Alcohol in breakfast products.

I had to do a Russian literature exam the other day. 

A terrifying prospect, but made somewhat easier by the fact that it was multiple choice and the word for a multiple-choice test in Russian is угадайка (oo-ga-da-i-ka) that derives from the verb угадать (oo-ga-dat) meaning 'to guess'. 
[So to all those at uni that used to moan about having to revise for multiple-choice tests....]  

Although I am reaching the end of my first academic year in Russia, having unexpectedly stayed 6 months longer than planned, cultural differences continue to shock and surprise me. I wonder how long you have to live somewhere before you become fully accustomed to the people and the place. 

On a recent late-night trip to a nearby shop with my flatmate, having stopped in the dairy aisle, I decided to take advantage of his presence by asking him to explain the unknown products there that I still hadn't managed to figure out. 'Kefir' is a pro-biotic, fermented thick milk drink [for first-timers it might seem like sour milk] that I had already been lucky enough to have the opportunity to try on a trip to Moscow with my mother during my early teenage years, however, a bottle between the milk and kefir caught my eye. 

"There's alcohol in that one..", my flatmate joked. 

Turns out it wasn't a joke. Hidden among the most innocent of breakfast products was a type of kefir with the addition of alcohol to really make sure you have a great start to the day. Good morning, Russia. Good morning indeed. 

Coming to the end of my stream of auditions, I have been left needing to make the choice between St. Petersburg and Moscow for my next academic year. People have warned me that moving to the capital after St. Petersburg wouldn’t be easy and the question is whether I’m ready for “real” Russia; those who don’t live in St. Petersburg often claim it isn’t really Russian as it is far too European. [<— Although I beg to differ and I would sometimes even argue that it is not European enough for my liking….but that’s personal taste of course.]

While St. Petersburg values the importance of a work-play balance, Moscow is work, work, work - the pace of life is cranked into full speed and you have no choice but to keep up. Although if you're lucky, you might be able to catch up on sleep during the 90 minutes it takes you to get anywhere around the enormous city (nearly twice the area of London).  

St. Petersburg is by no means small, yet I rarely feel the overwhelming sense of size, which greets you the moment your step outside your front door in Moscow. In St. Petersburg, the high-rises tend to be concentrated around metro stations outside of the centre, which allows me to live in my cosy central bubble without feeling the cluster-phobic effect of the millions living in the city around me. A city where I already have my favourite coffee places and where I can get to anywhere I need to go within 40-60 mins as a lot of the city is (technically) walkable. A city where I can suddenly decide to go to a concert or a play or meet a friend for dinner last-minute and where most restaurants and bars are affordable. Although it is very hard to overlook the weather. Especially when more than 3 hours of daylight during the winter months is optimistic. Prior to moving, everyone warned me about the cold - fine, you buy yourself a good coat - but no one warned me about the lack of sunlight and the huge effect this has on your energy levels. As mammals, my body definitely didn’t understand why it couldn’t just go into permanent hibernation for a couple of months. During the winter, I was never able to get up before 11:30am and I remember coming back from Moscow one morning at around 10am and being shocked that it was still pitch black outside.

Moscow is a city that just feels inherently “Russian” in the sense of size, power and majesty. There is just so much space and so many cars. And there are millions and millions of people (around 17 or 18 million). Towers are spread throughout the centre and complimented by the 10-lane roads that connect them, the space between them only emphasising the power and grandeur that they represent. While others cities tend to have high-rises and towers concentrated in one part of the city - often in the centre - with small roads between them giving you the feeling of being in a maze and with the buildings getting smaller as you get towards the suburbs, here it’s the other way around. 

This, undoubtedly, has an effect on the people living there. Living in Moscow is about working. Socialising seems to be a very much side-lined activity and hard to program outside of work considering the time it takes to get anywhere and the very loose ‘working day’ which can end anywhere between 5 and 11pm. Nice areas to walk around or meet friends for coffee or lunch are limited and are in any case often quite expensive. The slightly better climate means that the 7-day working week can continue, without question, all through the winter. Not a second to waste.  

So a choice needs to be made. Do I let myself get swept up in the rapidly-changing, constantly high pace of life in Moscow or do I stay in the comfort of a city that feels slightly closer to home.

[Or....do I just run away to Italy. A recent stopover there, after a concert in Germany, confirmed that true love never dies. After a brief moment of forgetting the word for ’sun’ and repeating the Russian word over and over again, my brain switched into gear and everything came flooding back. Eating three weeks worth of pasta, pizza and ice-cream accompanied by Aperol and Italian house wine over the few days just about managed to satisfy my cravings.]

For now, though, I going to take full advantage of 23-hour daylight with late-night bike rides, early morning walks followed by yoga and last-minute evening trips to the theatre and maybe the odd glass of wine on a rooftop. 

