Nevsky Prospekt, 20th August

All we did today was walk along Nevsky Prospekt... doing battle with the huge crowds, trying to avoid smokers, beggars, spruikers and the handbag arm-gangs! [The standard position for a beggar is sitting down in the gutter (not the road gutter, the water-draining gutter right next to the building walls); with a scrap of cloth laid out for coins; crying. Awful.

We’re looking for a few specific things, and prospecting (sorry) for lunch. First we pass the cd shop, the Stroganoff Monument (still not looking very tasty, although the kissing couples on the grass are rather sweet) and the Stockman shopping centre. Home of L’Occitane to the House of Moi, remember? We go in to use the Bankomat, M’s theory being that it’s safer to go inside somewhere with a) a guard on the door, and b) a relatively private, non-street location. Fine with me. I manage to resist the L’Occitane by virtue of thinking how much longer my money has to last (and how many countries I will have travelled through by then, let’s see ... five, and I’ll be on my way to the sixth and seventh!).

M is looking for a newsagent that may have English (British or American) newspapers. We trawl the shops leading to the Metro, nyet; various large bookshops on the street, nyet nyet nyet. Then we come to the side-street where M has noted there is a supermarket. We’re dying for lack of fresh fruit (we tried to buy some of the bananas in a bowl on the counter at KaveHaus yesterday; no luck, the woman in charge said firmly “DISPLAY ONLY”. Oh.). We walk around the block, looking for the address which matches the map marker. Nyup. However I note the Segafredo sign on a cafe, aha! - Italian coffee, a brand I know. So that’s lunch taken care of (at 3pm - why does everything take so LONG???)

With M’s help, and the little bit of English the proprietor has, I manage to buy some ground Segafredo to bring back to the hotel. The Helsinki supermarket coffee isn’t a patch on the Illy I bought in Bergen, so supplies of something nicer is good to find. The cafe people (at least three of them) invite me to take a seat while they measure out the beans, grind them up, measure them again, and put them in a little container. It costs me about $A12 for 200g, not cheap, but oh how lovely it will be tomorrow morning (or even in a minute, ie 9pm) when I make my first pot. Mr Proprietor was trying to ask me how I was going to use the coffee: I engaged brain and said “We have a press” (miming pushing down the plunger on a coffee pot) and he recognised ‘press’ (ie French Press, that’s what plungers are called in Scandinavia I noted)). So that’s alright, he’s ground the coffee to the right grundity.

There’s no sign of a supermarket, or anyone carrying groceries in bags, so we go further down Nevsky, getting into seriously expensive Western hotel territory (the Radisson, the Grand Palace), looking for Cafe Max, a big cafe and internet site. And there it is! I posted a short blog entry from here, a bit tiredly I think. It’s the essence-de-communist-state which is getting me down. I don’t know how long it was before Budapest, for example, threw off the grim face of the hard years and became a more optimistic, open city; but St Petersburg hasn’t made it yet. The amount of restoration, renovation, updating, servicing is impressive - there are dug-up roads, canals, and pathways everywhere; it seems every building has some stage of shade cloth or scaffolding attached to some part of it; along our street there are men rebuilding window frames and scraping paint off the old ones; glaziers are doing huge business; and there are cranes making the baroque rooftops look very out of date.

I spent a happy hour at the interwebs... catching up on some email, a quick blog entry, and an even quicker last 15 seconds look at my bank book. Hey mum, isn’t that cheque in the mail yet??? I didn’t have time to answer every email, sorry especially to my darling dorter, but we WILL catch up soon. [Can you put things like this in your blog ... ?]

M’s gone off to find another newsagent where he’s more hopeful of finding a newspaper. He’s had a quick look at crikey.com, chuckling his way through a few entries; flicked onto the Sydney Morning Herald home page, and checked his email. [We both find it amusing that his university’s site, when accessed from anywhere but home, always generates a warning box saying ‘THIS SITE IS UNKNOWN TERRITORY POSSIBLY CONTAINING NASTYPUTEREATINGVIRALSPAMGOOBIES”... hasn’t his illustrious institution registered itself as kosher yet? The interwebs spy devices certainly don’t like it. He has to choose the box marked “GO AHEAD AND CONNECT AGAINST OUR EARNESTLY GOOD ADVICE”. Heh. I think after all that he didn’t find anything particularly interesting waiting, what a pity. One could possibly hope for something really suss, or really silly .. anyway, just as I finish my webbing, he’s back with the paper.] Next stop, supermarket possible location number two. A bit of back-tracking along one of the canals, and hurray there it is! Full of actual supermarket things, like soap, and many aisles of grog, and FRUIT, and nuts and crackers and cheese and fresh milk which isn’t off and a zillion types of preserved meats. Huzzah.

