Category Archives: St Petersburg

Amelia, Baikal, Moscow, Outside the Box, Rus', St Petersburg

welcome to my “blog”

Quote June 9, 2019 blairsmitha Leave a comment

sweatshirt says “non-blogger” in Russian (неблоггер)

I am trying to inspire a sense of childlike wonder in my reader with my poems and sketches. I try to do this in three ways: by depicting supernatural events, by invoking a very personal and confessional tone, and by illustrating the natural world as a place of secrets and magic. When I was younger, I ardently believed in faeries and magic, likely as a coping mechanism to escape my abusive home life. I would go looking for hidden worlds in nature to escape into, and fantasize crossing over into some mythical realm and leaving my own reality behind.

The assignment for the Russian OCS program was to write seven blog posts. I decided to do my own take on the assignment because I knew accurately and cohesively documenting the real events and experiences of this trip would be extremely hard for me. My classmates have done an amazing job creating a log of important events and moments on this trip. I know if I tried to do the same I would slip into lying, leaving important details out, or getting completely lost in my writing.

So I chose to do a “blog” of poems and sketches. For me, poetry has always been a comfortable medium to document important events in my life while being able to embellish the narrative, stretch the truth, and pull the setting away from the “real” world and closer to a fantastical one. My sketches are also not very representative. On my blog you’ll find a girl with blue skin, pink water and a purple midday sky. I wanted to include them because I felt strongly about having a visual medium on my blog that attempted the same goals as my poetry. Most people look at art much more than they read poetry, and as someone with dyslexia I know it can be hard to read anything at all, let alone artistic writing. Therefore I wanted to include sketches on my blog along with the poetry to try to present the same message from my poems in a different way that might be more understandable, comfortable, or accessible for readers.

Where did my poems and sketches come from? The sources are as varied as stepping into wet sand and ruining my shoes at Lake Baikal, the history of prostitutes in St. Petersburg, or my classmate Nick’s passion for bird-watching. The majority of my poems and sketches were created in the moment while I was viewing each subject.

In Buryatia, the phrase “absolutely no one bothers you” repeated over and over in my head as we were driving through a vast dry landscape. I contradicted that statement later in the poem with the sand “bothering” me in my attempt to paint a complex portrait of my trip to Buryatia. In St. Petersburg I wrote down “canal girls” when I saw the area of the city where Sonia, a virtuous prostitute character from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, lived. I wanted to compare St. Petersburg prostitutes to the mist from public fountains that purify the city’s air. Because of my afore-mentioned dyslexia, I don’t read much poetry but I am almost constantly listening to music, especially folk music, spoken-word inspired rap, and alternative. I try to pay close attention to the consonant sounds, rhythm, rhyme of my poems. Listening to music strongly influenced me in Siberia when wrote “My girl, the bird”; I imagined that it could be something little kids could chant while jumping rope. I also imagined that someone might secretly act out the instructions in the poem to see if it worked.

In terms of my sketches, “a little boat” and “women of moscow” series (i; ii; iii) were both created “en plein aire”, meaning in the moment I was viewing the subjects. I wanted my image of the boat to be barely representational, sunstruck and filled with light to express the image as seen through the eyes of many weary but wonder-filled travelers in foreign lands. I was especially drawn to the Russian flag (visible in the upper-right corner of the composition) that grounded the boat geopolitically in what would otherwise have been an ephemeral space. With the “women of moscow” I was not concerned with creating perfectly accurate female portraits; instead, I wanted to express the qualities of my subjects that stood out to me through color association– red for strength, blue for innocence, and purple for mystery and secrecy.

Overall I hoped I could bring readers “through the looking glass” into a world that is partly Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Siberia, and partly a magical dreamland. I captured my experiences on the OCS program in the ways I know best, and I want to thank everyone who read this blog.

Ian, St Petersburg

Poetry in Petersburg

May 15, 2019 belli Leave a comment

Defying St. Petersburg’s Pushkin obsession, the “poem” I was reading while in town was not Eugene Onegin but Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow To The End of The Line, an alcoholic’s lovesong to Moscow and Vladimir. It was after midnight in the hostel. Nick–one of 8 other men in our room–was dead asleep. Behind me Vadim, another guest I’d met the previous day, was clicking away on his laptop. I’d begun to wonder if he had found an elusive Internet connection (WiFi certainly hadn’t been advertised). A red-bearded man drank from a massive can of Zhiguli beer in front opposite me, just to the left of the door.

