Intro to St. Petersburg, pt II

I’m living with Emma Fyodorovna, who is old enough to be balding, doesn’t speak a lick of English, and, like most Russian professors, ends all of her sentences (to me, anyway) with понятно, да? (That is, “understood, yes?” I don’t mean to imply that she’s a Russian professor, though). She won’t actually be living in the apartment for the next ten days, though, because there’s another student of some description (I was told not to expect him back until early in the morning) living in the other bedroom. Instead she’ll be staying with her brother, who I also met, I think. That is to say, I got introduced to some male acquaintance of hers, who may have been her brother but looked young enough to be her son. He asked me a number of questions which I understood well enough to answer after they had been repeated and explained only a few times, if I was lucky. Eventually Emma Fyodorovna told me I should go rest before he talked my ear off.

The apartment is near (within) the edge of the center of town, and if you visited it while you were looking for apartments, you would turn around and leave at the stairwell. The actual apartment is nice enough, though. It has two bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom, and a small hall connecting them. The stove and range are gas, and have to be lit manually, and the boiler has to be lit any time you want hot water—but it is there; apparently hot water is unavailable in most homes for a month or so in the summer. My room is about 8’x16’ or so, and (like all the rooms) overlooks the apartment building courtyard and Suvorovsky prospekt. This last is my only real complaint so far: Suvorovsky prospekt is a large street just off of Nevsky prospekt, which is the St. Petersburg equivalent of Broadway. It’s a bit noisy, unless I’m willing to close the window. I haven’t seen much of the city yet (until I get my registration, long walks are inadvisable), but I took a walk around the area nearby, and I think it would be fair to describe it as basically dilapidated: cheap neons signs, beat-up cars everywhere, facades crumbling—that kind of thing. We’ll see how it is closer in.