the habit of being

I had been up all night playing Mah Jongg solitaire, which Air France was calling Shanghai, keeping my eyes peeled in the darkened cabin for a certain stewardess with a black bow barrette clipped over her dark brown chignon. When we arrived in Paris on the 19th, I was unsure what the absolute time was, only that we were only minutes away from missing our connection to Russia, but as it turned out 40 other people were missing it too, so they waited, and D ran to get us cafe au lait and croissants while I held our place in the security line. On the flight to St-Petersburg, we got out our phrasebook and learned how to say yes, no, please, thank you, I’m sorry, hi, good day, goodbye, and vegetarian in Russian, and, along with theatre box office, that list nearly sufficed for a whole week in a largely non-English-speaking city.

We were immediately immersed in the cultural phenomenon of the Long Russian Line. Going through customs, registering at the Hotel St-Petersburg, and, we’d soon learn, everywhere else, all queues in St-Petersburg move at approximately one fourth of our accustomed American speed. Our earliest impression of the city was that it was much more American than European, and that it seemed to be stuck in the 70’s. This was partly a consequence of our first meal, dinner in the hotel restaurant called the Mirror Room. This was a large wooden room in the basement of the gargantuan building, and it was decorated like a high school prom. There was shiny blue fabric on the tables, ruffled up instead of pulled taut, and there was a red lamp with tassels on every table. The napkins sat on the plates in the shape of cones. A few branches of foliage were stapled to the walls. There were two vegetarian options on the menu, and neither was an entree. Half asleep, I discovered Russian elevator music and the local beer Nevskoe, which we’d be drinking a lot more of.

The hotel itself was right on the Neva, and had a gigantic SAMSUNG sign on the roof. My room wasn’t air-conditioned. It was very small and had both thick orange and blue mesh curtains. The bed was a thin palate on a wooden frame, but that first night I slept 14 hours. It would be the only night in Russia that I slept more than 5 or 6 hours, and the only night I wasn’t bitten by mosquitoes, because I hadn’t yet discovered that the windows opened. We joked about the rooms being like something from a James Bond movie.

We had a whole day before the conference started, so we the next morning we headed for the Hermitage, and went straight for the 19th and 20th century collections on the top floor. If you’ve spent a lot of time at New York museums, the presentation style at the Hermitage is a bit shocking: the rooms on the top floor are very plain, the paint is cracking, the windows are open, spilling so much light onto the paintings that you can’t make out some of the glass-covered ones because of the reflection. But there are beautiful Matisses, and you feel like you’re seeing them in someone’s house, rather than a sterile museum space, and the rooms are airy and small, and, because there are only a small number of paintings in each room, you never feel overwhelmed. Until you go downstairs, which is a very different story. The rooms are grand, ornately decorated, and much larger. The older collections housed here are more spectacular for their quantity than their quality. For instance, there is an entire hall full of nothing but Dutch (I think?) paintings of hunts and food.

That night, Sunday, August 20th, at the opening reception for the conference, there was a military band and hundreds of tiny glasses of vodka. A big group of us went out in search of a Lebanese restaurant from the Lonely Planet guidebook, and after walking for about an hour, finally found the place, only to discover it had gone out of business. We wound up eating bad Chinese with the help of a tourist from the UK. None of the staff spoke English. By the end of the night, I’d had champagne, vodka, beer, and wine, and really thought I was doing surprisingly well…

Unable to get to bed at night (St. Pete is 8 hours ahead), I slept through a lot of the conference during the first few days. We saw Le Corsaire at the Mariinsky Theatre Monday night. The story is all about pirates and slave girls, and unlike most ballet I’ve seen, it was fun and funny, not at all pretentious or high-artsy. The famous Kirov company was on tour, so we got a travelling Russian company with a tall prima ballerina in a hot pink tutu. Every drag queen’s fantasy, she came out for no less than five curtain calls at the end, when a dedicated group of men and women simply would not stop clapping. Afterwards we ate in a fantastic restaurant called the Backstage, which was decorated with ballet paraphernalia and whose walls were covered with dancers’ signatures.

Tuesday night we ate in a Georgian restaurant. Wednesday we blew off the conference altogether and went on a day trip to Peterhof, the “Russian Versailles,” on a hydrofoil. Wednesday night was the conference banquet, and I was feeling sick to my stomach, presumably due to having not been warned against drinking the water for a couple days after arriving.

Thursday morning I gave my talk, on our three-process model of reading rate, and, as usual, after who knows how many weeks of panic and anxiety, as soon as I was actually doing it, it was fine. That night we rode the Metro for the first time, and it really does have even taller, scarier, escalators than the Washington, DC, system, but otherwise is very nice. With a group of four friends, I saw a Russian production of Cabaret, which seemed much grittier and more authentic than the Broadway production I saw in 2001. Being in the front row, as we also were for Le Corsaire (and later for Giselle), didn’t hurt. Then we wondered around the main drag, Nevskiy Prospect, looking for a place to eat, and finally found a great Georgian place called Kafka. I should mention that in nearly all these restaurants I was eating aubergine. I had no idea Russians were into eggplant, but it would seem that they are, and that they do it very well.

