If you want a taste of what traveling solo in the former Soviet Union is like, read on! This travelogue was written in short chapters during a recent business trip to St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Tashkent and sent off to friends and family back in the United States. If you enjoy reading about this journey, please drop me a line and let me know!
—Melissa Jordan
Back in the (ex)USSR
Hello, all! Well, it looks like I will, indeed, be on-line
during this journey—just tested out the connection and downloaded my
incoming messages—of course, it is at the snail’s pace of 14,400
baud (@ the criminally high rate of $5.50/minute), but it’s a connection,
nonetheless.
It’s almost midnight, and I’m in my palatial room at the Hotel Astoria in St. Petersburg—it really is gorgeous. The hotel was opened in 1912, became notorious as the place where the poet/writer Yesenin offed himself (I got that room once—and didn’t sleep very well, thinking about that), and then was promptly closed by the Soviets in 1920. It’s really elegant, and it’s one block from the Winter Palace/Hermitage. I have St. Isaac’s Cathedral outside my window, and, in the pale sun of the White Nights, it feels like I’m receiving a benediction from the gesturing angels and saints that circle the cathedral’s rotunda.
As I’m typing, I’m waiting for room service to arrive with my tremendously overpriced dinner. They’re backed up, and I probably won’t get my meal until 1 am. Here’s the system: in order to pay for room service, I have to use cash rubles. In order to exchange rubles, I have to walk out of the hotel’s “corpus A,” down the street to “corpus B” where the exchange bureau is. The rate is 4785 rubles to the dollar. Then, I come back, order my food—prices listed in US dollars, and pay in rubles—at the rate of 5,777 rubles to the dollar. Ah, capitalism!!! The only items available right now are: smoked sturgeon @ $38, “meat” (???) in bacon and mushrooms @ $22, and mushrooms in sour cream (one outrageously rich portion is about the size of a small cupcake) @ $11. Odd menu choices guaranteed to give the diner strange dreams later on...
(By the way, I didn’t just go down to one of the hotel restaurants, as it is not the done thing for a single woman to eat in a restaurant alone here, unless you want more than your share of unwelcome attention—there are some... “cultural” issues with that.)
Okay, it’s time to sign off—I’m hoping that dinner will arrive before another wave of sleep comes on (didn’t sleep on the transatlantic flight—the man next to me had a pungent aroma, and was chewing tobacco the whole flight—occasionally spitting into a Snapple bottle he’d brought along. YUCK!!!!!!)
Cheers—I’ll drop a line from Moscow at the end of the week.
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