We re-stock our vitamins-via-dried fruit supply, add milk and cheese, and top it off with wine, tins of gin and tonic, and two large bottles of Evian water. Buying sparkling water, 375ml at a time, to clean our teeth is getting annoying. It’s quite an experience, I know one usually foams at the mouth a bit when tooth-cleaning, but try fizzy water for a really special, up the back of the nose effect. Or perhaps, don’t...

Then all we have to do is lug our purrchases back to the hotel, about a mile away. M wants to take a taxi, but we can’t see any passing. Then a woman, possibly homeless and quite probably drunk or not well, starts shouting and pushing at someone near where we’re standing. We put one hand each through the supermarket bag and start walking. By the time we get back to Nevsky I reckon it’s not worth getting a taxi - will it have a meter? Probably not. How on earth do we work out what a decent price is to haggle with the driver? I can’t be stuffed. We puddle along, taking it in turns to carry the bag or sharing it between two lengthening arms. We can do it. I silently thumb my nose at the curdled milk lady as we pass by..

Since we staggered back to the room, apart from eating up lots of our lovely new food, I’ve been watching the Olympics. I’ve seen a bit of high jump, volleyball, diving (yes! some diving), some interviews with medal winners (it seems we’ll be going to Estonia just in time for them to celebrate their first ever Gold Medal - in shot put), and now some replays of medal-winning races.

I reckon the bit of today which isn’t already on the blog is brought to you exclusively by gin and tonic, with a slight hint of cheese and cracker; to be followed shortly by Tired Foot and Leg Cream dessert!

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Hey we’ve cracked the code of the classical music cafe - it’s not the cafe which plays the bassoon quartets, it’s the cd shop upstairs with its speakers sitting over the cafe’s outside tables! So we forgive them for the MTV, after all.

And a little NB for my model-making dear ones: I saw three person-sized costumes today:
- a very poor brown bear, his face was all wrong, even the eyes weren’t level. He was handing out flyers for a cafe I think, purrhaps a regional Russian cuisine serving wild forest animal dishes!;
- a grubby, cheap and battered polar bear, also handing out flyers of some sort (ppl handing out flyers are 10 a rouble along the main road, the majority of them are for restaurants or strip-clubs. If either brown or polar bear had anything to do with a strip-club then the connection escapes me. The photo signs for the strip clubs exclusively feature Spamela Pamderson, btw!);
- a man in an extremely fierce-looking samurai costume, right down to the tasselled cap and black-banded mouth’n’nose cloth, who was, yes, handing out flyers for the nearby Japanese restaurant. His trouble was that he looked so scary I don’t know if anyone was grabbing the flyers!

.... the flyer-hander-outerers also seem to act informally as information guides; I saw quite a few people asking questions - mostly ‘where is KFC?’ and ‘how much further to Target?’ sort of questions. All in Russian, so purrhaps they are a little part of the implicit ‘how to get things done in St Petersburg’ system - you know, the implicit local knowledge stuff that none of us ever see written down; we just know how it’s done. The implicit local stuff (says she, warming to her subject) which is EXACTLY why it takes four hours to buy a bucket, or go to the bank, or find a grog shop (a la Bergen), etc etc. Too basic for the tourist brochures; too informal for the council signs; and too internalised for the locals to think of sign-posting it. Dammit!

MORE godly intervention...

It's Sunday evening, August 24th, and we are not yet in Estonia. Because my dear husband is in hospital... he became ill on Friday morning, with a sudden high fever and stomach upset. When the fever climbed higher AFTER he took some aspirin, it was straight off to the (thankfully nearby) American Medical Clinic. We saw a doctor very quickly, and almost as quickly the initial blood test results showed a huge white blood cell count and a very low potassium count - both bad signs. They admitted him, saying 'overnight' but even then we could see the subtext was 'probably for the weekend'.

