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.

Russian Grandmothers

I usually try to avoid answering my phone when it's my mom or my grandmother. Most of our conversations consist of them telling me how I should be doing things differently and how my life isn't what it could have been had I listened to them. So I listen to them less and less as I grow older. For a while though my grandmother stopped calling me altogether because she got used to the idea that she had nothing to say to me that I would want to hear, so when she called I answered.

She said she's getting surgery and I must immediately fly to Russia. She thinks her surgery will be sometime in May, although she doesn't know exactly.  A preliminary consultation with a doctor is scheduled and at this consultation she will be given a specific date for the surgery. Surgery is imminent.

I bought a ticket and came to Russia. I thought my grandmother was getting a surgery. I went with her to the "preliminary consultation" and it was certainly not a visitation to schedule any surgery. Rather it seemed more like a routine check up with a doctor who decided to send her to do an MRI just to make sure she doesn't have cancer. Although I did not ask the doctor weather my suspicions are true because the time and place were not appropriate for such questions, I did think this may have been a yearly routine for my grandmother.

So while I'm here I'll take the time to share some of my impressions about St. Petersburg, the city I was born in.

First on the list is the May 1st celebration. I did not know this but May 1st is Labor Day and is very much observed in St. Petersburg. My grandmother tells me it's observed all over Russia since the Soviet Times. I went downtown to the central city street, Nevsky Prospect, to see what was happening. There was a parade and tons of people came to watch it.

When I first got off the metro I thought the parade was wherever these lovely ladies were and I followed them until the main square in front of the Hermitage where the parade culminated and there was nothing more to see. A small stage was set up there with an awful sound system that hurt the brain so I left. I walked through the arches and back towards Nevsky Prospect.

I thought all the festivities were over and people were just walking the streets now, but suddenly I saw a mass of red flags descending  upon us in a solid wall of human flesh and I knew there was more to be seen.

Fortunately I took a video. To be continued...