It was then, long after the lights were out and as I was still reading, that two men entered the room and started taking off suitjackets and shoes. I’d first seen them that morning, surprised to notice one of them was putting on a waistcoat. We were in a hostel where hot water came in twenty second bursts and there was no Internet. I guessed they were businessmen or students on a budget, eager to make a good impression.

Now I saw how much they looked alike; I realized they might even be brothers. They were still standing at the end of the room, undressing, when they began to address the beer drinker and exchange pleasantries. Then, with the red-bearded man lying in his bed, beer in hand, the shorter of the two men turned and moved into the center of the aisle. His “brother” moved to the left and leaned, almost too casually, against a nearby bed and pulled out his phone. The beer drinker sat up a little straighter, and I felt an unmistakable call to pay attention.

Jacket open, waistcoat still on, the man in the center began to speak in precise metre. In disbelief I realized he was reciting poetry (Lermontov, I later learned) as the other two watched.

The tempo was almost hurried. Why shouldn’t it have been? He ran past strophe after strophe without losing the cadence. It was impossible not to be taken in, and I felt my neck tingle. For the next five minutes I beat back the idea that “this is what the travel writers are talking about” and just watch this strange perforamnce.

The main theme was love, but the power of the poem lay in the free metaphors, from sunsets to the sea, stacked one on another. When the poem and my vocabulary coincided, the images drawn were melancholy and lovelorn, their sadness accredited by his husky voice. Not one detail, no matter how beautiful, disrupted the even cadence: the intonation rose in emphasis but fell in time. His voice did not echo but wafted, reaching its greatest tenderness when “love” entered in any form and with each return to that concern I grew more eager to here it again. Once, the phrase “I love you” was repeated twice in a row and I was ready to turn to the videographer and start telling him about love. At the end I had become so transfixed I failed to follow our makeshift salon and applaud the performance.

The scene continued with two more poems: some Mayokovskii, and then a humourous lyric about the history of St. Petersburg. The latter involved turning the whole room–including Nick, asleep on his bed–into a massive map, which is a story unto itself. And after this, an Irish goodbye without further ado as everyone went to sleep without even saying goodnight.

But that first recitation of Lermontov (which one, I didn’t catch), its sudden appearance in a hostel inexplicable, burned so hot I can’t recall anything else. The above description of it was wholly inadequate–as inadequate as the below photo is to describe the opulence of the Winter Palace we would see just 24 hours later. In 6 hours spent between the Hermitage museum and the palace itself, I saw masterpieces by Malevich, Kandinsky, Cezanne, Vrubel, Da Vinci, Rembrandt, Signac, Faberge and too many others to name. Notes and photographs can’t do justice to the vastness of Petersburg. All I have are some singular impressions, shown below: a malachite pavilion, the humourously porcine Faberge figures, a statue that caught my in the suburb of Pushkin. And, of course, that unforgettable, impromptu recitation, never photographed.

Visitors inspect a malachite and gold dome in the Hermitage

A plump rock crystal pig by the Faberge firm

A Grecian statue in the Catherine Palace courtyard

Alexis, St Petersburg

St. Petersburg

May 14, 2019 shucka Leave a comment

St. Petersburg, a popular song by Brazilian Girls

Over midterm break, we embarked on an adventure to the “Window to the West”, aka St. Petersburg.

St. Petersburg is a dream city. It has a beautiful river running through it, accompanied by numerous canals and bridges. The streets are filled with buildings of different styles and colors, each adding its own unique taste to the overall architecture. As the former capital of Russia, the city has a vast variety of monuments, museums, and palaces. It also has a rich history, filled with triumphs, wars, floods, fires, and the infamous 900-day siege. For these reasons, today, St. Petersburg is no doubt a tourist city.

Moscow is also a tourist city. Frequently, I see tour groups when visiting major museums and monuments downtown. However, St. Petersburg wins in terms of numbers. This was apparent not just from simply the tourists I saw, but from the English signs, hotels, and souvenir shops I came in contact with.

Our hotel the first night in St. Petersburg

In some respects, it is easy to see how tourism may result in a negative reaction while in other ways the tourism industry in the city may have helped highlight important aspects of the place. Because of this, it was hard for me to determine my own opinion of the city. Furthermore, it helped me bring to face my own position in this country as a foreigner studying the language and culture of the country. Tourism is a major industry, bringing money and jobs. Personally, I believe it has a lot of advantages. Economically, it contributes to both private and local incomes by providing jobs in hotels, restaurants, transportation, etc. This dependence then provides incentives for the city to preserve major historical sites and the surrounding environment to better promote the city. Additionally, increasing globalization brings more cross- cultural collaborations. In this way, it promotes awareness for both locals and tourists through these interactions and subsequent understanding between the two.

