If you’ve seen the movie “Little Miss Sunshine”, you might recall an ancient, crumbling, sunshine-yellow van a loving and somewhat dysfunctional family piled into every day. With every few feet the van drove, the family members held their breaths and prayed it wouldn’t collapse in the middle of the street. The average American parent, upon seeing the outside of this van alone, might advise his or her child to stay far away.
For the past two days, I have taken such a vehicle to Smolny. It’s called a marshrutka, and it’s one of the most popular and effective means of transportation in St. Petersburg, if not in Russia or even Eastern Europe.
Marshrutki (plural of marshrutka) operate like buses, sans even remotely sanitary conditions or any concept of personal space. Here’s how it works: you stand by a bus stop (or, frankly, anywhere you like) and flag down the marshrutka you would like to take, which will have a sign with a “K” followed by a specific number. You then slide open the rusting door of the van so that you can quickly hop inside and find upwards of fifteen complete strangers staring directly at you. You find the nearest seat available and, if there are no seats left, you crouch by the door of the van, extend your arm, and grab onto a handle near the roof of the van, allowing everyone in the vehicle to smell your armpit. If you’re said passenger and traveling to work/school earlier in the day, this shouldn’t be too much of a problem. If you’re taking the marshrutka on the way home, everyone will hate you.
And if you’re thirsting for a good Soviet experience to and from work or school, the marshrutka is surely for you. Instead of depositing money into a meter or even handing a fee to a single person as usual on a bus, you give your 30 rubles to someone who is sitting near you but also closer to the driver than you, and then tell them, in polite Russian, to pass on the money. They will then keep handing the money off until it reaches the driver. In the event that you provide more than 30 rubles, the driver will then pass your change back to people, who will pass on the money back to you. Kind of like a game of Soviet monetary “telephone”. You can always cool down the 21st century Russia with a little marshrutka teamwork.
When you want the marshrutka to stop, you yell “STOP, PLEASE!” at the top of your I’m-American-but-desperately-trying-to-speak-Russian lungs, and then the marshrutka pulls over as soon as possible, allowing you to relieve the van of your armpit scent and depart. If you’re having trouble getting out of the van, this is a good thing; you’re supposed to have the sensation that you and the billion others crammed into the car are going to be smuggled into Belarus. I’m not sure why Russians would want to be smuggled into Belarus, but that’s the feeling I got.
A native Russian I know inquired about my rash yesterday. I had discussed with her and several others my experience on the marshrutka earlier that day, and she said it’s possible I was having an allergic reaction because people from Azerbaijan make the marshrutki very dirty.
Besides enjoying an exhilarating commute to school, struggling to diffuse tension between myself and a certain cat (whose name begins with a “V” and ends with an “asinka”) and inadvertently inhaling massive amounts of secondhand smoke, I’ve been doing a few other things in St. Petersburg. One of these is not getting lost again.
Yesterday we went to St. Isaac’s Cathedral, which is also one of the most beautiful buildings I’ve ever seen. If you spend a lifetime hiking up the cathedral’s stairs, you’ll see a gorgeous view of the city. The church is more in the Western European style than the Russian style, so it will be really interesting to see Russian-style churches on some of our other excursions.
I made a giant list of activities I’m really dying to do before I leave the city. I accomplished three of these activities today. After school, I went to Dom Knigi, Teremok, and to a grocery store I had heard was great but apparently no longer exists. Dom Knigi, or The House of the Book, is St. Petersburg’s best and biggest bookstore.
It’s a must. But Dostoevsky begs to differ.
I went to the bookstore to look around for a few hours, but the ultimate goal was to buy a collection of Anna Axhmatova poetry and Dostoevsky’s The Double, both of which I would like to put myself through the pain of struggling to read in Russian. The Double is one of my Russian literature favorites, and my inner (and outer) nerd got more and more excited at the prospect of finding it at the store. There were plenty of Anna Axhmatova collections, but The Double was nowhere to be found. I was concerned I wasn’t reading the Cyrillic correctly or that it was buried somewhere under all the Crime and Punishments. I asked a saleswoman to help me who, after scanning the shelf I had been staring at for a good long time, said, “No, I don’t think we have it. It looks like The Double is in this big book of other books if you want to buy that, but it’s kind of heavy and expensive.”
Meanwhile, in the bookstore basement I found an entire section on gastroenterology.
Russia excels at making life far more difficult than necessary. Want to buy your favorite Russian book ever in Russian by Russia’s greatest literary hero of all time at one of Russia’s greatest bookstores? Absolutely not! Expecting water to come out of that sink faucet anytime soon? Fat chance! So you don’t want the elevator to stop at several completely random floors on your way down to the first? No way! Looking for the non-smoking section in the restaurant? I don’t even know what that is…
Russia is great at some things, though. For example, the emergency system is spot on. Just dial one number for fire, another for ambulance, another for police, and another for gas leak.
Whoops! How could I forget? The most important emergency number is for…”suspected” наркоман or, as it both translates and transliterates directly into English, ”suspected” narcoman. No, I’m not making this up. Yes, it is what you think it is, and you may do your research if you like.
I imagine the following conversation happening (heaven forbid):
Man (after dialing narcoman emergency): Please help! There’s a fire!
Woman: Allyo? Who’s calling?
Man: Please send fire trucks immediately!
Woman: Firetrucks? Pauses, then giggles. Oh, silly! I think you have the wrong number! By the way, any narcomen around? If so, send ‘em on over!
I finished the day with amazing honey bliniy from Teremok, which is like a fast-food Russian crepe stand. Well, I guess the day's not finished yet. I have to finish preparing a presentation/monologue for my conversation class on shopping and consumerism. Looking forward to ranting about The Double at Dom Knigi.
Oh, sorry. I almost forgot. This week promises to be incredibly dull.
The lineup: Eugene Onegin at the Mariinsky Theatre on Wednesday, snazzy Italian dinner and Gogol Bordello in concert on Friday, and trip to Novgorod and Pskov on Saturday and Sunday.
If there’s a heaven, this is it.
Let’s keep this on the hush-hush and not tell Dost'y,
Даша/Dasha/Dana
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