Or, I'm too lazy to actually start the obligatory year abroad blog on time, so here we go. I imagine you'll be dying to hear how I'm doing, unless you're in the exclusive/long-suffering group of people I annoy with random progress reports about the cats in St Petersburg and getting the trolleybus in the wrong direction. (Think bus and tram meet at a party and have ugly, ugly sex - it takes them fifteen minutes longer to come than they said it would, but then they both go at the same time and fucking nobody's surprised.)
Um, yeah. I like parentheses (by which I mean stuff in brackets - I'm not the kind of dick that refuses to call them brackets, because come on, brackets is a great word) (see) and I was thinking of recording some of my fascinating observations of being in Russia for posterity/me wondering how the fuck I did nothing with my twenties later. Because this place is frequently hilarious.
So yeah, fascinating observations. Erm... Oh yeah, the metro here is great. There's generally a Soviet thing where they like naming everything after famous writers and stuff. Like, the station I usually go to is called Mayakovskaya (complete with snazzy art deco tile portrait and quotations on the main hall wall) and at one point I got to go to Dostoyevskaya - predictably it was locked up with great iron bars, and looking through all I could see was crushing blackness and silence. I think there was some guy writing a diary down there as well - Notes From The Metro should be hitting stores in time for the lucrative Christmas depression market.
Yup, Russian lit joke. I'm sorry. If you didn't get it because you've got literally anything better to do with your life, you weren't missing much. But seriously, it makes the blue plaques look a bit shit. Why don't we have a Virginia Woolf Tube station? I suppose it'd take ten minutes for them to finish telling you to mind the (class) gap ("... the impression that one is drowning in a sea of people; the distance between the platform and the train stretches like a void of being that can only be crossed with a forthright and firm step; to vanish into such an abyss would be nothing, and furthermore would piss off everyone trying to get to work on time no end, you nonce...") and any poor people/aspiring Irish writers would get the pimples kicked out of them. Ahem. Sorry.
But yeah, the metro is great. It's actually fairly small compared to a real one like in London or Paris (Petersburg has that "We're a capital too! There's a poem about it and everything! ... Guys?" thing going on), having as it does five lines with about ten to fifteen stops each, a good number of which overlap.
It also has my favourite example of modern Russian-ness (in my opinion, duh). So, Petersburg is, to be honest, a crap place to build a city - most of our interesting classes involve being told stories about how the place is basically a godforsaken marsh with a climate so foul that in the late 80s a third of the population had TB at all times, and when you dig a grave here it fills up with water, and when Peter the Great decided it was going to be a capital city and people were going to damn well live there he had to forcibly make them move, and most of them caught colds and died anyway - they had to build the metro really far underground. I hear it's the deepest metro in the world. This translates to loaaaaaaads of time on the escalators getting up and down from street level. There's usually three, one up, one down, and one permanently unused. (Or maybe they open it at rush hour. I can never tell.)
But the really brilliant thing about the escalators is that the handrails always seem to move a bit faster than the steps - you start with your hand pretty much level, and then if you keep it there you eventually look like you were going to trip forwards but managed to catch yourself and you're now hoping that if you just stay like that no-one will notice. This basically means that everyone on the escalator is playing chicken with Soviet electrics - how long do you hold on? If you move your hand every five seconds it looks like you're giving the handrail the world's laziest handjob, but if you keep it there you get the aforementioned who-me-tripping-no-it's-an-exercise-I-got-off-Fitocracy thing. So what do you do? Personally, I stick my head out and watch everyone else doing exactly the same thing. It's always nice to have your wacky foreigner flail moments mirrored by the general populace.
But the slightly tenuous generalisation I'm lumbering towards is that kind of nearly-there aspect I get round here. (I was going to say in Russia, but assuming the whole of Russia is just Moscow and Petersburg sounds like a bad plan, being something of an outspoken provincial round our way.) Yeah, they've got a metro, and it works really well, but the handrails are slightly off, and no-one seems to be overly bothered. You can't drink the tap water without boiling it because you'll get tapeworms, if you're lucky. In some of the more Western bars people try to speak to you in English (even if they haven't twigged - I mostly just say I'm French and do a convincingly Gallic pout), but I usually can't understand them unless I'm listening in oh-you're-speaking-English mode.
Oh, and the other day I saw a guy dressed in a giant iPhone costume advertising iPhones on the corner of Nevsky Prospect (almighty Nevsky Prospect... Okay, I'll stop). I was going to take a picture, but I thought he must feel like enough of a pillock already. I mean, Christ.
I don't mean that in a bad way - after all, it could actually have a bomb dropped on it (as my taxi driver from the airport helpfully pointed out, it already looks that way in places - as well as saying that I shouldn't walk too near the buildings because the masonry has a habit of dropping off onto passers-by, which I think/hope was a joke) and it would still have more infrastructure than Manchester. (That was also a JOKE guys. Everyone knows that's Barnsley, anyway.)
But yeah, people are friendly, I've managed not to get pickpocketed so far, and the family I'm staying with has CATS!!! I was sick for a bit (saga for another post) and I went to lie down, and when I woke up the little black cat was curled up next to me, purring away. Aww.
While next time!
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