Down the Rabbit Hole

The second I climbed out of bed this morning, I knew today would be a rough day in Petersburg. My feet and knees still ached from all the walking I did yesterday. Just wandering around the hostel and standing in the shower made me grunt and groan like a tired old lady. Youth certainly doesn't last long, does it?

But today was my last day in Russia, the very end of my trip, and I was determined to make the most of it. So I took the metro to Nevskyi Prospekt and continued my free tour of the city, in spite of my throbbing leg pain, in spite of almost 90-degree heat and glaring sunshine. And with the right mindset, I was able to enjoy it all. It only takes a few minutes of sitting on a park bench beneath the imposing grandeur of the Admiralty or a few seconds of listening to a street musician squeeze folk songs from an accordion to forget my wretched feet and lose myself in the greater experience of St. Petersburg.

One of my more interesting encounters today was with a pair of tourists who stopped me near St. Isaac's Cathedral and, with a crippling accent in Russian that offended even my ears, asked me: "Excuse me... do you know... what time?" I told them in Russian what time it was, to which they responded with blank stares, trying to puzzle out what I had said. So I repeated the time in English. At this, the young couple went into ecstasies.

They were newlyweds from Vermont on their honeymoon, and for some reason, they had expected everyone in St. Petersburg to speak English. They were so overjoyed to hear my American accent that they practically wanted to kidnap me and take me with them as a personal translator and tour guide. So I sat with them for half an hour, going over maps, pointing out cheap places to eat, giving them instructions on how to ride the metro, suggesting which sights they absolutely had to see and which weren't worth the time or money.

It struck me then how well I have come to know St. Petersburg and how lost I would have been without knowing the language as well as I do. Throughout the trip, I have been kicking myself for being so clumsy at Russian, feeling like even after three years of learning the language I still know nothing. But now I realize I've been hard on myself. I speak Russian pretty well. I would still hesitate to call myself a fluent speaker, but really what I'm lacking is productive vocabulary, coming up with the words I want to say when I want to say them. I understand what's said to me so clearly that often, when remembering a conversation later, I have a difficult time believing it wasn't all spoken in English.

And without that, at least, this would have been an entirely different trip—most likely, a tale of increasing frustration and decreasing sanity as I discover how important being able to understand and communicate really is, much like the couple from Vermont had discovered.

Soon after we parted, I headed back to the hostel, gathered my things, and made my way to the airport. To get there from the hostel, I had to take two lines on the metro and a city bus while carrying all my luggage, which altogether took almost an hour and a half. Surprisingly, this wasn't as bad as it sounds. The metro wasn't busy, so I got to sit down; I took breaks when I was tired and didn't stress out about it. I got to the airport early enough to kick back, rest my long-suffering feet, and read a the first couple chapters of Alice in Wonderland. So, not bad at all. I only spent 42 rubles to get to the airport (about $1.50), very cheap compared to the 800 or more ($26+) I would have had to pay for a taxi from the hostel.

As my plane lifted off, I watched St. Petersburg growing smaller and smaller in the window. It seems so different now than it did a month ago when I first landed. Or rather, I seem so different now. It's not that I've changed all that much; it's that I have learned so much in the past month that I see everything differently. I learned new places, new people, new food, new customs and routines, new words and phrases and sounds. I learned the differences between a rural city and the glubinka, between Russians and Veps, between young and old, native and foreign.

But even more than that, I learned about myself. I've been told that the best way to get to know someone is to travel with them, and traveling by myself, I have come to know myself like never before. And with this knowledge comes confidence. Confidence in my ability to adapt to new and uncomfortable situations. Confidence in my Russian skills. Confidence in knowing that I can get all the way to Russia, through the biggest cities and the deepest interiors of the countryside, all by myself. I can choose and conduct my own research, formulate my own English lesson plans, and arrange day trips as I please. And when I'm done with it all, I can get myself back home.

Perhaps this is the most important thing I gained from this experience (though admittedly, I'm dying to go through the material I collected on the Veps people). I feel older, calmer, more capable. And with a suitcase full of souvenirs, a camera full of pictures, and 30-some completed Veps attitude surveys, I've gotten a lot out of this trip.

Now I'm sitting in the airport in Helsinki again, where I will spend the night. My flight leaves at 7:30 tomorrow morning, so I picked out a comfy lounge chair next to a power outlet and made it my own. There is free wifi, and I have plenty of movies and books to keep me busy if I can't sleep.

Tomorrow, I fly to Chicago with a short stop in Paris, and from Chicago I take the train back to Ann Arbor. This is the last night I will spend abroad, the last night of my trip. My head is dizzy with impressions. The situation is made even more surreal by the bouncing Finnish language, surrounding me on all sides, and the white night skies of Helsinki. It's like my own adventure in wonderland, and soon, it too will come to a close and seem like it was nothing more than a dream. And what a strange and wonderful dream it's been.