3 in 1. Aren't you lucky?

A pleasant surprise

I only drink bottled water in Russia, as water straight from the tap in Piter is not potable, and it tastes really funky even after it’s been boiled (hence a lot of tea drinking). Over the past month (holy cow, I just realized I’ve been here a whole month already!) I’ve collected quite a few bottles in my room, as we don’t have a dumpster in our courtyard, and I usually forget to take them with me when I’m headed in the direction of the nearest trash collection site. On my way to the gym this evening I finally remembered to take all the bottles with me. At the trash site I was met with a wonderful sight: next to the overflowing dumpster were two smaller dumpsters; Petersburg has a recycling program! I wish I’d known earlier; I’ve been putting plastic in with the regular garbage at home. Of course, I can’t say how widespread or effective it is, but the fact that there’s a separate dumpster for paper and one for glass, plastic, and metal is a fantastic start.

Russian Construction Sites

There’s not much anymore that really surprises me in Petersburg, and even if I find something unusual, it typically doesn’t catch me off guard. But twice in the past week I’ve experienced something that both surprised me and cracked me up. It’s Russian construction. The first experience was last weekend; me, Anya, Berney, and another of Anya’s friends were walking down Nevsky Prospekt, approaching Anchikov Bridge, which has been under construction for a couple months now. Saturday, they were resurfacing the sections of the road right where the crosswalks were. But instead of closing one side of the sidewalk at a time, as I would expect in the states, they didn’t close any side at all. Instead, all those masses of people walking down Nevsky just walked right through the construction areas, or around them as best they could. The asphalt was fresh and tarry-smelling, an ominous-looking steamroller backed up and zoomed around with nary a look at the pedestrians scuttling out of the way. In America, that would be a lawsuit waiting to happen.

A similar thing happened today; they were replacing a pipe that runs under the road I walk down to get to the gym. As I approached the construction site, I could see that they’d dug up the sidewalk on either side of the road, so there was no going around. A massive pipe was slung from a crane, blocking the road. Again, at home I would have expected to see a sign at the corner, or something, as warning that it might be best to take a different route. Here, I waited for the workers to swing the pipe mostly out of the way, and scurried across the road and out of the way of a military transport vehicle, which revved its engine menacingly from behind me.

These incidents point to what I consider a paradox in the Russian idea of responsibility (a paradox in Russia? No way!). On the one hand, Russia is a very bureaucratic society, and it can make your head spin to try and figure out who is responsible for what, whom you need to talk to to get something done. The most frustrating (and frequent!) words you will hear here are, “That’s not our area. Go talk to X.” Usually X will send you on to someone else, or back to where you came from in the first place, and it takes a lot of persistence to finally get someone to do something. But on the other hand, pedestrians walking through a construction site are responsible for their own safety and well-being, we’re responsible for getting out of the way of the steamroller. Actually, maybe it’s not such a paradox; after all, the construction workers, just like the bureaucrats, aren’t taking on any more responsibility than they have to. Still, in general, I like this aspect of Russian society, the focus on personal responsibility. No one is looking out for you, no one is following you around taking care of you, telling you your coffee is hot or other equally obvious things. You have to use some common sense.

Yogurt

Russians love dairy. The range of dairy products available in Russia far exceeds the assortment found in the US, and includes sour cream (my favorite brand: Happy Milkman. He’s just so jolly!), kefir, tvorog (farmer’s cheese), a huge variety of both block and spreadable cheeses, milk, ice cream, syrok (cheesecake candy bars), tvorozhok (tvorog with jam or other stuff already mixed in), and butter, among others. The stamp of Russian dairy is its full-fat deliciousness; generally speaking, the less fat there is in a dairy product here, the more expensive it is. The milk I have with my coffee every day is 3.5%; if Galya decides to go “light,” she buys 2.5%.

Yogurt is a relative newcomer to the Russian dairy market and has been wholeheartedly embraced by Russians as a close cousin of the native kefir. My phonetics teacher, Olga Valentinovna, told us that when yogurt first appeared in Russian markets, people called it “oi-gurt,” because there aren’t any Russian words that start with “yog,” and it was hard for them to pronounce. With time, however, Russians have learned to say “yogurt,” and it is now, apparently, one of the healthiest and multi-talented foods available, as evidenced by the plethora of yogurt commercials you will see on any channel, during any show. I have seen commercials for yogurt claiming to lower cholesterol, boost the immune system, regulate digestion, make children grow, and, my favorite, a yogurt called “Beauty” which will save your hair, skin, and nails from aging. Maybe I’ll try that one out, haha. Amazingly, I haven’t yet noticed a yogurt commercial claiming that yogurt will help you lose weight, a major facet of Yoplait’s commercials in the US. Whether or not Russian yogurt can actually do any of the things people claim it can, it is yummy, which is the only criteria by which I judge my bacteria-laden food choices.