Saint Petersburg

December 2–3, 2007

The city is election-ready.

Putin’s Russia is united and indomitable

You can press down on any side, there’s only one button.

St Petersburg is still being flooded with “GAZelles” emblazoned with poetry (cf. last time).

Instead of house numbers backlit with amber LEDs they’re now putting in nasty-looking house numbers with an energy-saving light bulb inside. Fluorescent lamps are never as cosy as incandescent light bulbs (or yellow LEDs for that matter).

For some strange reason half of them now have an empty white space in the centre.

In the city centre I happened upon conclusive proof that contemporary sculpture is in decay.

It’s a good thing there are still traces of the past left in St Petersburg — for instance, these pre-revolutionary apartment numbers.

For the very first time I noticed that all of the traffic lights in this city hang on unimaginably complex totemic structures.

This is a unique phenomenon.

I was equally surprised when I noticed that there are regular residential buildlings on the island where the Peter and Paul Fortress is located. A straw poll of St Petersburg locals showed that no one believed it possible that there are ordinary buildings with ordinary, sordid stairwells and ordinary people living in them in the immediate vicinity of the fortress. The fact that no one is aware of this probably explains why they haven’t yet built a seven-star hotel here.

Admittedly, in Moscow there’s also a cluster of communal apartments right opposite the kremlin that still hasn’t been redeveloped after all this time.