My journal has been traveling with me for eight years...I can't believe it. It's a record of almost all of my foreign travels (Oxford onwards) and many of the things in between, and what it doesn't cover is written about in a notebook that's safely tucked away on a bookshelf in California. It's a good thing my writing is small, or I would constantly need new journals!
But you didn't come here to listen to me go on and on about my nostalgia...you want to hear about Saint Petersburg! My feelings about this trip, so far, can be summed up as follows:
THINGS I'VE MISSED
- Light switches on the outside of bathrooms
- Showerheads that can be removed and hand-held
- Hotel breakfasts (in Russia they almost always include hot dogs)
- Amusing Cyrillic spellings of English words (or foreign words we use in English)
- Russian dancing (just as bad as ever, thank God!)
THINGS I HAVE NOT MISSED
- Jet lag
- 2-in-1 shampoo/conditioner
- Measured drinks
THINGS I WAS NOT EXPECTING
-Consistently good wi-fi
-Daylight for all but 4-5 hours of the day
-Russian mosquitoes
After a lazy afternoon yesterday, we made an attempt to find a new club. Most of the places we were interested in checking out were in the same are of the city, so we figured we would just head in that general direction. One long stroll down Nevsky Prospekt, the major street in Saint Petersburg, later and we spotted the first intriguing bar. It turned out to be small and mostly empty, but we stayed for a quick drink before heading off again. Who were we to turn down cheap mixed drinks and real Redbull (a luxury outside of the US)?!
The next bar we came upon looked promising, but they wanted 200 rubles for Jon and 1000 for me! That, in July of 2010, is about $30. We managed to get them down to 500 for both of us, but money is a little tight these days so we moved on.
We tried Revolution next, a club that we'd been to last year, but they also wanted an unexpectedly high cover. I'm not sure why...it's not like the locals can afford it. We wandered around for a bit, trying to formulate a new plan of attack, when suddenly we stumbled upon what can only be described as Dive Bar Row. It was like Williamsburg decided Brooklyn was becoming too upscale so it packed its bags and headed for somewhere poorer. The bars were a hipster's paradise, though with somewhat less irony and significantly less PBR. We had a drink in one before deciding that the better cultural experience would be drinking on the street with the throngs of people outside.
1 deli trip later and we were sitting on the curb, "Redbulls and vodkas up in our hands" (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBRhoB5V_fA for the origin of the quote). We got into a nice chat and fought off mosquitoes until the sun came up and the bars closed. Then the real fun began. We were on our way home when two cops approached us. I couldn't understand most of what they said, of course, but the gist of it seemed to be that, while drinking beer on the street was just fine, carrying an opened bottle of vodka down the street was not. Then they asked us to come to the station with them.
Don't get too excited...the "But I'm a tourist and I didn't know any better!" excuse worked out just fine (aided by its white lie counterpart "But we're from New York, and it's ok to do it there!"), and we ended up befriending Boris the Police Officer with a conversation about how early bars close in America and how short Tom Cruise is. We shook hands and said goodbye, and went on our merry way. I am, I must admit, a bit proud of my brush with the Russian law...it must have upped my street cred by at least several thousand points. ;)
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