St. Petersburg

Fine. I'll talk about St. Petersburg.

I think it would be fair to say it's a strange place. It's kind of nice on first site, then kind of grungy once you get closer, then kind of nice once you get used to it, which I kind of have. All the buildings are very large (broad, not tall) and all the streets are very wide. The influence of collectivism is obvious here; all these enormous apartment buildings are (or could have been) little self-contained islands, complete with a central courtyard. All of this is still there, but now some of the apartment space has been converted into shops, and some of the courtyards have been converted into parking. And next to all these somewhat shoddy apartment buildings are the Hermitage and the Summer Garden and the Winter Palace and the Church on Spilt Blood and, well, it's easy to see why there might have been a revolution.

Then there are other strangenesses. I've mentioned that there aren't any street signs, for instance. Well, it turns out that there are, but they're on little plaques on the corners of buildings, and they're not entirely regular. Even though it rains all the time in the summer, there actually are no storm drains at all--water essentially just sits. A lot of the smaller streets don't appear to have any kind of traffic regulation at intersections--no stop signs, or even yield signs. And the signs actually do say 'stop'--it's transliterated directly into Cyrillic.

Traffic, by the way, is crazy. Like New York City, but more so. Lights turn yellow before the turn green as well as before they turn red, and it means the same thing then, too: go faster. There's a lot of driving out into the middle of intersections when it's obviously going to block traffic. There's also a lot of parking on sidewalks, and a certain amount of parking in the middle of streets near intersections, and I don't even know what else.

Public transportation is interesting, partly because there are so many kinds of it: buses, the metro, marshrutki, trolleybuses, cabs, and gypsy cabs. The buses will serve as a good starting point, I think.

If I got onto a bus in Cincinnati, I'd pay at a set point (when I got on or when I got off, depending), and I'd pay directly to the driver--or, anymore, to a machine right next to the driver. In Russia, this is not so: sometimes, there is a conductor, and I pay him or her. The rest of the time, I take out my money and pass it to the person next to me, who passes it to the person next to her, who passes it . . . to the driver, who passes it back to the nearest person . . . to me. This is absolutely trustworthy. The same is true in the marshrutki, which are sort of taxi-buses: they're vans with lots of hard plastic seats in them, and they run set routes. They only stop, though, when someone flags them or when someone wants to get off.

And as for the gypsy cabs--I think I've explained those before. A person standing on the side of the road can flag down passing cars, who will stop to negotiate fares. The drivers of these cars are, of course, complete strangers; nevertheless, this is completely safe (with a few easy stipulations), and everyone does it--including, for instance, lone women at three or four in the morning.

So, this is probably worth noting about Russians: they're stereotypically reserved on the streets, but it turns out they actually do have a very strong community spirit.

I think that will serve as an introduction.