Irony of Fate: The Sequel

There is a famous Russian film called the Irony of Fate (Ирония Судьбы) watched every year on New Year's in Russia. The movie begins after a night of drinking when Zhenya mistakenly gets onto his friend's flight to Petersburg. He wakes up at the Petersburg airport still drunk and still believing he is in Moscow. He tells the taxi driver his address and conveniently enough there is a street in Petersburg with the exact same name as his street in Moscow. Playing on the uniformity of architecture during the Soviet Brezhnev era, the building looks surprisingly similar to his building in Moscow, his key miraculously works, and even the layout of the apartment is quite similar. Still drunk, Zhenya doesn't realize his mistake and the comedy continues.  


Unfortunately I too had a Zhenya experience. However, I was able to notice my mistake. Sunday I came home after a long day of walking around the city with some friends from my program. I hopped on the metro and was able to find my street with ease, even after having moved in only the day before. However, as I walked down my street to head to my apartment I realized I had absolutely no idea which one it was. They all looked the same! Clusters of buildings in Petersburg are often situated around a courtyard with separate doors leading to each building, but the clusters are very similar. While trying to call my host mother, a Russian grandmother (babooshka/бабушка) was yelling at me to help her carry her bags, a million stray cats were surrounding me, and I got locked into one of the courtyards after the gate closed behind me. Finally I was able to reach my host sister (Katya, 20) who gave me directions back to the apartment. It turned out that our building is actually located on a different street than its address (who knew?). I had spent a half hour walking into different courtyards and testing my magnetic key on each door- only to be disappointed to see on the electronic keypad in bright red English letters "Error." I finally found my building, put my magnetic key on the door, saw the comforting word "Open," and made my way up to the apartment. I suppose my ironic fate as a speaker of such a prevalent language was my ability to truly understand the weight of the words "error" and "open" when everything else was so foreign to me.

Leopards and horses and bears. Oh my!

At our first orientation session for the Bard College-Smolny Institute study abroad program, we were asked what comfort item we brought for our trip to St. Petersburg. Without hesitation I thought of my stuffed leopard named, well, Leopard. He is an amur leopard, native of the Russian Far East, so I thought it was fitting for him to make his way back to his true home. He has become the title of my blog mainly for alliteration's sake (St. Petersburg was named Leningrad during Soviet times). While he may not take part in all of my adventures, it is certainly comforting to have a little bit of home with me here in Russia.

Fortunately enough, the first few days in Petersburg have gone quite smoothly. Our group of 29 students arrived on Thursday August 19th and spent the first two days in a hotel in order to not only bond with one another, but also give us some time to adjust. Within our first few hours we decided to take a stroll along the beautiful roads and rivers that make Petersburg such an amazing city. It did not take very long for us to see things that were not an everyday occurrence in the States-well at least not in Glastonbury.

Our first sighting (and letdown that a camera was not ready) was three miniature ponies riding down the streets of the city...ridden by not so miniature full-grown adults. One woman had her hands in the air and was screaming at the pony to go faster. She might as well have been screaming at it to throw her off. Had we seen this spectacle on a later day we probably would have been more impressed by the two horses riding down Nevsky Prospect (the largest street in the city) at 1:30 in the morning. However, it wasn't until we saw the two bear cubs on leashes and wearing muzzles or the chimpanzee in the park that we knew St. Petersburg would have a lot in store for us.

St. Isaac's Cathedral from across the Neva River