We're couchsurfing for our first few days in St. Petersburg, and we manage to find our way to Sergey's house fairly easily. With all of our bags, it's a bit of a slog and the lack of sleep from the night before makes us less than our usual charming selves, but we have a chance to meet everyone and settle in before heading out for the day. Sergey's daughter is small and sweet and doesn't say much to us, but she curates a little museum exhibition for us, one piece at a time, running back and forth to where she keeps her treasures. Here is my sticker, here is my book. This is my paper star.
Our first day outside in the city finds us crossing off items on our now-familiar first-day list. Walked too much - check. Ate lunch at deceptively expensive bistro - check. Discovered that many sites are closed on Mondays - check.
Our next few days are much more fruitful - Sergey generously agrees to register our passports for the entire month of September, and so we have 4 glorious, paperwork-free weeks ahead of us. After the hour-long form filling session is finished at the post office, we walk over to the Peter and Paul Fortress for a whirlwind tour. Originally built to defend St. Petersburg against Sweden back in the 1700s, its walls now house an odd mishmash of printmaking workshops, art galleries, space museums and such. Along the south wall, we walk past people sunbathing on the bank of the Neva in the cool September air, and we weave through the remains of a sand sculpture competition.
A second couchsurfing guest, Alex from France, arrives a day later and Pierre and I join him and Sergey for a bit of exploring. We have a drink at the Literary Cafe where Pushkin had his last meal before being killed in a duel. Afterwards, we work our way to a bar called Fish Fabrique - I remember this bar from my first trip to St. P. At that time, it was a small dingy student bar in a more or less abandoned building where if you still had a drink when the metro closed down and the bridges went up, you could sleep there, sitting at a table, until the city woke up again and you could go on your way. Now, it's changed - the spirit seems to have stayed the same, though the Fish Fabrique club has moved from an upper floor to a lower one. The decor is still a jumble of wooden benches with a scuffed up stage in one corner for a small band to play on. The rest of the building has taken off and been developed artsy-style - now, rather than being a derelict empty building, it's a kind of anti-establishment artist's collective: sculptures in the courtyards, galleries, thrift-store decorated coffee shops and bars on every floor. Kind of like what you'd get if you took a funky/art-student neighbourhood in Montreal and tipped it on its side to make it an apartment building.
We wander up a few floors, poking our heads in here and there, until we find a cafe the size of a very small apartment with flowery wall paper on the walls, a jumble of couches and kitchen chairs. Here we can order herbal tea and a few pints of draft and sit and play chess and checkers and talk. Most of the patrons are early university age, very earnest, be-goateed and wearing thin sweaters. The four of us visit amongst ourselves and make plans for the next day.
We decide to make one more stop that night at the other end of town, in another underground bar with a bit of live music. The spot is famous for being a spot where Viktor Tsoi worked and played when he lived in St. Petersburg in the 80s. His band Kino - and he himself especially - seem to hold a cult status with young Russians the way a Jim Morrison or Kurt Cobain would be to a young North American (minus the drugs and suicide: Tsoi died in a car accident).
A couple of young Russian girls find us - they have just moved to St Petersburg from Siberia for university, and they are drunk with beer and drunk with love for their new home. Everywhere they go in this city there's art, music and life. They are everywhere in the bar - they take photos with the people on stage, they take photos with us, they laugh when they say a word wrong in English, and laugh harder when they say it right. They are so happy, as if they just got out of some monochrome crazy house and are living in technicolor. They are so happy to be out. I can relate to them a little. I grew up in an isolated, small-small town well before the Internet reached it, so I can understand their giddiness. Trust me, it's there even when they're not drunk.
They invite me to stand in the doorway of a side room with them where we listen to a couple of musicians play some Victor Tsoi. Pierre and Alex don't quite know what to make of them, and get a bit nervous when the girls start yelling (in Russian) at the musicians while they're playing on stage. The musicians yell back, the girls yell back more... to Pierre and Alex it probably sounds like the musicians are trying to shut the girls up, but I translate the little I understand and tell them it's more like a shouty conversation. Like shouting Amen or Hallelujah in a church while a preacher's shouting. The girls are sweet, two kittens with an endless ball of string (string!). Tomorrow they will be very hung over kittens. We say goodbye, and Pierre and I leave well before the last metro - we want a bit of sleep before we start all over again the next day.
Alex has only a few days to see St. Petersburg, and so he and Sergey have planned a whirlwind tour of several sites the next day. I use the word whirlwind with Sergey a lot, and it's not because I can't be bothered to use a thesaurus. Sergey thinks fast, talks fast, moves fast, in several languages, all without ever giving the impression of being frantic. He gets a lot done in a day, whether he's working or taking people on a walking tour. There is no 0 to 60 - there is only 60 and up.
We hit the ground running at 9 o'clock when we all meet near the Finlandsky Station to catch a boat to Kronshtadt which is about a half an hour away. While waiting for the boat, we look around - nearby in the middle of the square they seem to be doing renovations of some sort,
"What's with the crate?" I ask and point to a box high up in the middle of the square.
"Someone hit the Lenin statue with a rocket launcher," Sergey says. "The statue is hollow so it went through. They won't repair it." I think he's less surprised that it happened than that it took so long for someone to do it.
The boat comes - we enjoy the view from the windows and the deck. In Kronshtadt, we take a roundabout tour of the city and have a quick breakfast in a local snack shop, then wander around the naval museum for a short while before heading back to the pier (with stops in a few local shops for bread, fish, and second hand store) to catch the boat to Oranienbaum which is, in turn, a bus ride away from Peterhof, the imperial palace of Peter the Great. Alex goes into the Peterhof grounds for a quick look around - Pierre and I decide to wait for a day when we can take our time. Then we drop into a church on the way to the bus stop and look around inside before catching the bus back to St. Petersburg, at which point we all catch a metro home. The day's a bit of a blur and by the end we're all pretty tired (except Sergey, I think, who I think finds us to be slowpokes at times). We wish Alex a safe rest of his round-the-world trip and promise to keep in touch.
Other than sightseeing, we take time in our first few days to visit the school where I'll be studying. It's a quiet time of year with all of the summer students gone - the school has only a few handfuls of Japanese students on group courses, and a few others doing individual classes like me. I love the school - it's small, clean, central enough and very well organized. The staff are helpful and friendly, and has a great study room. We set up my schedule - three mornings a week for three weeks - and head home.
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