Life in St. Petersburg

Here's some stuff about what it's like to live here. If you want to buy anything, you have many choice of how you'll experience shopping. St. Petersburg is abundant in its variety of retail practices. While there are supermarkets like those we're used to in major cities in the US, there are also small shopping centers that follow the soviet era procedures. While all the sails people are in one space, you have to come up to every sales person individually to buy stuff. You can't just put it into your cart and pay at the end after you've accumulated everything.

This type of shopping center is kind of like a farmer's market, only the goods are not necessarily from a farm. Here you see a fish stand inside of such a shopping center. The only thing that has changed is that before, in the Soviet era, this place had only one cashier. So, every singly sales stand had a sales person give you the goods and a sales ticket and you would go to a cashier in the center of the sales area and pay them after you show them all your tickets. I'm not sure how they controlled theft in that situation.

Of course other types of selling practices exist, this is just one of the kind that stands out to me as something I don't see often in the US.

If you're looking for scarves in St. Petersburg chances are, as a tourist you may end up in this store on Nevsky Prospect. Here they sell the world renown Pavlovposadski scarfs with beautiful folk prints made in the town Pavlov Posad. As you can see this store is decked out in a huge number of different prints, so if you go in there you better know what colors look good with you so the sales ladies can help you pick, or you'll spend a lifetime looking through all of them. You can also find them in any of the souvenir shops along Nevsky, but they will not have this many and you may not find the right one for you.This store has four walls covered in scarves.

As you walk along the streets you will find amazingly intricate facades such as this one. I really try to resist taking too many pictures because I'd like to experience the world through my own eyes as much as possible but this decorative architecture was just too much for me to pass up.

I've been taking ballet classes and below you will see what some of my walk back home looks like. I am particularly fond of the night lights in this city.