Winters are for sleeping and summers are for playing.

Lots of love,

Masha xxx

St. Petersburg's surprise summer storms - keeping you on your toes

Late-night, post-theatre river love

Midnight, white night, bike night

Middle of the night sunrise

Popping back to Berlin for a few days, keeping it real and keeping me sane.

Living in a city built for cars.

Feeling worse for wear, tired, damp and wedged between a rather large man and a window and with my phone out of battery, I had no option but to endure a twenty minute conversation about the bus we were on. What was the height of the ceiling? Had the bus been made in Russia or in Germany? Did it run on diesel, natural gas or petrol? Did any of the rods running along the ceiling have anything to do with its fuel efficiency? Did the colour of the bus have any correlation with the type of fuel it ran on? On and on he went and managed to drag three complete strangers into the conversation, which he had initially started with the conductor - this time a poor, young girl who clearly wanted nothing to do with it but seemed to have all the answers.

To be honest, any kind of travel in St. Petersburg or Moscow is eventful and not easy to say the least. I have already recounted my difficulties with the metro in Moscow, but the metro is one of a plethora of available options of "public" transport. Unfortunately, in St. Petersburg, there is a general mentality among older generations of 'if you have a car, you use it'. Following the Soviet Times, where owning a car was rare and involved paperwork and months of waiting, welcome to the ultimate time of 'if you've got it, flaunt it.' For a place with a huge amount of people living in it, the city is surprisingly unaccommodating to people! Many roads will have three or four lanes in each direction (car lanes - no bus lanes at all) while people, scooters, and bikes are left to battle it out on the pavement. Not a bike lane in sight in a city that is flat as a pancake. Ironic compared to mountainous Bristol where you find bikers on every corner, sweating up and down the hills in the sun and getting soaked in the rain, often probably questioning their decision to bike that day. Unfortunately, the amount of cars also seems to contribute to a sometimes unpleasant amount of dirt and pollution in the city caused by traffic jams throughout the day. Discovering an amazingly quiet part of the city on the east side of Vasilevsky Island, I realised how pleasant the clean air was and how I had gotten so used to the constant rumble of cars and dirt that I was stunned by the stillness and purity of the bay.

So, the logical option is to take a form of public transport, in order to reduce the number of cars on the road. Brace yourselves. Taking a bus involves a scarily high probability of being swarmed by baboushka's in a rush to get their favourite seat on the bus (I still wonder where all the dedoushka's are) before you get stuck in the traffic caused by no bus lanes and the huge number of cars. Taking a marshroutka (a mix between a bus and a taxi - a minivan that follows a certain route and will pick up and drop up passengers anywhere along that route) involves being confident enough in your knowledge of the city and the language that you know where to get off and can explain that to the driver, who is very rarely Russian himself.

The metro might seem like a viable option, with the guarantee of no traffic jams and a very frequent service but you need to add 10/15 minutes to every journey to allow for the seemingly endless escalator ride in order to reach a depth where it was safe to construct a metro in a city built on swamp land. My flatmate is a huge fan of trams and is often excited by the idea of taking his favourite old tram (often no.6), yet the trams don't offer viable routes through the centre and it is never really clear where I can actually get on.

Going slightly longer distances, such as that between St. Petersburg and Moscow, I often take the night train. The novelty soon wore off unlike the taste of the stale croissant, vacuum-packed salami and curdled yogurt that they serve you for breakfast. I accept that I will never understand the people who feel the need to set their alarms an hour and a half before arriving in order to waste time fussing around in the compartment, hugely reducing the already limited amount of sleep you can manage to get on the 8-hour journey; the best earplugs in the world won't block the snores some people manage to produce.

So I have taken to riding on a ex-flatmate's scooter around the city and I feel like superwomen. The best combination I could find between speed, ease and flexibility... I am worriedly awaiting the day she finds time to stop by and take it back...

Back in England for a week over Easter and I realised how much I miss driving - there is nothing like putting an old CD on full blast (I could only find Green Day and Britney in the car...shame) and driving around in the countryside without another car in sight.

The flight there left me with one question that I still haven't been able to answer: why is it so hard for people to stay seated until the seatbelt sign has been switched off?!

Transport worries aside - the city has transformed from the snow-covered wonderland it was a few months ago. White nights are arriving quicker than I thought and there is something quite magical about having the sun shining nearly 24 hours a day. Four in the morning looks very similar to eleven in the morning as well as eight at night and I am told every day, by friends and acquaintances alike, that the white nights are absolutely spectacular. I can't wait.

Lots of love,

A xx

The quiet spot I found

Writing a 'retro' letter to a friend using ink and a quill in the HUGE main old post office on Pechtamskaya

Chaki the Cat agrees that working is for winter time