We returned to the Hermitage for a second round on Friday, but it was dreary out and somehow it just wasn’t nearly as pleasant as the first time with all the open windows. With a lot of pushing from me, still wanting to see a “serious” ballet, we snagged tickets for the next night’s production of Giselle at the Hermitage Theatre, and had one of the slowest meals ever at another restaurant on Nevskiy Prospect.

Before coming to Russia, we’d concocted this brilliant plan to take the overnight “Red Arrow” sleeper train from St. Petersburg to Moscow (where we’d catch our flight back to the States) on our last night. Despite the large number of websites that claim to be capable of booking Russian train tickets, I had no success purchasing them in advance, and despite resolving to take care of getting tickets early after arriving, we waited until the day before we were leaving (Saturday) to walk over to the Finlandia Terminal (which was nearest to our hotel) to get tickets. This proved to be the most stressful part of the entire trip. No one working at the station had much English, so we were reduced to trying to write notes (28 August 23:55? 1st class?) and holding them up to the window. Our train was sold out. There was no other train Sunday night. We could get tickets that night, but we’d miss Giselle. Furthermore, I needed my passport to buy a train ticket, and it was back at the hotel. After I went back to get it, we discovered that there were, in fact, second class tickets on a different train Sunday night. It wasn’t a sleeper, and the arrival time was very tight, but it was a better option than missing Giselle and having to find a hotel in Moscow.

From the train station, we went on to the Russian Museum, where a woman in a large hat impressed upon us that she had two degrees and could give us a tour in English for 300 rubles (about $12) per person per hour. D talked her into a half hour tour and she took us through the icons and asked if we were Christian (oh right, you’re scientists! she said when Denis shook his head) and then told us stories about Catherine the Great’s love life. Afterwards we explored the rest of the museum alone (the icons were definitely the high point, along with a portrait of Anna Akmatova), and then walked over to the Church on Spilled Blood and the souvenir fair, where there are more matryoshka dolls than you’ve ever seen in your life. I bought a silver bracelet that says something on the order of God Bless and Protect Me in Cyrillic. Then we headed back to the Hermitage Theatre to see Giselle, which is about ghost maidens who’ve died on their wedding night.. totally goth. And then we went back to the Backstage Restaurant, which we’d enjoyed so much the first time.

On our final day, we managed to cram in the Zoological Museum (15,000,000 specimens!), a canal tour of the city (it was originally based on Amsterdam), the Dostoevsky Museum (I insisted… it’s in the actual apartment where he wrote The Brothers Karamazov), and a 3-hour Russian play (based on Nabokov’s King, Queen, Knave.. I felt like I missed a lot due to only knowing about seven words, but it was clearly good, serious theatre), before running off to Moscovsky Station to catch our midnight train.

We decided it was worth another shot at getting a better ticket, but were having even worse luck trying to communicate with the station agents, when a Russian man who spoke excellent English came up to us claiming he could get us 1st class seats on the Red Arrow (#1) for 5000 rubles. This wasn’t too much more than the asking price. He called someone up on a cell phone and gave them our names and passport numbers, and several minutes later a military guy showed up with the tickets, which were actually for the #3 train, not the #1. And then we sprung it on us that the 5000 rubles didn’t actually include the price of the ticket, so it was all seeming very sketchy and expensive when he guided us to the beautiful red train with a final: One question, George Bush: good man or bad man?

Bad man, said D, and they were in fact valid first class tickets on a sleeper train. We had our own little room with a flower, sparkling water, and two boxed meals including foie-gras, salami, and caviar. I managed to sleep a few hours and suddenly we were in Moscow at 8 in the morning. Our cab driver kindly took us by Red Square on the way to the airport, but it turned out to be closed on Mondays.

At the free breakfast in the hotel one morning near the end of the conference, people were asking one other what their strongest impression of St. Petersburg was. One man talked of almost getting robbed on the metro, others of various tourist sites, and when it was my turn I said it was the Neva. The city is huge, but because of the canals, you never feel like you’re very far from the river. One night on the way back to the hotel, which was right on the Neva, we saw these huge crowds of people lined up along the sidewalk. When we asked the cab driver what was going on, he said they were waiting to see the bridges go up. The various bridges go up on a schedule late every night, to let larger ships pass through, but the idea that people who lived there would wait around to see it amazed us. In New York, we have rivers, one of which I can even see from my window, but they really aren’t “important” to the city at all, apart from their role in giving it its island-ness. Apparently almost all the great European cities are built around rivers in the way that St. Petersburg is, and that’s why no one other than myself (the only person there who had never been to Europe) thought this whole “river thing” was such a big deal.

I guess that’s the short version of What I Did On My Trip To Russia. In conclusion, when it comes to visiting faraway places, a picture’s worth a thousand words. And, also, I can’t wait to get another stamp in my passport. Prague, anyone?