I spent a long weekend in Vilnius, but that will have to wait. So much travel, so little blog-space! St. Petersburg is many things that Zurich is not – it’s big, it’s chaotic, it’s noisy, and it’s dirty. The population of St. Petersburg is almost two-thirds of the entire population of Switzerland. It’s not as populous as New York, but I’ve been Swissified, so it was a bit overwhelming, but very exciting.
St. Petersburg is huge – the subway is unfathomably deep underground, and the trains go for long stretches at high speed between stops – unlike in Zurich, there’s no debate between walking or waiting for the next train. You never know exactly when the train will come – there is no set schedule, and although there are timers on the platforms, they only tell you when the last train left. The trains run very frequently, though, so you don’t have to stand there for too long thinking, “If only I hadn’t stopped tie my shoe, I would have caught the train.”
Another strange thing is that a lot of the subway stations have safety doors instead of platforms, so you wait in what appears to be a hallway with heavy-duty elevator doors every few meters. When a train arrives, you don’t see it, but the safety doors open. You hop in as quickly as possible once the train doors open, because the safety doors slam shut with enough force to make you question their usefulness as “safety” doors. Once you’re in the train, you often can’t see the stations for more than a few seconds (because of the safety doors), and all of the station names are in Cyrillic, so it can be quite, er, exciting trying to get where you want to go.
There are hundreds of buses that run on tangled routes. The drivers speak only Russian, you get in, pass them some money, and they hurtle through city streets unfamiliar to confused travelers like me. Where does bus K-113 go? I have no idea, I just hope it’s going in roughly the same direction I want to go. And then there’s the practice that my friend and I dubbed “hitchcabbing,” which we did once while we were there. Basically, if you stick your hand out, palm down, while standing next to the street, somebody will stop. It’s usually not a cab. A lot of people in St. Petersburg earn some extra cash by picking up random people and driving them where they want to go. You get a car to stop, pop your head in, tell them where you’re going, negotiate a price, get in, and hope you didn’t just make a huge mistake.
There are tons of museums, some beautiful, some bizarre – one even has a collection of babies with birth defects, preserved for display. Yes, they have pickled, deformed babies in jars. That was less disturbing, however, than the stern warnings we read about drinking the tap water. Apparently, the tap water in St. Petersburg is so full of heavy metals and critters that even the locals don’t drink it. We were warned to use bottled water, even for brushing our teeth, for fear of catching a fun little parasite that is impervious to antibiotics, can withstand being boiled for up to ten minutes, and which can remain active for years after the initial infection. Eek.
There were many things that we could hardly fathom – the universal use of nylons and stockings by all women, regardless of whether they were wearing shorts, skirts, sandals, or flip-flops; the use of Russian dressing on foods ranging from pizza to sandwiches; the fact that we walked over 35 miles (56 km), despite having taken trams, subways, and buses for the “long” stretches; the strange feeling of watching the sun set at 11:30 p.m. – and many things I didn’t even mention here. It was an amazing weekend, and worth the angst over getting our Russian visas, which only arrived the morning of our flight out of Zurich.
St. Petersburg is huge – the subway is unfathomably deep underground, and the trains go for long stretches at high speed between stops – unlike in Zurich, there’s no debate between walking or waiting for the next train. You never know exactly when the train will come – there is no set schedule, and although there are timers on the platforms, they only tell you when the last train left. The trains run very frequently, though, so you don’t have to stand there for too long thinking, “If only I hadn’t stopped tie my shoe, I would have caught the train.”
Another strange thing is that a lot of the subway stations have safety doors instead of platforms, so you wait in what appears to be a hallway with heavy-duty elevator doors every few meters. When a train arrives, you don’t see it, but the safety doors open. You hop in as quickly as possible once the train doors open, because the safety doors slam shut with enough force to make you question their usefulness as “safety” doors. Once you’re in the train, you often can’t see the stations for more than a few seconds (because of the safety doors), and all of the station names are in Cyrillic, so it can be quite, er, exciting trying to get where you want to go.
There are hundreds of buses that run on tangled routes. The drivers speak only Russian, you get in, pass them some money, and they hurtle through city streets unfamiliar to confused travelers like me. Where does bus K-113 go? I have no idea, I just hope it’s going in roughly the same direction I want to go. And then there’s the practice that my friend and I dubbed “hitchcabbing,” which we did once while we were there. Basically, if you stick your hand out, palm down, while standing next to the street, somebody will stop. It’s usually not a cab. A lot of people in St. Petersburg earn some extra cash by picking up random people and driving them where they want to go. You get a car to stop, pop your head in, tell them where you’re going, negotiate a price, get in, and hope you didn’t just make a huge mistake.
There are tons of museums, some beautiful, some bizarre – one even has a collection of babies with birth defects, preserved for display. Yes, they have pickled, deformed babies in jars. That was less disturbing, however, than the stern warnings we read about drinking the tap water. Apparently, the tap water in St. Petersburg is so full of heavy metals and critters that even the locals don’t drink it. We were warned to use bottled water, even for brushing our teeth, for fear of catching a fun little parasite that is impervious to antibiotics, can withstand being boiled for up to ten minutes, and which can remain active for years after the initial infection. Eek.
There were many things that we could hardly fathom – the universal use of nylons and stockings by all women, regardless of whether they were wearing shorts, skirts, sandals, or flip-flops; the use of Russian dressing on foods ranging from pizza to sandwiches; the fact that we walked over 35 miles (56 km), despite having taken trams, subways, and buses for the “long” stretches; the strange feeling of watching the sun set at 11:30 p.m. – and many things I didn’t even mention here. It was an amazing weekend, and worth the angst over getting our Russian visas, which only arrived the morning of our flight out of Zurich.
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