Saint-Petersburg, Russia - Tips for Tech Travellers
Posted by Dylan Beattie on 14 May 2019 • permalink As I'm heading back to Saint-Petersburg for DotNext 2019, this seemed like a nice moment to repost something I wrote after my first visit to Russia back in 2017.1. As a guest in Russia, it is vitally important to keep moving at all times. This is because if you stop moving for more than, say, fifteen seconds, your hosts will assume this is because you have run out of roast pork and sausages. It is impossible to sit down at a table in Saint Petersburg without somebody serving you a massive plate of meat. My hosts explained that the Russian phrase for 'no thankyou' is 'nyet, spasiba" but based on my experience I think this literally translates as "please bring me roast duck and cabbage now, and after that some more sausages".
2. Sausages in Russia occupy the culinary niche that is normally reserved for, say, some carrots in Western cuisine. You will find sausages chopped in a salad, boiled, fried, steamed, and served as accompaniments to all sorts of things.
3. Saint Petersburg is BIG. The average street here is wider than most London postcodes. If you have to walk three blocks, wear good shoes and take a bottle of water with you. Monuments and war memorials here are built to such a scale I can only assume they are intended to leave civilisations in neighbouring star systems in no doubt as to the nobility and sacrifice of the Russian military. We should give a special mention to the churches, which are not only huge, but we can conclude from the style of their decorated domes and minarets that the builders thought God had a bit of a thing for cupcakes.
4. Riding the Saint Petersburg metro will seem uncannily familiar to anybody who has read Jules Verne's "Journey to the Centre of the Earth". After buying your metro token from the ticket machine and passing through one of the metal detector arches - for which you are not required to empty your pockets or anything, meaning that they go off constantly and are consequently ignored by everybody including the police - you step onto an escalator approximately fourteen miles in length. The tunnels and station interchanges suggest that tunnelling machines in the former Soviet Union were available in two sizes - Extra Large and Stupidly Extra Large - and the interchanges are so big that the connected stations have different names. If, say, the Red Bull Air Race ever needed to be held indoors due to inclement weather, the pedestrian interchange tunnel at Spasskaya/Sadovaya would provide an ideal venue.
5. For typography enthusiasts, the Cyrillic alphabet is an absolute delight... except when it comes to handwriting. Cursive Cyrillic is a minefield of hilarity and ambiguity. Any doctors who feel they have exhausted the possibilities of the Latin alphabet when it comes to writing illegible prescriptions will find Cyrillic a rich seam of possibility.
6. The Russian people are lovely and friendly... once you get used to the fact that a Russian telling you a joke will initially sound like they're interrogating about some war crimes you may or not have committed. It helps to keep a Polish person with you, since they seem to know the correct point to start laughing, thus giving a handy cue to the slightly baffled English speakers participating in the conversation.
7. An English person trying to speak Russian is the funniest thing that has ever happened. The Russian equivalent of the Edinburgh Festival consists entirely of English people attempting to pronounce the names of Saint Petersburg metro stations whilst the audience drink vodka and roar with laughter.
8. Vodka must be served no warmer than -273.1499 degrees Celsius. To offer someone vodka that is merely refrigerated could cause a serious diplomatic incident.
9. Most consonants in Russian have a 'hard' and a 'soft' pronunciation, which, like tonal Cantonese or the tongue-clicks of the Khoisan language family, is completely impenetrable to foreigners. It is very important, however: based on my attempts to speak Russian to waiters, I have concluded that the elusive hard vs soft 'T' sound must be the difference between saying "no thank you, I have eaten so much food I think I need to to go the hospital" and "could I please have some more roast pork and boiled sausages"
10. There are a lot of Chinese tourists in Saint Petersburg. Local regulations prohibit them from travelling in groups of fewer than fifty. If you arrive to check in to your hotel moments after a Chinese tour party has arrived, you may wish to pass the time whilst you wait by reading the collected works of Dostoyevsky or walking to Vladivostok and back.
11. Every single car in Russia has a dashboard camera recording video footage of the journey, presumably so that when your cab gets cut up by another one and causes a six-car pile-up, the driver can pay the repair bills by sharing the crash footage on YouTube and hoping it goes viral. Most cab drivers keep their radio tuned to the local high-energy Europop station, so when they do inevitably have a massive crash, the resulting YouTube footage already has the appropriate soundtrack.
In short... it was AWESOME. The city is beautiful and vast and unlike anywhere I have ever been, the people could not have been more welcoming and friendly; arrival and departure was an absolute breeze thanks to the brand new, hyper-modern airport terminal building, and the metro is a great way to get around (and clearly signed in English throughout.) And if you don't fancy jumping through the administrative hoops of getting a Russian visa, you can visit SPB on a cruise ship from Tallinn or Helsinki and stay for up to 72 hours without having to get a visa, which is kinda cool.
Just don't stay up drinking vodka the night before your 5am departure. Trust me on this. :)
