Thrills, Spills and Dill

I went to St Petersburg in February 2004, and stayed for half a year.

For six months I wore filthy clothes and slept in unwashed sheets, halfheartedly wringing my socks and underwear over the sink until hot water was cut off in June - a local policy no local can explain. June was the month I broke down, occasionally making the hour's journey from Ozerki to Ploshad' Vosstaniya, all my clothes in tow, so I could use a friend's washing machine and quietly cry in his shower. I smelled bad, and the Russians were, as I saw it, deliberately refusing to understand me.

I played games with my heart rate, hailing banged-up Zhiguli "taxis" at two in the morning, sleepy from drink, praying all the way home that the strange Armenian at the wheel would not slit my throat and eat my liver. Sometimes there was conversation, but I learned to indicate by my bearing that I did not want to talk.

All winter and through the spring I drank with exchange students and vaguely unpleasant businessmen at the Shamrock, opposite the Marinsky Theatre. Sometimes, when there was live music, members of the corps de ballet took off their shoes and danced. One night, a woman sent a bottle of champagne to my table because she'd seen the look on my face when she'd taken a cigarette and a light from the man I was with. Wanting to be gracious, I motioned for her to come and share it with us. I had only seen her from the waist up, and as she waddled over on short, twisted legs I felt very foolish in my jealousy. We could barely communicate, but she told us about her married and much older lover, and kept complimenting me on my lips and teeth. In the summer, I drank sweet Sovietskoye at Dacha almost every night.

For eight dollars an hour I taught at the unintentionally surrealist English Club run by a woman I will call Marina. Once or twice a week, I did my best with whatever theme she had chosen for the lesson, which might be a role-play set in an abortion clinic, how to write an effective online personal, or a sequence from 9 1/2 Weeks with guided discussion. There was always coffee, stale biscuits bought by the kilo from the kiosk downstairs, and an undercurrent of tension. Marina was obsessed with Carrie Bradshaw and Sex and the City, and wanted English Club to have the show's boldness. As the questions I was expected to ask grew more and more intimate, students began to find excuses not to attend, but still Marina would not compromise her vision. I wished she would not sit in on our sessions, because she had a peculiar and toneless way of speaking, in Russian as much as in English, which made my already uneasy students clam up further. 

Marina was an awkward and interesting woman, and I would have liked to have known her under different circumstances; as an employee it was hard to speak my mind. She wanted more than anything to be cosmopolitan and glamorous, but the reality of it was that she was subject to the same daily degradations as any other Petersburg woman of average means: to hand-wash your jeans until your hands peel from the detergent, to live with your parents until you are rescued by a man. She wore tight clothing and heavy makeup; she wasn't unattractive, but her face was a little too broad and she tended towards plumpness. Most of our students, on the other hand, were spectacularly beautiful; the uglier ones soon dropped out.   

One day in March, my boyfriend and I walked along the embankment on Vassilievsky Island. We were trying to find the Kuntskamera (Peter the Great's still-operational Cabinet of Curiosities, tenuously re-billed as a museum of ethnography; its German name always made me think of a Hamburg burlesque show), and we got into a particularly inane argument about whether there was a Russian equivalent of the man's name "Dennis". He was certain he'd never heard it used, while I insisted that Solzhenitsyn's novel A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich hinted strongly that one Ivan, at least, had had a father named Denis. Alex was sure I'd got the title wrong, and we walked up and down the frozen embankment, working up the courage to ask a passerby. Snow filled my boots and clogged my eyelashes, and a series of young women couldn't, or didn't want to, remember. Finally a much older woman, who couldn't remember either, appointed herself leader of the inquiry. I was right, it turned out, and gloated accordingly. We ducked into Russkiy Kitsch for an absurdly-priced Kir Royal, where a black man in powdered wig and footman's livery took our coats, 500-rouble notes prominent in his tip jar. I didn't think it was possible to be happier or more carefree than I was that afternoon in that hideous cafe.  

Petersburg can be a very stressful city: a combination of wide streets, low buildings and a completely flat landscape gives the impression of a sky that bears down very heavily. After my boyfriend went back to America, I felt so lonely in Petersburg that I behaved very erratically. I could be flamboyantly outgoing, phoning new acquaintances and badgering them for lunch or drinks, or, when forced to speak Russian, almost aggressively sullen. Without Alex to give me strength, I dreaded ordering at cafes, would get off blocks and blocks after my stop on the marshrutki (private minivans) because I didn't want to shout my stop-request with bad grammar, and felt constantly in danger.

