девушка and Достевский in Санкт Петербург

It doesn’t get more Eastern European feeling than this. I am sitting in a cafe in Riga, Latvia. There is a man beside me playing the accordion behind a flower stand. There are lots of cafes nearby and a big public square with winding lanes radiating out from it. It is nice and temporarily distracting from the night bus that I intend to board in a few hours.

Things have been unnecessarily complicated for me of late. I was offered a volunteer position with the United Nations (very appealing) in Haiti (not so appealing), designing safeguards and laws to tackle police corruption among other things. I had three days to decide whether I would accept it. I did not. This was against the background of some unexpected visa wrangling with the idiots at www.iranianvisa.com over an invitation letter to everybody’s favourite Islamic republic. I have now exchanged seventeen emails, sat in a Western Union for an hour and a half, wired them thirty five Euros and they can’t get started since they still don’t have the money.

I don’t want to worry about this kind of thing right now, I just want to enjoy the small slice of Latvia that I am seeing. I find myself in one of those little moments that fall between the cracks of such a big trip. The nice atmosphere during the few hours I spend here are not enough to really make much of a mark, but will however colour my impression of this country sufficiently to feel that I have been here.

It can’t compare to good old Санкт Петербург where I spent a week meeting девушка and even the occasional красотка, staying out of all sorts of drunken trouble making, and drinking in the amazing culture all around.

The first couple of days there, I spent looking around the streets thinking of Достевский and his characters, moving along the side of the canals and enjoying a truly European feel for the first time in years. It was a city of art and I passed a couple of days walking around in the Hermitage, winter palace of the Царь, and now one of the world’s greatest art museums. It’s the kind of place that you have to walk past the Рембант ван Рейн (Rembrandt van Rijn) if you want to have enough time to see the Пикасо (Picasso). After a few hours of such amazing art, I felt overwhelmed and made for the exit. You could spend weeks looking at the paintings in there, though I was satisfied with seeing both DaVinci masterpieces and dozens more by Matisse, Cezanne, and Gaugin among many others. It was certainly the biggest art collection with some of the biggest names that I have ever seen, second only to the Louvre in scope and perhaps the Vatican in big name artistic sex appeal.

A word on all the Cyrillic: though some may dismiss my use of Cyrillic spelling as nothing more than a pretentious attempt to showcase my infinite culture and sophistication, I can assure you that this is untrue. The point of this blog has always been to convey to the reader a sense of the experience that I have been living throughout my travels. Apart from the девушка and the красотка, which are words that may import far too much scandal to explain, all of the others are words that are recognizable, being either proper names or titles which are familiar in English. Now imagine boarding a metro and seeing nothing but Cyrillic all over the place, thinking “hmm, well c is s, p is r, b is v, y is u, н is n, д is d, и is i, so I am headed for the Nevsky Prospekt station, aha! There it is: Невский Проспект!”

It takes a little getting used to, and more importantly, requires the abandonment of the intuitive interpretation of the symbols that you recognize. It made me realize that my perception of words is a perception of symbols, in that when i see a word in English or French, or even a word in a language using a Latin script, I am capable of recognizing the word as a symbol itself, not as the sum of its component parts. In order to learn some Russky words, and to navigate my way around, I first had to learn the alphabet, including the sound each letter made, then overcome the inclination to impose my Latin pronunciation on particular letters, and finally I was able to sound out words as if I were a child first learning to read. This may sound like quite an accomplishment, though in the end it amounted to little more than feeble attempts to pronounce words without any idea of their meaning. It was useful in reading signs and menus, as the number of recognizable words is quite surprising. It also allowed me to pick up some words that I would otherwise have never been able to remember. That said, I hope that readers of this blog will indulge my decision to insert some Cyrillic, as a means to convey a significant experience from my travels in the Commonwealth of Independent States, if not as a challenge to decode them.

All of this served me well during the daytime, though did not play much of a part during some wild evenings at Петербург nightclubs inuding Fidel and Mod Club for any of you in the know. The first night out was with a group I picked up at the hostel including a couple of older Aussie guys, one of whom had been in jail. After a few beers for me, and a few Boдka shots for the Aussies, we headed out for some fun on the town. En route, I remarked that one of the girls we were with was particularly short. With no tact whatsoever I asked “how tall are you?” to which she replied “I’m 4’11” and I’m not a midget.” This led to twenty minutes of discussion of her height which ended inconclusively.

The bar was great and strange things started to happen. Soon the Midget and some lame English guy had blood all over them, from an altercation that he had likely started. I never got the full story, but understand that Aussie John had been instrumental in “diffusing” the situation. By two in the morn, most of the group had gone home, leaving myself and John the Aussie jailbird. At one point, I was talking to some people and noticed that he had just head-butted someone who was now lying on the floor. I suggested that we go somewhere else and we moved to the bar next door. We lasted there for a good half hour until I returned from the toilet to observe him pummelling somebody else with his fists. Again, I suggested a change of venue. I should note here that the bouncers took no action, apparently approving of his behaviour. The third bar was great. I did not see what happened to John there, as I was otherwise engaged, discussing a marriage proposal with a Russian girl I had met moments before. I later found out that John had made for home, spent some time in police custody, talked his way out, and found the hostel after hours wandering the streets. All in a good night’s work.

The following evening I headed to an area containing three nightclubs. I had a great time there meeting lots of Russians, and did not meet any prospective fiancées. Saturday night was probably the best though. We headed out again, back to the place where Aussie John and I had somehow managed to stay out of trouble a couple of nights before. Some of the bouncers remembered me and I was treated to a couple of free beers and taught some Russian pick up lines that I employed with limited success. I was glad to have befriended the bouncers as most of them were goons. This impression was confirmed by the fact that the night degenerated into a medium sized street brawl after midnight. As I stood there sipping a beer and spectating, I was approached by a girl intent on reprimanding me for observing the carnage. She said something to the effect of “You come to my country to watch people get in fights” to which I replied “I came to drink a beer and everyone started fighting.” She saw the validity of this response and we soon became friendly.

The evening ended with me buying МакДоналдс (McDonald’s) breakfast for a Russian guy from the hostel and a rap singing religious zealot with a massive beard who we had somehow picked up on the street. We fled rap-Rasputin and got in at about seven o’clock in the morning.

The next couple of days, I spent in complete sobriety, save for the daily beer I would purchase for the purpose of roaming the streets. This was motivated by the behaviour of St. Petersburgers(?) who consume beer as if it were a soft drink. It is common to see not only rebellious youth, but also women and men headed from work, sipping a half litre bottle of suds at any time of day. It doesn’t turn heads at eight in the morning any more than it does at eight in the evening. I found this to be a charming routine and enjoyed my daily beer stroll.

The last night was also a memorable one, ending on a Санкт Петербург rooftop with a couple of девушка talking about rap music and learning that Jza from the Wu Tang Clan had played a show in Ekaterinaburg. The девушка were big fans. I headed home that night, sorry to leave Pуссия but eager to move on over the eastern fringe of Europe to the Bosphorus strait and the edge of the western world.