately, a rain storm was just passing, so it was overcast. The weather was much nicer during most of my trip.
View down Nevsky.
View up Nevsky, looking at the monument in the center of Insurrection Square.
A view down Pushkin Street.
Basically, the whole historic center of the city has neoclassical facades just like this. A fair amount of renovation has happened in the past five years, but there are still lots of historic buildings in need of repair.
Before leaving, I had a chance to visit my old host family from when I studied abroad. Picture below, with mom and son:
They're doing well, still hosting young Americans. Money's tight, though, because the study abroad program hasn't raised their compensation in a long time, and the dollar has lost a lot of value against the ruble over the past few years.
I was asked for impressions of street food in St. Petersburg. Analogous to döners in Germany, there are kiosks in Moscow and Petersburg selling shwarma and Caucasian breads similar to naan. There's also hot dog stands everwhere in Moscow, as well blintz stands, which will make blintzes to order with any topping (or filling, rather) that you want. In the summer, there are small trucks with a tank full of kvass (in literature sometimes "quass", I believe).
Of course, there's also ice-cream vendors with carts at all times of year. I had an ice cream on Saturday, and considered eating it outside while reflecting on Churchill's comment that a people that eat ice cream on the street in the winter (the Russians) can never be defeated. But instead I took it inside.
Posted by kshawkin at March 26, 2005 05:16 PM