June 8, 2007 || First Day/Dorms

June 8, 2007

We were up from about 7am Thursday until about 9pm, 10pm Friday. When I try to think of words to describe the trip, my mind goes blank. "Long," obviously, and we dealt with it well enough until maybe 4am East Coast time (which unfortunately was about 10am GER—i.e., boarding time).

Now, it’s roughly 4am RU and I can’t quite get back to sleep. I was prepared for late-afternoon sun at 10 at night and morning light at 3am, but I didn’t even think of the birds who must get super-energized from the sun since they sing so loud at its coming and going during the proper shades of daylight, and all the hours in-between.

There are so many other things I forgot to think about (or just remember) too. I’m still in awe of the mere fact that it is GREEN everywhere (each time I've been to Russia before, it's been blanketed in snow), and people are wearing shorts! I didn’t even recognize Pushkin square, the Russian museum, etc., until I heard their names! Every time a seagull cries it reminds me that I am in a port city, the Northern Venice—which was so hard to imagine last time I was here, seeing as the water was always frozen and the gulls had migrated.

I forgot, too, what a busy city looks like on a Friday night—and I’ve never been in one while the Scorpions (of “Rock You Like a Hurricane” fame) were playing a street concert and a worldwide economic forum was being held.

I’d forgotten how even the little diners here were once summer palaces for Russian nobles, with pink walls and white cherubs for moldings, but now they are also fitted with bare bulbs or big-screen TVs.

I forgot how some people would rather lose your money/business than deal with you at stores. Customer service just isn’t important yet... but it’s getting there.

I forgot how blankets are more like thin mattress pallets and the showers are never like those in America. Ours, for example, has no hot water and the faucet is at about waist height; it is long enough that, when swiveled all the way to the left, it spills perfectly into the center of the sink— which is fortunate, since the sink has no faucet.

I forgot how the floorboards creak and the doors stick.

I did not forget to rinse my toothbrush with bottled water.

As for the vibrancy, the color, and the beauty of this city, and the satisfaction of ordering my own meal in Russian, and the kindheartedness and playfulness of good Russian friends—how could I forget?

====You Might Find This Interesting====

St. Petersburg occupies an interesting place in the hearts of many Russians; for those that lived here, some can still remember it being called Petrograd and also Leningrad (and before both of those, it was originally called St. Petersburg). St. Pete’s was the birthplace of the Soviet Union, as it was here that the last tsar and his ministers were captured by the Bolsheviks (you can actually walk in the very room where this happened, in the city’s most famous museum, the Hermitage). Here also, the Decembrists laid their plans. Putin was born and raised here; and he shares in the strong collective memories of the Leningrad Blokada, when Nazis surrounded the city for 900 days, shelling and bombing. Their orders read “[Hitler] has decided to wipe the city of Petersburg off the face of the earth.” In the first winter, 53,000 died. The only way out of the city was across a narrow bridge of frozen water which appeared during the winter over the easterly Lake Ladoga. By the time the siege was broken, 670,000 had perished.

In terms of the arts and culture, Petersburg is the capital of Russia. Many of the buildings were designed by French, Italian, and other foreign architects. Pushkin, Gogol and Dostoevsky wrote here. The Mariinsky Theater and the Kirov Ballet call Petersburg home. This, of course, was due to the influence of Peter the Great, without whom Petersburg would not exist. Peter was a singular monarch, who wanted very much to transform his country; he literally dragged Russia kicking and screaming into Europe. His first act was to build a new capital—St. Petersburg, on the western edge of his empire, whereby he intended to extend his boundaries. The place he chose to build upon was little more than a swamp at the time, and thousands died during construction; tradition has it that St. Petersburg is nothing but a dream city, built upon the bones of those who died serving Peter’s will. Even after construction was under way, problems were plentiful—the Neva often floods (Peter himself almost drowned on Nevsky Prospect), and after dark, wolves would roam the streets… not a very hospitable city. Петр Первый forced his nobles to move to the new capital, and to cut off their beards (an important symbol in Russian Orthodoxy); he also introduced European dress and French into his court, which highly displeased his subjects. To demonstrate how brutally people felt Peter had acted, even years later after Petersburg was a bustling center of culture, Pushkin painted its birth in a harsh light: “By nature we [were] fated here to hack a window through to Europe.” Pushkin could’ve said “opened a door to Europe” or “let in the light of Europe” but hack brings with it an entirely different connotation.