For $300 I rented a one-room apartment with a precarious balcony on the tenth floor of a Soviet high-rise in Ozerki, one hour or a 150-rouble taxi ride from the city centre. The only thing going for the grim neighbourhood was "O'kei", the massive, Wal-Mart-style supermarket down the road, which, almost uniquely in Petersburg, sold such luxuries as Tabasco, zucchini, and English rich tea biscuits. For the most part, though, I cooked and ate very Russian: crab salads, juliennes, pelmeni and plov. I bought marinated shashlik meat and splattered everything with smetana, adzhika and dill. I'd make a week's worth of mixed-meat solyanka in a Soviet-issue cooking trough, and learned to love siyrki and kefir.


A view, from my apartment, of what we used to call The Playground of Shattered Dreams.

I took private Russian lessons in the mornings, which gave me the afternoons to roam Petersburg's many museums. I spent whole days on my own. My student card entitled me to free or heavily discounted entry, so I had the freedom of going to the Hermitage to look at just one room, and then escaping back onto Nevsky Prospekt for a coffee at Abrikosov, while all around me tourists struggled on, having committed themselves to exhausting the collections of the largest museum in the world. I liked the Political History Museum, where visitors slide around on the surgical baggies we are asked to place over our shoes to protect the floors, and the Museum of the Arctic and the Antarctic, where stuffed polar bears and emperor penguins are suspended in the absurdist limbo of a barely-converted Orthodox church. I regret having missed the Museum of Hygiene.

Towards the end of spring they began to raise the bridges for river traffic, which stranded me in central Petersburg until four or five in the morning. I spent many nights on the pavement outside Dacha, having the same conversation over and over again with contract English teachers I saw as aimless and parasitic. I was isolated, overwhelmed by constantly having only a partial understanding of what was going on around me, and missed my boyfriend very much. I had no real purpose in Petersburg and every day was a brain-frying sensory onslaught of Cyrillic lettering and the unfamiliar.


Valentin on one white Petersburg night.

In the summer Georgians and Armenians come to the courtyards of St Petersburg and set up room-sized steel cages full of watermelons. The last time I saw Alyosha, my foot got caught in the door of a metro car because he insisted on rushing. The train started moving, with my foot still trapped - I freed it just before it would have scraped against the tunnel wall. Lyosha bought us a watermelon as a kind of apology. He was very bright and very impenetrable: at 20, he was months away from a Masters in Physics, but paid for his surfeit in braininess with horrendous social skills and a total inability to empathise. The watermelon was sweet and juicy, and we ate it on my balcony, where mosquitoes feasted on my face and calves.

I flew back to Hong Kong at the end of July and have been violently nostalgic about Russia ever since. I miss ordering a carafe of vodka with a pitcher of cherry or pomegranate chaser, I miss how my Russian was so bad that deciphering the ads in one metro carriage would occupy me all the way home from Nevsky Prospekt, I miss dried cuttlefish and rock-hard sukhariki with my beer. I miss 50 cent-packs of cigarettes, four-minute escalator rides to and from the metro platforms, and the way Russian women looked at my shoes. I miss the permissiveness of Russia, the feeling that I could be that little bit drunker, that little bit trashier than I would at home.

There is a sharp, fermented note in Russian food that I miss very much: the soured cream, the pickles, the acidic black bread, lemon crescents floating on oily-surfaced bowls of solyanka. Cold cabbage salad and beetroot vinaigrette, curd cheese and warm kvas. Here is where and what I liked to eat in St Petersburg:

Hot beef borsch at Me100; anything else is only playing at being borsch.

Zoom: Chicken salad with raw grated celeriac bound in mayonnaise; baked apples with honey and hazelnuts. An impossibly willowy waitress will ask you, "Kak vashe nastroeniye?" (How is your mood?)

The "S'esh' skol'ko mozhesh'" salad bar at Il Patio (Nevsky Prospekt 30), for roasted peppers, balls of buffalo mozzarella and as many pregnant arctic prawns as you can eat.

For Chinese food, Velikaya Stena on Chkalovsky Prospekt.

Myasorubka for Mongolian Barbecue Nouveau in high-ceilinged, Art Deco surroundings.

Blini wars: Teremok vs Maslenitsa. Teremok is definitely more upmarket, and sells such incomparable delicacies as sliced pork blini with horseradish sauce, but I prefer Maslenitsa for simple jam blini, as their batter is denser and sweeter. You'll find either or both around many metro stations.

Myasnaya solyanka at Fish Fabrique at three in the morning. I hear Griboedov also does a mean soup.

Cheese blintzes, duck breast in raspberry sauce and other Jewish delights await you at Seven Forty. Avoid the matzo balls.

Zemlyanika, the tiniest of wild summer strawberries, sold by the pitcherful by old grandmothers outside metro stations, tipped into a glass of sweet Sovietskoye.