Son of Saint Petersburg

Red Eft has recently returned from a week-long writing workshop, where she was immersed in healthy food, funkiness and literature ;-) and posted a stack of questions about St. Petersburg:

What are the bookstores like?

There seem to be very few, but we were possibly in the wrong districts. There are definitely fewer per head of population than in e.g. Toronto, New York or Stuttgart. On the other hand, St.P has a university, and you can't have a university without books, ergo there must be at least one humungous bookshop somewhere. QED. The only bookshop I saw, was an english-language shop near the Hermitage; it was on the second floor of a typical 19th century block that had been turned into offices and flats. There was no shop window as such, just a sign which happened to catch my eye. We didn't go in (can't stop the bus).

Is there fast food everywhere?

No. We saw McDonalds, Baskin-Robbins, a pizza brandname which I can't recall, but these were exceptions: one each in a city of five million Russians and God knows how many tourists (the Hermitage gets 15,000 visitors a day). The public appears to be composed of homesick American tourists and the Valley-Girl-wannabe bimbos of Russian mafiosi, taking a break from double-parking their Hummers in front of Dolce & Gabbana (you probably think I'm joking). I feel confident in stating that the broad mass of Russians can't afford to go near them.

There isn't even a local equivalent that I noticed, in the way that McDonalds is outnumbered thirty to one in Stuttgart by Doner Kebab takeout joints. The Russians seem to take eating seriously.

The supplimentary question that Red didn't ask: so what is everywhere?

Alcohol. Apart from the kiosks selling vodka and other spirits, apart from the street vendors selling Kvass from open stalls, at least half the population walks home of an evening with a bottle of something open in their hand. It's very common and clearly a socially-accepted form of behaviour: you see business people in suits, secretaries in twinsets, students in hoodie and jeans, walking down the street sucking meditatively on their bottle of beer. (Price comparison: half a litre of Russian vodka costs 103 Roubles = 2.90 Euros = US$4.12. A bottle of Russian beer in a restaurant costs 80 Roubles = 2.28 Euros = $3.20. A family-sized chocolate bar (100 gram) costs 22 Roubles = 0.63 Euros = $0.88)

Can you buy organic produce and soymilk anywhere?

No idea. I very much doubt that I would have recognized soymilk on the shelves of our local supermarket. It may well have been there, but God only knows how it would have been labelled or how the packaging would look. It's probably available, we did see stores that looked like the German "Reform" chain of health-food/macrobiotic/holistic thingies.

There was a mutiny on the day that we visited the Dostoyevsky Museum: certain highly vocal members of the group insisted on having some walk-about time before lunch. By coincidence there was a large Farmers' Market Hall-type place next to the museum, so I walked around there for a while. The food looked fresh, healthy and non-genetically-treated e.g. the veggies were all lumpy and patchily coloured :-) But I wouldn't swear that they were organic in the sense that the West uses the word.

Tell about funky bohemian hangouts, if you found any.

Well, um, you see ... no. Given that St.P has got a university, there must be some funky bohemia around somewhere. But I wouldn't know where or what, we certainly didn't see it.

It's like this: it was a guided-tour group, and we were supervised and led every inch of the way. We spent our time on the bus or in the enjoyment of Culture or being excellently fed and watered.

Communism may be gone, but the Russian administrative bureaucracy is still several dozen decades away from grokking the service mentality. One cannot just "go to Russia", dear reader, no no no: you need a visa. In order to get a visa, you must book a recognized Touristic Package from an accredited Russian tourist agency. This includes your hotel, museum visits, a guide, laid-on meals and gypsy dancing bands. This is then supervised by the agency: there were two unnamed, unmentioned young women who followed us around all week. As we boarded the bus in the morning, the blonde was there to number us off. When the bus arrived at the restaurant for lunch, the redhead was there talking to the manager. That evening at the Mariinsky, the blonde was at the kerb waiting for the bus. The guide resisted telling us who they were, and neither of them was willing to say more than "I'm Anna"; "No, I'm not the guide". Shades of the good-old, bad-old KGB days!

To be fair, this degree of organisation also has its good side. A concert was cancelled due to illness on a midweek evening, the agency phoned our guide (every Russian has at least one cell phone) midafternoon to tell her, so we could spend the afternoon walking in the gardens of the restored imperial palace at Pushkin. When we got stuck in traffic and missed our appointment at the river cruise, they arranged on-the-fly for a replacement boat to meet us at a mooring point on canal X and take us on an improvised tour to a mooring point on canal Y, where the bus was waiting for us. That was pretty impressive.

I would like to have had some more time on foot in the city centre, but it didn't work out that way. The geography of the city works against the casual foot tourist: it is, as I have said, enormous, and the public transport system is cracking under the strain. There is a subway system: two lines that cross near the Neva, and a circle around the outer suburbs, with very few and widely spaced stations. The principal subway line runs parallel to the Moskovskaya Prospekt, which we travelled daily from the hotel to the city centre. It's some 12 km long, and I counted three subway stations.

According to our guide, the city actually runs on an informal system of paid hitch-hiking: you stand by the side of the road and wave your hand. Somebody stops for you (a private car), and you negotiate a destination and a fee.

I didn't feel up to either of those alternatives: the language is a real barrier. (More on that later.)