Saint Petersburg

Map

June 16–18, 2007

I forgot to take my camera, as well as my back up camera. So I had to use my phone. Shock horror.

Architects are continuing to disfigure the city. They’ve already lost the milk hands growing out of their arses, and permanent hands have sprouted in their stead. Out of everything we saw today this cannibal building takes the biscuit. It has scary spinning eyes and gobbles up passers-by with its entrance. Three hundred metres away from the “Petrogradskaya” metro stop.

Plastic wheel stops have been installed all over the centre to prevent drivers damaging lampposts with their bumpers.

Bus lanes have been kitted out with the letter “A”, just like in Europe.

New red asphalt, supposedly less slippery in the wintertime, marks the bus lanes. It looks like the red carpet rolled out for a government airplane. By the way, a week after I got back they started doing exactly the same in Moscow, with the addition of yellow zigzags on the carpet.

There are still far too many cables overhead in the city centre (in the photo you can see the 16 balls bridge, so called because there are statues of four men and four horses on the bridge, you do the maths).

By the way, none of the locals can explain why all of the windowpanes of prefab housing blocks in residential areas are painted black (in Okulovka the norm is light blue windowpanes).

The first “Exit” sign ever spotted in this country. It’s near the St Petersburg “Ikea”. You typically see such signs in Europe and the United States (Exit, Sortie, Ausfahrt). The signs indicate a road branching off and take on additional meaning when the exits are numbered (try finding someone’s dacha in the vicinity of Moscow on your first go using nothing but verbal instructions).

Alright, everyone read this poem:

So there’s snow, so it’s hot,
There are showers, we care not,
Just as long as we’ve got
“TsKS-Set’”!!!
Roofing
Cladding
Rain gutters

An old woman in a shop window. The Soviet mindset truly is a baffling phenomenon. Someone probably put a lot of effort into this, and yet it still turned out very Soviet. Sort of like Nadezhda Krupskaya and a granny from a shoddily illustrated Russian fairy tale rolled into one.

For the sake of comparison, an old lady in Wiesbaden — she’s fantastic, plump, alive, and she’s emoting.

It’s interesting that no one has come up with an unambiguous, universal and easy to understand diagram showing how to refuel a car. You would think that it’s dead easy, and yet instructions are always required. Here’s the order in which things are usually done: