7th to 11th of October, 2022.
After Alyona finishes her meeting, we chat a little bit. She is tough! In somehow like a stereotype of a Russian lady: she is nice and kind, but she is also tough. She suggests we go for a tour in the centre tomorrow, but I tell her I am pretty tired from today, so we decide that tomorrow we will only go to a flea market nearby and look for some hiking boots for me.
Her apartment is still very much like from the USSR times, apart from the changes she made. I feel like I am inside a movie, like “Good bye, Lenin”, for example. And she keeps lots of stuff around, plus the books! She is a Philosophy and Ancient Greek teacher but she also loves Literature. The Classics, mostly! I wish I had read as many classics as she did. And she has read most of the Nobel Prizes too! That is so amazing! She has this cupboards full of beautiful old books, old and dark covers, which gives a very interesting atmosphere to the apartment.
I am staying in a kind of living room / bedroom.
The flea market is huge! Here you can find basically everything second hand. And there is so much stuff! The section with old portraits and frames, furniture, lamps and decorative objects is so pretty! But I cannot help myself of feeling pretty bad too. Why? I start thinking about how many things we have here, kilometres of products waiting to go somewhere, already taking a lot of space on our planet, and still, out there, hundreds, thousands of shops are selling brand new things. Everything we have in here, it is being produced, brand new, in absurd quantities, right now. Where are we keeping all this stuff? Why we keep doing this? When was it that we start to believe we need so much more than we actually can take?
We find a stand full of hiking boots. Some look interesting but they are way too expensive for second hand products. Something around 30 Euros. I think it has to do with the war. The Russian Rubles are over the roof comparing to Euros. After thinking a lot, we decide to go back home and wait, come up with a plan.
I prepared some food for dinner and Alyona really likes it! We talk about a lot of stuff but I like when we also go to our rooms and work in our personal things.
Next day is Sunday and we go to the city centre. Alyona keeps telling me all about Russia and St Petersburg. She knows a lot! And I strike her with questions too, from Sarte to the Revolution; Lenin and the historical buildings. We pass by The Winter Palace, current holding the Russian Museum, and it is so incredibly beautiful! Alyona tells me that, if you decide to visit, you will need a whole day for it, because it is now the biggest collection of Russian Art Work in the World.
We do a lot of sightseeing, including Alyona’s University, and we take a photograph in this quite popular corridor, apparently famous for have been in a few films. We also go to the old “lighthouses”, or as they are also called Rostral Columns, a very famous landmark in the city. From here, we can spot the prison where Dostoyevsky was held, Trubetskoy Bastion Prison, in Peter and Paul Fortress. When we pass by this very fancy and the oldest Hotel in the city, Astoria, I decide to go inside and check. The name it sounds so familiar to me. There is some kind of event going on and lots of people well-dressed are attending. I have this really weird / bad feeling when I am inside there. It feels like… wrong! Like all of this is wrong, and I ask myself why are we like this?
Alyona take me to a shop which sells food from the Soviet Union times. It is called Pyshchenaya, and they sell Pyshka, this deep-fried pastry with icing sugar, just of like a donut (but way tastier) and the coffee just like used to be prepared back in the times. The shop is full! People are waiting in a queue and we can barely move inside. Later on, when we pass in front again, the queue is all the way to the streets, with about 35 people waiting. Insane! But I understand why: it is delicious!
I like St Petersburg a lot! Even though it is full of people on the streets, I felt quite good by walking around there. There are so many gorgeous buildings everywhere! The whole atmosphere of the city was very pleasant, and I was not expecting to like a big city so much.
Back at home, at some point in the night, we go outside the building and do some trimming on the trees. Alyona has planted them and now they are growing too big, so we just trim some of them, and cut down two threes which are dead. We also rearrange one, moving from one spot to another. It is quite hard work, and we stop when it starts to rain.
Next day we just chill. And we also make some short videos for Alyona project for expanding Ancient Greek teachings in Russia. By the way, did you know that Russian language comes from Ancient Greek? I didn’t! All I have to do in the video is saying the following sentence in Portuguese: Wherever you are, start learning Ancient Greek! It is fun!
But that is because Alyona is fun! Even though she is also this very serious and tough person, as I said before, she can be very funny, and she makes me laugh many times.
And she is so helpful too! She contacted a friend and asked if she knew anything about where I could get some hiking boots (or anything, actually) for free. Her friend got me some hiking boots, and a pair of socks which I needed, plus some other things for Alyona. I went to meet a lady, a friend of this friend of Alyona, on my last night, in a bus stop nearby. But she was too slow to find the proper meeting point, so I couldn’t get the stuff. Shame!
That same night Alyona asks me if I need anything. She offers me another pair of trousers, which I switch for the only jeans I am wearing for more than one year. Also, she gives me an extra layer of wool, a great turtle neck blouse, which I can wear under the clothes I already have. Winter is coming!
I take one metro and one bus to get out of St Petersburg and start hitchhiking towards Velik Novgorod. That’s right, another thing which Alyona helps me with it is to decide to visit many other Russian cities, instead of only St Petersburg and Moscow, as I had planned. “This is not Russia”, she would tell me. And I know she is right. I search for CS hosts in a few more cities: Velik Novgorod and Tver, both before Moscow; Nishny Novgorod and Kazan, between Moscow and Ufa. And I will see which more places I will try to reach.
One thing I will always keep with me from Alyona is the Russian expression Na figá, or “What for?”, in English. Whenever someone does something stupid, something apparently without any purposes, we would just say: Na figá?
10 Years Around the World 