Undoubtedly, tourism has its consequences. Many more authentic and local places are being replaced by souvenir shops and crowds. This contributes to the strain of local infrastructure and businesses. This is because they suffer as a result of accommodating for the increasing number of tourists. In addition, tourism has environmental problems with the continued and growing waste with the expansion of sites.

On a boat tour in St. Petersburg which interferes with the natural habitat

What sets me apart from other tourists? In what ways am I also damaging the “authenticity” of the country and city that I am staying in? As much as I want to consider myself not just another “tourist” am I just fooling myself?

When visiting another country, you are exposed to different languages, beliefs, food, and environments. In a lot of ways, traveling helps create a more informed, open-minded perspective of the world. It helps to break down stereotypes through first-hand experiences and relationships formed. I believe every visit is an opportunity to learn something new and embrace the complexity and diversity of the world. Even if you do visit a country as a tourist, you are granting yourself an opportunity to meet new people and expand your knowledge. However, to understand a culture, it takes more than just simply visiting a place. It requires effort forming relationships from first hand experiences and understanding between people by learning from each other.

Amelia, St Petersburg

five star hotel

Image May 13, 2019 blairsmitha Leave a comment

Amelia, St Petersburg

monument of the floods of st. petersburg

Image May 13, 2019 blairsmitha Leave a comment

This is a monument we saw in St. Petersburg that marks the water height of the highest floods the city experienced. The highest black bar marks the 1824 flood, which Pushkin wrote about in his poem “The Bronze Horseman”.

Amelia, St Petersburg

canal girls/yellowcard girls (poem about st. petersburg)

Quote May 13, 2019 blairsmitha Leave a comment

we arise unwillingly, like springtime mists

and similarly, seep onto the streets,

float across dead water.

we wipe the sky clean with our hands as if it is a foggy window

and then, like mist, must settle onto a blade a grass, discarded trash, your forehead, you know.

the sun will kill us every day unless we hide in some shady spot and wait till evening.

on the backs of ladybugs and fruit flies we ride triumphant into the night,

defeating death to once again move forward on the endless wheel.

our faerie song is a simple one:

if you see us crawling along the banks of the canal,

smile, raise your hand, and wish us well.

Claire, St Petersburg

The Hostile Hostel: Our Trip to St. Petersburg Through Three Pieces of Art I Saw in the Russian Museum

May 12, 2019 williamsc Leave a comment

On our last day in St. Petersburg, our group visited the State Russian Museum, a collection of all types of Russian art ranging from Rublev icons and folk art to giant Surikov pieces and Soviet art exhibition posters. Here, I explain why these three works of art remind me of my favorite memories from this trip.

How the Mice Buried the Cat

Our experience with public transportation in St. Petersburg was very different from the easy and painless daily experience of riding the Moscow metro. When we stepped off the train platform in St. Petersburg, we were greeted by a giant sign announcing that we had arrived in “the hero-city of Leningrad,” a massive obelisk, and… a closed metro station. Not only was the metro closed, but the entirety of Nevsky Prospect was as well, thanks to the May 1st Workers Day holiday. Thus began a very long trek dragging all our luggage around the city. Perhaps you can begin to tell why these poor mice dragging a heavy cat reminded me of our trip! We attempted to circumnavigate all the street closures to find our hostel, only to finally show up and realize that the hostel didn’t exist.

I looked up this carving later, and discovered that it is based on a fairy tale about a group of mice who all work together to bury a dead cat that has been terrorizing them. After being hauled to its grave, the cat, who wasn’t actually dead, wakes up and eats the mice while they celebrate their victory. This story actually seemed fitting for the saga of our hostel: the first day’s fiasco seemed to be a great blessing, because we ended up being “forced” to spend the night in a five-star hotel instead. Like the foolish little mice, we rejoiced in our good luck, only to have disaster befall us the next day: for the next two nights, we stayed in a hostel that seemed to be beyond the wildest nightmares of our praktikanty. For example, when I first looked around our eight-bunk room, I heard a loud yowling noise. Walking down the stairs, I found an actual catfight going on between two ferrel cats in the litter-filled courtyard of the building, and wished for an army of little mice to come take these noisy feline neighbors somewhere else.

