St. Petersburg summer 2005

St. Petersburg summer 2005
Originally uploaded by veti_vert.

Continuing the account of the East Europe tour taken in June-July 2005:

St. Petersburg was the second city of the tour.

We left Tallinn early in the morning and took a bus to St. Petersburg. We initially wanted to take a train or ferry, but a bus was the only way to get there since the other transportation services had been discontinued. I remember the landscape being very green and relatively unpopulated. There were no large, or even medium sized cities between Tallinn and St. Petersburg.

Crossing the border into Russia was quite unforgettable. The bus stopped at a non-descript grey, bureaucratic building. The Estonian border patrol, a youngish woman with short-cropped, brightly dyed red hair, gathered all our passports and disappeared for a few minutes. She returned with the passports freshly stamped with the exiting Estonia mark. We all had to exit the bus and gather our luggage; we then had to file into the building. The bus crossed the border, empty. We were instructed to form two lines to go through the Russian border control with our luggage in tow. I was the last to enter the building and as my foot crossed the threshold, the door slammed shut and was locked.

I was nervous because everyone seemed so solemn and serious. As I came up to Russian passport control, a good-looking young guy with a well-chiseled face barked something to me in Russian. I had a moment of confusion due to my incomprehension of Russian, but it was pointed out that I needed the extra form (which one fills out to enter countries) which I recovered and handed over. He took the form, looked at me without expression, and stamped my passport. After the affair, we re-embarked the bus. Thereafter, I noticed all the signs were in Cyrillic.

We arrived in St. Petersburg in the afternoon. We waited at the bus stop for our contacts: Ilya and Oleg. When they finally arrived, there was much discussion about what needed to be done next. Since three of us didn't speak Russian, we often had to sit out on these discussions. I also noticed that these discussions could go on longer than one thought they should, F. would smoke a couple of cigarettes during these seemingly endless debates. The decision had been made. Mic & Jeff would go with Ilya to purchase tickets to our trip to Moscow (this was another pattern during this trip- as soon as we got somewhere, we had to be prepared to go to the next city) and F & I would take all the luggage to go with Oleg to Vasilievsky Island where a kid named George lived. We would take a cab to accomplish these tasks.

Taking a cab in Russian, I soon discovered, meant something that I did not expect. Taking a cab in Russia does not mean you stand on a street corner and wait for a friendly, clearly marked cab to stop and pick you up. No, getting a cab in Russia means you stand at a street corner with your hand out, waiting for someone to stop, and then you argue about where you are going and how much they (a random person) will charge to take you there. It is similar to a hooker picking up tricks. Another thing I noticed, in Russia people's cars are totally trashed. Often things are broken and the interior is not kept. This seemed consistent in my car riding experience. The car owners are obviously not, unlike the more materialistic Americas, obsessed with their cars.

So Oleg finally flags down a cab (this process can take a long time) and F and I piled into the small car, crowding it with all the luggage- and there was a lot of luggage (for four people) I had Jeff's huge backpack on my lap, crushing me, while F was crammed next to me. He and I didn't say a word, and sat mutely in the back seat with our sunglasses on. (For some reason Jeff instilled in our mind that we were not to let on that we weren't Russian, he created this cloak and daggers aura, and that if anyone knew we were not Russians, the gig would be up. Now, I have no idea what this paranoia was all about. Then we just went along.) The driver would look nervously in his rearview mirror at our stoic faces. Finally we arrived at Vasilievsky Island and were able to unload the entire luggage. George spoke English, fortunately, so we were able to converse with him. Oleg spoke a little French and even less English, so our communication was minimal at best.

(…..to be continued)