Since then I've been trotting backwards and forwards from the hotel to the clinic, bringing stuff in for him (including red geraniums nicked from the Hotel Astoria window boxes); eluding the drunk who keeps propositioning me as I pass (I HAVE to go that way, the canal prevents me crossing elsewhere without a big detour, and at times like 11pm that's not tempting..); keeping my chins up, and trying to remember to buy gin!

Here's the gist: M's liver, white blood cell, potassium and ? metabolite function/counts are all improving from very bad levels. The liver function disarray is because of an unidentified gastro-intestinal bug. The potassium and ? levels are related to having an infection, but I can't decode the Russ-lish and heavy accents of the several doctors we've seen, well enough to explain further. He's having blood tests each day, and each time the levels of all that lot have returned a little more towards normal.

His treatment has been litres and litres of rehydrating fluids (through a drip), with added potassium and liver-helping and -fixing additives. He's having something like 4 litres or more of this daily. He's now on antibiotics, a detoxifying liquid to help flush toxins from the bowel (a charcoal-based compound); extra blood pressure meds, and another liver-fixing-up drug. He has no fever, no tummy upset or pain. And... he's bored out of his brain! We have NO English text of any kind left to read ; I made a mercy trip to the English book shop today but missed the closing time by an hour ... no English newspapers are available. I may be desperate enough to print some pages from The Australian or something for the poor man. I left him my book of crosswords, and he has the dear old iPod...

So it's exciting times for us; tomorrow we'll have to start the administrative process of getting our visas extended (this is no small thing; the travel agent on Friday warned me most solemnly that I must take care than any certification by the clinic includes ME or else there will be - not MAY be - "penalties at the border"); sort out the Estonian accommodation and travel; move me to another room in the hotel, etc etc etc. It's been a fairly tense weekend...

One excellent piece of news is that we had a call from our travel/health insurance people in Australia, to confirm that they know what's going on and that we are covered by a direct payment, no forking out a zillion roubles of otherwise purrfectly good spending money. Double triple phew!

Pardon me if I don't give a big run-down on St P, that's all recorded on my laptop waiting for me to find a WiFi connection which is connected. I've tried and tried, at the hotel and at several cafes which advertise WiFi, but no luck. It's always nyet when I try.

Yesterday brought to you by a very nice loaf of white bread and some 'Enjoy', because I needed reminding. Today brought to you by sterner stuff - I needed the strongest potion to hand after a fairly big night of worrying .. yes, it's Jean Paul Gaultier '2', which is strong, potent and brave. Like I need to be.

Helsinki, proper stay this time.

From a Helsinki bed...

Oh HOW we slept last night, solid and silent and long.. all we managed after arriving in our room was to admire the features (standard modern hotel room, but the bed is in one piece, there is a big shelf in the bathroom, and I have the window side), unpack completely (and gee, what piles of stuff come out of those little hard-working suitcases), stagger out to eat, stagger back, and fall over.

M woke me just now with real coffee, yes we have a kettle, it’s amazing what a difference it makes to food if you have even the tiniest fridge, and a kettle.. and I am lying on the bed, looking (from the 7th floor) over the Helsinki Town Square rooftops, towards the cathedral. On a building nearby is the time and temperature, a breezy 19 degrees today. I see the locals are wearing jeans and long-sleeved jackets, so it can’t be so warm yet.

I woke dreaming of my brother, and a Chinese princess, and strangeness and distance and the madness of elite protocols in dynasties... what? Like, the princess needed a nom-de-plume, so all over the kingdom a list was made of all existing names, so she could be given a unique one.. I seem to have the Chinese on my mind. Which reminds me, I missed the diving in the Olympics again. I miss it every time. Dang. I like watching diving.

Anyway, we are slowly pulling ourselves together (with the help of the coffee and Rachmaninov’s 3rd piano concerto on the iPod) in time to meet M’s Finnish linguistic professor for lunch. I don’t much feel like going out, but I think we are free afterwards for more collapsing as needed.

Haven’t cracked the hotel’s “free” interwebs yet. I tried last night, by pressing buttons on the remote to make clever things happen on the tv, but I couldn’t then get the little laptop to run off the connection I think we’ve paid for.. oh well. Research later today should clear that up. The set-up in the room is that you tell the telly that you want interwebs, then use the keyboard on the desk with the telly as the screen. INteresting.

Seeya later..

I wish I could stay in bed....