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Do svidaniya, Saint Petersburg

After wandering around by myself in Saint Petersburg, Russia, I had a busy day. It was one of those days where you don’t have time to stop and take any pictures. Yeah, that kind of day. It was December 23, but I’m showing my age. The age of the story, I mean. Whatever.

I could barely say anything in Russian, so fortunately, Kate was helping me every step of the way as I trekked toward her parents’ apartment in the distant little city of Pudozh. Today was the soonest day I could take a bus there from Saint Petersburg… hopefully. She had checked the availability of bus tickets online, and although there wasn’t a direct route that night, there was one that would take me to Vytegra, a city about an hour away, and her father could pick me up from there. I just had to go to the station and buy the ticket.

As you would probably guess if you’re older than I am, relatively few people in Russia speak English, so this was going to be a challenge. It was more than just pointing at food behind a glass and saying “please.” I had to ask for a ticket to a specific city at a specific time. Kate had told me exactly what to say, and I wrote it next to a map I had drawn showing how to get to the bus station.

So, after a late start to the day, I set off. I think I hadn’t even eaten anything, but it didn’t matter. I really didn’t want to go all the way to the station, in the snow, just to be told in a foreign language that I would have to wait even longer to get to Kate.

I guess I get used to new surroundings easily because I didn’t have much trouble finding the bus station. I only had to take familiar routes to get there, although it was farther from the main road than I was expecting; that did throw me a little bit. But after what must have been an hour, I was at the station. I found the sign with the ticket symbol on it (the poor tourists who visit the US and have to confront signs that are only in English!) and made my way to the ticket desk.

“Вы говорите по-английски?” I tried to say to a middle-aged woman at the only available ticket desk. She indicated that I should try the next desk over. I asked the woman at the next desk the same question, but she couldn’t speak English either. Either that or they didn’t want to admit it. During my travels in Europe, I met plenty of people who said they couldn’t speak English even though their English was passable. (I wrote “there” instead of “their” and almost missed it. Note to self: practice English.)

I went back to the first clerk and, in the most pathetic display I’ve ever put on for a stranger, tried to pronounce the sentence I had written. I was only a few words in when she handed me a pen and paper through the little slot thing in the window. I listed the details that Kate had given me: the destination, the time, and that day’s date (all in Russian, of course). And a question mark. I handed her the paper.

She wrote on it and returned it to me. To my relief, she had written an amount of money, and not a terribly large one. I had been told that transportation was cheap in Russia, and I was pleased to find out that it actually was the case. Now I could go back to my host, relax for a little while, maybe finally have something to eat, and then I could be off to the station.

After burning off my last few hours at my host’s place, I got my stuff together, thanked him for his hospitality, and set off. Not for the bus station, but for another part of town where Kate’s friend Vitya could meet me. He was going to give me one of her cameras so I could give it to her, and he agreed to help me take my stuff to the bus station.

He was a little late, but there wasn’t really anything he could do about it because he was taking an exam, so I spent some time dragging my suitcase through the snow, looking at the shops, and trying not to cause trouble or even get anyone’s attention. Such is the reality of life when you find yourself loitering in a country where you don’t speak the language and they don’t speak yours. What if the police confronted me for no reason, as I had heard they sometimes do? I’d just be able to say “I don’t speak Russian.”

Finally, I met Vitya. I was cold and I could go for some food, so we went to a cafe nearby. It was actually a chain, and one that I think he didn’t particularly like, but my bus was going to be leaving soon, so there wasn’t much time to choose another place. We got to know each other a little bit over some delicious coffee (which I guess wasn’t as good as some other places’) and Russian food.

Now we really didn’t have any time to spare, so we hit the subway and made it toward the bus station. By the time we got off the subway we were nearly running; we were that close to missing it. I was hurrying, dragging a suitcase through slush, well behind someone who wasn’t dragging anything and was used to the slush.

We somehow managed to make it to the station a couple of minutes before the bus was about to leave. Vitya gave me Kate’s camera and wished me all the best. And now I was on a bus full of people who didn’t speak English.

The bus ride was a long one… was it 8, 10, 12 hours? Something like that. I lost track after a while. It was incredibly dark, and the roads were unlike anything I’d ever seen or felt. Several people I had met told me the Russian proverb, “Russia has two problems: fools and roads.” It was bumpy the whole way, and there was rarely anything to see except for trees. Occasionally we would pass through a tiny hamlet consisting of little more than a sign, and sometimes we would even come to an intersection and turn. All I could do was sit and watch and wait, thinking about the one who was waiting for me. I didn’t sleep.

It was still dark but well into the next morning, December 24, when the bus finally reached Vytegra. The layers of clothes that had kept me warm in Saint Petersburg did nothing for me here. I hurried into the tiny building that was the bus station. A few minutes later, I got a text and saw a familiar figure in the window walking toward the entrance.