June 11 by Donna

Joan and Karl summarized well, but they forgot one important stop, the Vodka Museum!  Here we heard the story of vodka, which is made from grains such as rye and wheat.  Russians invented vodka when they were inspired by French wine but couldn't grow grapes.  At the end of the tour, we had a vodka tasting, with three flavors:  plan, resin (the guide kept saying raisin, but eventually we figured out she meant resin, or sap), and honey.  Pretty quickly they tasted the same to us!

One amusing aspect of travelling in Russia is the Guide Game.  Your guide basically tries to stare down another guide in order to position you for best access to whatever you are trying to see.  Tanya was particularly skilled at the Guide Game.  Every now and then, the Game notched up a level, and words were exchanged, roughly akin to the hissing of two cats.  Occasionally, we were stuck behind a big group with a long-winded guide, at which point Tanya would maneuver us to "play-through", as I called it.  We had a particularly interesting example of the Guide Game today when we went to the Steiglitz Museum, and there was supposed to be a local guide.  The only problem was that the local guide did not speak English.  Tanya erupted into a long and furious discussion with the Steiglitz guide, the gist of which was that she insisted on speaking Russian, which Tanya was to translate to us, while Tanya insisted on just doing the tour herself, since she had been there 100 times, and therefore save us the pain of hearing it all twice.  Thankfully Tanya is a very talented Guide Game player, and she prevailed. 

 

Another thing to mention is that people here generally are very dour.  People on the streets, in the restaurants or shops, all have very sad, downcast looks on their faces.  Joan speculates that this behavior is a holdover from the Soviet era when everybody was afraid that everybody else was KGB.  I have made a sport of giving these people a big smile, and they seem quite startled.  Very few smile back.  Yesterday, I gave our driver, Yuri, a happy greeting, and asked how he was today, and he shrugged and responded in Russian, which Tanya translated as, "I'm normal".  Tanya explained that nobody every answers "I'm fine" or "I'm good"; the best you can get is "I'm normal".  When we went shopping in the afternoon, we explained to the shopgirl in the department store that we wanted to purchase some "happy, pop music in Russian", she looked at us blankly, shook her head, and said no, they don't have that.

By the way, we had a grand time shopping for a few hours in the big department store.  The aisles are full of every modern item and brand imaginable.  It is a long ways from those stories of empty Soviet storefronts.

  
I have to conclude with one last story from St. Petersburg.  When we left, there was a survey from the ministry of tourism that I decided to complete.  It had all the standard questions like how many days were you here, is it business or pleasure, and how much did you spend on meals?  Then one question caught my attention:  "Were you robbed in St. Petersburg and, if so, how much was your total loss?".  Wild!!