Conductress

As mentioned above, we sorely missed our beloved Moscow Metro. We took public buses to our meeting places most of the time, which I found to be slightly more confusing and a great deal more motion sickness inducing. Conductress illustrates a feature of the St. Petersburg transportation system that we encountered many times: the bus employee whose job it is to go around collecting fare from all the passengers. In our experience, like in the painting, these were mostly women, although they were never as terrifying to interact with as this painting suggests. Still, Conductress did get me thinking about the various Russian women we had encountered during our stay.

We spent the most time, of course, with our praktikanty Alyona and Natasha, who are university students about our age. Occasionally, we were aware of the cultural differences between us, such as when they were horrified by me taking off my sneakers and putting my sock-clad feet on the floor before stepping into slippers (this is, apparently, extremely dirty and dangerous). But in general we had really great, successful interactions with the two of them, and I would often forget we had been raised on opposite sides of the planet.

For example, once we tried to explain the English phrase “wild goose chase” to them as a way that an English speaker might describe our first misadventure with the hostel. Teaching each other idioms in our respective languages has become one of our favorite topics of conversation.

“Ahhh, I understand,” said Alyona at last, “We have a similar phrase in Russian, we say: finding a needle in a haystack!”

Natasha pulled out her phone and started showing me pictures of haystacks, as I didn’t understand the word in Russian. Ironically, this was happening while we were in the midst of a different wild goose chase, this time to find a tiny metal figure dedicated to Daniil Kharms, the absurdist writer much beloved by Russian 205 students.

“No no no,” I said, “we have that phrase too, this is different.”

Finally, we were able to communicate that a wild goose chase is not only long and difficult, like finding a needle in a haystack, but has no positive result at the end. In the end, we didn’t find the figure, but Alyona took the group to a bakery that “anyone visiting St. Petersburg must go to,” and we both ate a slice of speciality cake which she recommended.

My favorite instance of the bond we all formed in St. Petersburg, however, brings me to my last painting, Queue by Alexxei Sundikov.

Queue

This painting, Queue, will definitely remind the my fellow students our trip. We waited in lines for palaces, museums, boat rides, coat checks, bag checks, exits, and even other lines. We waited in lines which, had they been half their length, my family at home would have seen and promptly turned around and gone home. Sometimes, we would see the end of a line while walking along and Diane would have us all get in it, and only after we were in the line would we figure out what we were waiting for. At the Hermitage ballet, Diane taught us the art of waiting in a line: you have to be very pushy and keep your shoulders and elbows in front of the people next to you and behind you, all the while subtlety moving forward even if there’s no movement at the front of the line. But all this standing in lines meant that we had lots of time to hang around and joke with each other, and this leads me to one of our favorite moments of the trip.

Another Russian woman we had the pleasure of spending time with on this trip, in addition to the praktikanty and the “conductresses,” was one of our roommates in the hostel. She was an older woman who immediately began interrogating us when we walked into the room after our night at the ballet. What were our names? Where were we from? What did we study? How much did our ballet tickets cost? Did Amelia believe in God? Where did Amelia buy her face cream? Why didn’t she buy her face cream at the pharmacy? Why did I want to take a shower at night? Why did we presume we could come into the room after 10 pm? Why in God’s name was Amelia eating chips while she was trying to sleep?

After being yelled at least four times for such offenses as walking into the room and getting in bed after the lights had been turned out (“you can go sleep in the streets if you continue causing these scandals tomorrow young ladies!!”), we began to sympathize with Alyona and Natasha’s opinion of the hostel. The next day, as we discussed all this in the many lines involved in visiting the Hermitage, she earned the unflattering nickname of “Babka” among the group.

We all had Crime and Punishment on our mind, having come to St. Petersburg to see the city where Dostoyevsky set his novel. Soon, a running joke started that if we murdered “the Babka,” we could re-live the protagonist Raskolnikov’s crime of killing an old women in a gross St. Petersburg apartment, and thus truly get the “Dostoyevsky experience” we were looking for. Finally, as we waited in a line (which we ended up leaving because it was the wrong line), Natasha (who had mostly remained quiet on the Babka front–we thought she might be a little horrified by the awful joke), piped up with some of our favorite words from the whole trip:

“Kill, kill, kill the Babka!”

