Things I Used to Think About Russia
Russia is scary.
Fake news (Michael made me write that). So far Russia has been friendly, safe, beautiful, and easy to travel around. The scariest thing about Russia at the moment is how bad Michael and I are at speaking Russian.
Nobody in Russia speaks English.
Half true? In Saint Petersburg and Moscow, at least– although I’m assuming this will become more true the farther east we go. On every occasion that we’ve wandered into a bar, restaurant, or coffee shop there has been at least one young person who speaks English. And nobody seems to resent the need to speak to us in English, which is a pleasant change from a lot of our encounters in more touristy parts of Europe.
Outside of the service industry and for anyone over 40, English is indeed very limited.
It’s difficult to travel around Russia.
The internet is full of cautionary tales, tips, and tricks to help you travel around Russia... and you don't really need to read any of them. Almost everything we've done so far has been simple. And anything that hasn't been simple has been more odd than difficult.
Here’s a list of things that are extremely simple in Russia:
- Buying a SIM card: you can get them at the airport, at cell phone stores, at convenience stores. Pretty much anywhere. And 20GB of data costs about $15.
- Getting an UBER: apparently private citizens have operated as unofficial taxis for years, and Uber has just legitimized this and made it possible to get the same price as a local, plus you don’t have to try to say your destination in Russian.
- Navigating the metro: it's pretty much as easy (or difficult, I guess) as any other metro system on earth. And the Moscow metro is so beautiful, it may as well be a museum.
Here are some things that are not that simple, but not that difficult either:
- Getting into the Hermitage in winter: this basically involves waiting in a long line to buy a ticket, then waiting in another long line to show your ticket to someone, then waiting in yet another line to get to the cloakroom (where you’re required to check your cloak), then getting to the front of the cloakroom window only to have someone yell “Niet” at you and point to another window. Once you manage to get your cloak checked, you have to push your way back through incoming traffic and show your ticket to someone else. Which is very difficult to do if you checked your ticket in the pocket of your cloak.
- Getting an UBER at the airport: I know UBER is in the easy category, but this is the one exception. Because not only do private citizens operate as UBER drivers, official taxis do too. So trying to get an UBER at the airport basically means you can’t just grab any one of the 100 taxis lined up, you have to scan the licence plates of all the taxis until you find the exact one you’ve booked and secured a price with.
Russian food is bland.
I expected to spend 3 weeks eating borscht, mashed potatoes, and pickled vegetables and slowly losing my will to eat. And we have eaten all of those things already, but nothing has been bland and my will to eat is alive and well.
Not only has all the traditional Russian food been delicious, it turns out that Georgian food is so ubiquitous (apparently due to Stalin’s Georgian heritage) that it may as well be the national cuisine. And it’s amazing. Kind of like if Ukrainian food met Lebanese food and then married an Italian.
Russians drink a lot of vodka.
This might be true, but it hasn't been our experience so far. I was preparing my liver for an onslaught of hard alcohol consumption, but apparently I didn't need to. We've had a few shots of vodka here and there–some clear and some distilled with black currant, juniper berries, pepper, and horseradish (not all in one, that would disgusting)–but it definitely hasn't been the drinking marathon I expected and feared. But maybe we're just not hanging out with the right Russians.
Russian police are out to get you.
One of the most complicated things about visiting Russia is getting a visa and following the necessary registration rules once you're in the country. The prevailing wisdom suggests that you should register your visa in every city to ensure that the police don't cite you for failure to comply with the law (either rightly or wrongly), but we're lazy and registration is time-consuming, so we haven't been registering our visas at all. Nor have we been carrying our passports around with us, which is also recommended. So I guess we've been taking our chances with the police... and so far so good. For the most part, I find it hard to believe a police officer would even know you were a tourist if you if you weren't walking down the street yelling in English or sporting a fanny pack and a DSLR. And even if they do know you're a tourist, our experience has been that they're disinterested at best. In fact, the only direct interaction we've had with the police is when a very attractive police officer stopped traffic at a busy intersection and escorted us across.
Russian women are beautiful.
When I asked Michael what his first impression of Russia was he said, “The women are so beautiful. They take my breath away.” And they really are. It’s like being surrounded by supermodels, who are also extremely well-dressed and adept at walking in high heels on icy streets.
Russia is very cold and very big.
Yeah, it’s pretty cold. And it's really fucking big.
