Second first impressions
There were never any good old days,
They are today, they are tomorrow.
It’s a stupid thing we say,
Cursing tomorrow with sorrow.
--Gogol Bordello, “Ultimate”

I used to laugh when I would hear,
“May we meet next year in Jerusalem!”
But here I am walking through the gates
Of Jerusalem!
--some hymn

I sat in the airplane and watched the animated map as we took off from Dulles. The geography of my life flew by in a matter of minutes: Philadelphia, New York, Boston. And, several hours later, Bavaria, where we touched down and spent a few hours. We took off again and flew over Poland and the Baltic States; I watched the ground, but unlike in the cartoons, the borders and names of countries aren’t visible from the air in real life,and I couldn’t tell where the Polish villages ended and the Lithuanian ones began.

Finally, we made our descent to Petersburg. The disadvantage to approaching from Germany (as opposed to Finland, through which I’d always flown before) is that you don’t get to see the city from the air. No matter. As soon as I stepped off the plane and into the terminal, the flood of memories began: there was the table where I’d chatted with Bard administrators as I waited for the plane to America. There was the passport control booth I’d last passed through.

When we finally made it through passport control and retrieved our baggage, we were met by Lena, a twentysomething high school teacher who moonlights as our housing coordinator. She informed us that our bus was running late. I really didn’t care. I was unwashed, unshaven, discombobulated from the flight, and sitting with heavy luggage in the unlovely outskirts of southern Petersburg, but as my classmates observed, I was practically bouncing. A giant poster in the parking lot read “St. Petersburg: the city where dreams come true.” The fact that it was a Toyota ad didn’t make it any less true.

Finally the bus came, and we took the obligatory trip up Pulkovskoe shosse and Moskovsky Prospekt. The ugly-beautiful industrial outskirts turned into Brezhnev-era apartment blocks, then The bus dropped us off, one by one, with our host families. As the second to last, I had a bit of a wait, but finally I stepped off into the bus and into the rectangular dvor (central courtyard) of a 1970s Soviet-built housing complex, all concrete and tiles. My hostess, Mariya Alekseevna, met me outside the front door, and we headed up to the apartment.

Mariya Alekseevna turned out to be a very interesting person. She’s 67 or 68, a pensioner and former military engineer. Although she was born in Leningrad, she spent some time in Barnaul, working at a weapons factory (although, for security reasons, the workers were required to tell anyone who asked that they made frying pans). She has a great repertoire of political jokes.

So far I’ve seen much less of her husband, Oleg Andreevich. He’s very friendly and personable, from what little I’ve seen of him. He’s the head of his sadovostvo, a collective of dacha owners, and has spent most of his time taking care of all the inevitable business that accompanies the end of dacha season.

Mariya Alekseevna and Oleg Andreevich have two daughters, Ira and Natasha, both of whom live in Moscow. Ira studied art and then entered a monastery, where she paints icons. Natasha lives with her husband and three children, with whom she visited the apartment the other week.

The apartment itself is pretty nice. Although it’s in a Soviet building, it’s been well cared for (Mariya and Oleg have lived here since it was built in 1975) and renovated. My room is small but not tiny, with large windows that overlook the dvor and playground. The view is nice; I always associate Russian playgrounds with pictures from “A Day in the Life of the Soviet Union,” one of my first tastes of Russia, so the associations are positive. It’s also very lively, with cars dodging between potholes and other cars, children playing on the playground, and adults and teenagers sitting on the playground benches and doing things that are probably best not done around children. All around, birch trees grow, just as they have grown here since the time of Aleksandr Nevskii, just as they grew in ancient Novgorod, and that makes me happy.

My first night, I took a walk around to acquaint myself with the neighborhood. I admit that it was a bit of a shock at first. I was spoiled with my first host family in St. Petersburg: right in the historical center, less than ten minutes from the university. Now, I live in a Soviet concrete block by the Pionerskaya metro stop (near the top of the blue line), about forty minutes from the university and a good fifteen-minute walk from any architectural splendor. I’ve always loved the Soviet concrete blocks; they’re as much a part of Russia as any birch tree or onion dome. But it took a little while to get used to the idea that I was living in one.

My concrete block was surrounded by other concrete blocks, and it’s a convenient five minutes from the Pionerskaya metro stop. All around were kiosks selling pretty much anything you might want. I didn’t have any money, or a cell phone, or even a metro token—nothing, really, but my passport and my keys to get back into the apartment. I wasn’t sure where to find an ATM that I would be comfortable with using—two years ago, in my youthful recklessness, I would have pounced on the first anonymous freestanding ATM I found. The isolation and helplessness were a bit of a surprise in a city that I had come to regard as my own.

The next morning I headed out to meet Lena and the rest of the group for a tour of the city. I felt like this was a bit of an insult to my intelligence, and something that couldn’t possibly communicate anything new to me, aside from the location of the program office. As I walked along the familiar streets, I felt a strange mix of feelings: every square meter of the city had some happy memory connected to it, but I still didn’t feel entirely at home. Finally, after tea at a café off of Nevskii, we were free to go. As I hopped on the metro, all by myself, I felt a certan weight lift. I made my way back to Vasilievsky Island, my old stomping grounds, and strolled around. There were lots of new stores in the pedestrian street on 6th/7th line, but the street was essentially the same. The biggest shock was that where my favorite shaverma kiosk had once stood (along with several other kiosks selling alcohol, tobacco, techno music, and all the other finer things in life), there was nothing but empty sidewalk and a truck full of watermelons. So much for my promise to come back.

I was afraid, at first, that I’d built the city up in my mind too much in the past two years, that its attraction was more a matter of circumstance and that my new experiences could never live up to my old ones. Few things can live up to nostalgia: the grilled chicken at Brook’s House of Barbeque is the only one that comes to mind. And it’s always difficult getting adjusted to a new place. Starting new classes, negotiating space and food with a new host family, and getting sick from dehydration and jet lag are never fun, and it’s important to understand why you feel a certain way, and not jump to conclusions. As I made my way back to the apartment, fighting nausea on a seemingly endless metro ride after falling ill at school, I repeated to myself, like a mantra: “This could happen in Boston. This did happen in Boston.”

Now, a few weeks into the program and much more settled, I’ve calmed down. Petersburg is still Petersburg, for all its changes. It still has its beauty, magic, and mystique. I may be a bit older and more cautious, but I love St. Petersburg, and not a day doesn’t go by that I don’t take a moment to marvel at the sheer ubiquitous beauty of the city, the language, and the people. No matter how bad a day may be (and I haven’t had a really bad one yet), I know that I can walk out of the university and see St. Isaac’s and the Admiralty spire. Or, failing that, at least the birch trees outside my window. I can watch movies about St. Petersburg, and instead of painful longing, feel a sense of smugness and satisfaction: “I could step out the front door and be in that very spot in forty minutes.”

You can’t step in the same river twice, but damn, the water still feels good.*


*NB: the “river” is an abstract, rhetorically convienient river, not a reference to an actual river. I wouldn’t want to step into the Neva even once.