23 June 2008: Adventures in a Russian Shopping Mall, and Other Stories

This blog is starting to get a little spare on details. I’m writing about stuff that’s happened about three weeks ago; needless to say, my memory’s a bit fuzzy. I really should have been taking notes all along, but sadly all I have now are my daily journals for Russian class (themselves a bit spare) and my pictures. Lucky for you, this time-lapse view spares you the general decay of my mind. I think I’m catching the Russia. For now, however, my daily journal and my pictures speak only of happy things, so general unpleasantness will be lacking.

I decided to run to the apartment quick after classes today to drop off my computer and stuff before going shopping with Karis and Daniel. As I approached my entrance to the building, I found my way blockaded by a very small, elderly man looking generally confused. I was actually kind of surprised that my coincidental co-entrance with another resident hadn’t happened sooner. I respectfully stood back a few steps so as to let the old man “magnet” himself into the building. (I have four keys: one is a little magnet that lets me into the building, one is a gigantic skeleton key to let me into the gate on our floor, one lets me in the first door of the apartment into a weird little in-between, and the last lets me from the in-between into the apartment.) Well, Little Old Man seemed a bit confused. Actually, Little Old Man seemed not to have a key at all. As I was beginning to wonder how to displace Little Old Man so I could get into the building, hoping to leave him to his thoughts, he noticed me standing there. “Babble, babble, babble?”
“Um, yes, I live here?”
He made a gesture to open the door. The thought crossed my mind that the other residents of the building might not appreciate my letting in a complete stranger, but then he was very old, and very little, so I determined that anyone could handle him if he became unruly. My plan to leave him confused in the stairwell was quickly abandoned as he introduced himself, shook my hand, and started a lengthy story, in the middle of which he stopped to ask me which apartment I lived in. Okay, so maybe two weeks into my stay, I might have taken better notice of that particular detail, but I didn’t, so I made something up. Most unfortunately, my made-up apartment just happened to be the apartment of the woman our little old man was looking for. This led to another long string of questions involving someone named Galya and goodness-knows-what-else. Luckily for me, Irina happened to have introduced me to Galya (an unbelievable tiny, round woman with a pekingese) a few days earlier, so I replied that I did know who this person was. Also lucky for me was the fact that Little Old Man was so absorbed in his various stories that he didn’t notice the blatancy of my statement that I knew the woman I claimed to live with. The possibility of getting out of this without things becoming very awkward was rapidly vanishing when who pops in the front door but Maxim (dressed in his new checkered lilac blazer of which he was so proud.) The look on Maxim’s face translated roughly into “What the *insert favorite expletive*” I quite agreed. Maxim took control of the situation, but I wasn’t quite free, as I wasn’t sure whether it would be rude not to accompany the Little Old Man up twelve flights of stairs. It took a little longer than usual. At the end, he was very thankful for all our help (ha!) and shook our hands. I never really found out much more than I did from the old man. He was a guest of Galya and her husband, who wasn’t home. And that’s all I know.

I met up with Daniel and Karis at the metro station shortly after this little adventure. We made our way to Gostiny Dvor, an arcade-style shopping mall on Nevsky Prospekt. From what I understand, Peter the Great had it built for exactly this purpose (shopping!) back in the 1700s. Our mission: to find Karis a new purse/bag/thing. After finally figuring out how to get into the mall (trickier than you realize), we found ourselves in the “Bag Store.” How convenient! We found everything from tiny (and in my opinion, useless) clutches to gigantic off-road suitcases with built-in compasses, but no bag for Karis. All were either hideous, or outrageously expensive, or more often than not, both. We made our way all around the mall in our quest, to no avail. A side mission was to find some black shoes for me, since I left mine at Brown. Finding shoes that don’t look like they were stolen from a monstrous elf, a smurf, or Crocodile Dundee was kind of challenging. Finding shoes for less than 17,000 rubles (about $680) was even more challenging. We were probably judged a lot for walking through stores in our jeans and T-shirts, but that’s okay . . . we were judging them, too. Russian’s have a very . . . different . . . view of what’s fashionable.

After our failed, but educational expedition into the world of Russian fashion, we made our way back along Nevsky to the metro station. I found a high-end boutique in our city guide and thought, since we had so much fun gawking at the outrageous things in Gostiny Dvor, we might take a gander there. The boutique was appropriately named “Defile.” There was an abundance of articles whose purposes we could not discern. There was one shirt (?) in particular that just about gave Daniel a seizure. I wasn’t too far behind. The X-Files theme in the background was fitting, I think.

We made one last pit-stop before leaving the area. I’d heard of a Lutheran church I kind of wanted to see. Lutherans, in Russia? Sounded interesting, and interesting it was! We saw on the bulletin board outside that services were given in Russian and German. Hm, German. We noticed that the German name for the church was “Schwimmbadkirche” or “Swimming Pool Church.” Also interesting. When we got into the church, we had a heck of a time finding the way into the sanctuary. All we could find were a bunch of bulletin boards featuring pictures of the church from the days when the Commies had turned it into, you guessed it, a swimming pool. I was bound and determined to get in, so I asked the woman working in an office off to the side whether we could look in the church. Funny thing about that . . . in the second between opening my mouth to say something, and actually saying it, my brain pulled a funny little trick. Recalling that the sign outside said services were offered in German, my logic held that the people working in the church would speak German. Also, if the services were in German, then perhaps they would be used to German-speaking people coming in. Further still, I could pass for German to someone who doesn’t know any better. So, tired of not knowing what was going on in general, wanting for once to be in control of conversation, and really wanting to see the church, I did a bad thing: I asked the woman in German. I’m generally against forcing non-native languages on people in their own countries, but I feel slightly vindicated that, at the very least, it wasn’t English. It worked, though, as the woman (who didn’t speak German at all) was generally exasperated enough to just point the way upstairs. The church was laid out in good Lutheran style, that is, not laid out at all. The place was very peaceful, very quiet, and very white. And it still had that swimming pool feel.

One last note from the day concerns Russian superstition. Russians are a very superstitious lot. It leads to a lot of spitting, spinning, and the occasional digestion of “lucky” tramway tickets. As we came out of the church, we saw a black cat run across the path of a man in the square. He jumped. We giggled.