Blog
July 9, 2007
July 10, 2007

I started to write this blog on the 9th, but somehow I just couldn’t. I think I’m really tired, and although I had intended to go to the Hermitage today, it didn’t “work out” as they say in Russia. This idea of intention and the impact of circumstance is strong here, and it works for me…I intend to use the expressions my self, and have already started. I’m not sure if I will ever get to the Hermitage while I’m here, and that would be scandalous to me, so must find a way to skip something else and go there.
I’m sitting in a small restaurant called Zoom, which is just around the corner from where I am staying at the Herzen University dormitory. My dormitory room is small, and I share it with Allison, with whom I always have interesting conversations at the end of the day. We have very separate days, which makes it all the more interesting at the end of the day, as we have done such different things.
There is so much to do here.
We can’t open our window because of the mosquitoes, so our room has become quite the little stew pot of humidity. I’ve taken to wrapping myself in the lightest of sheets, and probably look like I’m on my way to a toga party. Or that I am a returned ghost, which is a more likely scenario here: there are many ghosts in St Petersburg, as the city is built on the bones of those who built it, and of course the rivers are filled with the bones of those who disagreed (or who were seen to disagree). Yes, I’m sure I must look like a ghost.
I had this thought the other day: so many of the buildings here are decorated with angels and cherubs and various birds that I imagined that all the wings of those beings suddenly became inspired and the whole city lifted up into a gust of wind and sailed over the Gulf of Finland, and then dropped, where it hovered and continued thriving. I think that’s how odd this city seems to me; it could be anywhere suspended over anything, going about its insulated business and just – humming.
But also yesterday I went for another walk, a shorter one this time, and visited Peter’s Summer Garden/Winter Palace. I liked that his palace was small, two storeys, and a simple design, by a Dutch architect, a kind of pragmatic place constructed to house his pragmatic curiosities. The house is close to where the Neva meets a canal, and probably when he lived there his view across the Neva to the right would have been of a flat field, or marsh, no buildings.
I also found the “emblem” for my trip, a small print of a St Petersburg cityscape, over which is superimposed an image of a bizarre looking canine; in tiny writing on the print are several Russian words whose meanings I don’t know, and for some reason, that tiny bit of absurdity, the odd dog, is a meaningful synecdoche of my experience. I’ve never quite taken to the Maryushka dolls, and in fact learned (from the award-winning lecturer in my untranslatable Russian class) that they were introduced by the Japanese in the early 20th century. So, a tiny absurd print made by a Russian artist appears to by my emblem: not the dolls; not the lacquer boxes which are pretty but just that; not the fur hats, which will fade in the Vancouver Island rain; not the birch boxes etched with Church of Spilled Blood; not the ubiquitous icons for sale at every street corner and in every cathedral.
So the music in this café, Zoom, is even better than the rock music of the other place I used to go, until I got tired of the ever-present green “reserved” signs placed on the tables to keep us “Americans” down to a small percentage of their clientele. I can tell when I’m not wanted, and despite the Cyrillic alphabet, can read the signs. And hey, that’s a whole other experience I am going to write about once I get home (I’ve been taking notes), and that is the experience of traveling as an American, because that’s essentially what I am when I am here with an American-identified group…an American. That’s exacerbated in my mind by the fact that most of my American friends refer to themselves as coming from “America”, thereby claiming the whole category of “America” for themselves, and leaving me to work out for myself how I am to distinguish my north American-ness from their American-ness. It’s an odd feeling, but I’m working on an essay with a working title called “Once Upon A Time I Knew an American” and it’s about that, and of course other things. What I’m getting at here is that the experience of being here in Russia, with mostly Americans (there are other Canadians, of course, but we are a minority), is as noteworthy as the experience of being in Russia. One of the things that I have been feeling about being Canadian while so far away from Canada – I can get Canadian news by checking the online Canadian newspapers – is the impact of the looming possibility of a common “North America” on the various senses of North American identity. Most of the time I don’t think about stuff like that, or when I do start to think am usually precluded from finishing by my limited contexts.
I’ve come up with a travel motto for myself: travel often and alone, stay long, live simply.
I have my eye focused on a small cabin on an island between Vancouver Island and the mainland. The dream of that cabin is vivid; the feelings associated with the dream are even stronger.