I should have taken a taxi to my hostel the moment I saw it was raining. But I wanted to make up for blundering in Helsinki by courageously and skillfully navigating Petersburg's public transit. So I dragged myself and my luggage onto one bus and two trains on the famous Russian metro.
Riding the metro, I quickly received an initiation to Petersburg life: someone tried to pickpocket me in the crush to board. Luckily, my purse is too small and too tightly packed to wrestle anything out of it in a hurry. Nevertheless, the experience flustered me: feeling a stranger's hands rifling through the purse beneath my arm, and then having to continue riding the metro with the would-be thief standing so stoically four inches from my face.
By the time I got off the metro, the rain was really pouring. Как из ведра, as they say. The hostel, though less than a block from the metro station, was nearly impossibly to find, and I wound up dragging my luggage around in the downpour for over an hour before I found the place. Everything in my bags got drenched, except for a couple books I brought as gifts for my hosts in Vytegra, which I had neurotically packed in garbage bags "just cuz."
To top things off, while taking first shower I'd had in 2 days, the hostel lost electricity and cold water, so I battled a scalding hot geyser in pitch darkness.
All these mishaps finally gnawed away my unflagging cheeriness, and this afternoon I set out into the city full of murderous rancor for life itself, scowling at the passersby even more severely than they, as Russians, scowled at me. By then, the rain had stopped, and less than a block from my hostel I was greeted by this ad draped across the side of an enormous building:
It's a bank advertisement. It reads, "Russia. Land of Opportunities." And oddly enough, that cheered me up. After all, my trip here is a unique, potentially life-changing opportunity, and at that moment it seemed as if someone had posted that gargantuan ad just for me. Who wudda thought I'd travel all the way to Russia to feel personally inspired by capitalism at its most blatant?
Since then, I've spent a positively magical afternoon doing really commonplace things, like reserving a bus ticket and buying shampoo. It's all about the attitude, I guess. Plus, it helps knowing that tonight I get to sleep in a bed for the first time since Sunday night.
No comments:
Post a Comment