This, of course, sent us into a fit of uncontrollable laughter. That night, we returned home late after Babka’s “curfew” with great trepidation, only to find that she wasn’t even in the building. We celebrated by eating snacks in bed and coming in and out of the room as often as we wanted.

These three works of art don’t show the multitude of mighty palaces, picturesque canals, and historical monuments that we were lucky to visit in St. Petersburg. However, each one brings to my mind memories that I will treasure of my time in this city with my fellow Carleton students and our new Russian friends.

Nick, St Petersburg

The Global Big Day in St. Petersburg

Link May 10, 2019 rosenn Leave a comment

I’m standing by a crane, the smell of industrial smoke wafting through the air; a fierce cold breeze carries stinging flakes of snow onto my face. My stomach is rumbling, my ears are nearly totally frozen from the wind and cold. Before me is a tunnel with a clearly marked sign: an image of a pedestrian crossed out: вход запрещён (no entry). An unfamiliar woman approaches me: молодой человек (young man), she says вы идете куда? (where are you going). I barely have the strength to open my mouth, and she proceeds to explain that I can reach the ships by passing the tunnel, through which walking is prohibited. I thank her, and turn around.

This anecdote immediately raises the question: what was I doing? Well this particular day is May 4, or Star Wars day (May the 4^th be with you), but more importantly here this year it was also the Global Big Day. The Global Big Day of what, you may ask. This is the Global Big Day of birding. This still may not make much sense, so for a bit of context, birders have an obsession with big days, which involve trying to find as many bird species as possible in one 24-hour period in a certain region, generally a county or a state. Now, a few years ago some folks at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology had the brilliant idea to expand this concept to the world, a coordinated effort wherein all birders across the globe report bird sightings to a website, eBird and they see how many species they can get in a day. More information can be found about it here. So essentially, as a dedicated (and slightly obsessive) eBirder, I had to report as many species as I could on this day.

I was a bit disappointed when I found out we were going to be in Petersburg on the 4^th, since I knew that would mean we had excursions planned, I didn’t know my way around the city as well, and generally there are just fewer birds in Petersburg since it is farther north. However, in a sense I got lucky; free time was at a premium on this trip, but on this day we at least had until noon free, giving me 5 hours to look for birds if I woke up early. If I could last that long. I dragged myself out of the grimy hostel room at 6:30 in the morning, having only a thin down coat, and as soon as I stepped onto the street I realized how cold it was. The wind was strong and snow was falling, though admittedly not hard. This wasn’t the only problem. We were in the center of Petersburg more or less, which was great for getting to the sights but not so good for birds; the only possible habitat near the hostel was one of the ubiquitous canals, but they have concrete along the edges and thus at best support a couple of Black-headed Gulls, a few terns, and a Mallard. My goal was to reach the ocean.

I started to walk down the nearly-deserted wide boulevards of Saint Petersburg, briskly to stay warm and because there were no birds around to see. I tried a spot along the Neva that looked promising in the map, but only found a House Sparrow and some pigeons, and then headed towards the ocean. I didn’t quite realize that I was going to a shipyard. Upon reaching the above-mentioned tunnel, I realized that this was futile, and had to backtrack.

My backup was a place called Ekaterinahof, which looked like it might at least have a few trees (as opposed to in Moscow, trees seem to be quite rare in Petersburg). Ekaterinahof was not at all like Peterhof, which was an estate of Peter the Great on the Baltic Sea, but rather like an ordinary city park. I roamed there for a little while and found some of the usual urban park birds as well as a drake Eurasian Wigeon, and at a nearby canal I located a couple of the standard Petersburg terns (eBird checklists here and here). Although better than the industrial hell I had just left, it was far from exciting, and I was very cold, so quickly retreated into a Teremok, which is a fast-food Russian cafe of bliny and then returned to the hostel with an hour and a half to spare.

The morning wasn’t a total failure, however. I did manage to stumble upon a couple of Petersburg landmarks in my roaming, including the Narva Triumphal Arch, built in 1814 to commemorate the victory over Napoleon; and the Trinity Church, which we had seen from a distance, but not up close. It was certainly better than sitting around the hostel all morning. Plus, I did end the day with 24 species, which is 24 more than anyone else reported in Saint Petersburg on this Global Big Day.

Note: For the record, the Black-headed Gull and Eurasian Wigeon pictures were not taken in St. Petersburg. The Black-headed Gull is from Moscow and the Wigeon is from Iceland. However, the birds I saw on this day looked the same as these birds, just they were less cooperative for pictures.