Saint Petersburg

Saturday night, a little before 9pm, my plane landed from Saint Petersburg by way of Paris. I had never been happier to be in New York City, and I have a feeling I never will again.

I went to Saint Petersburg on the 25th with a group of 4 students (myself included) and a professor from the University of Connecticut for a course entitled “Creative Writing in Saint Petersburg.” In our week at UConn prior to leaving the country, I was actually looking forward to the trip; the other students seemed nice, the professor was engaging, and I was enjoying writing again.

But, alas, the trip wasn’t what I’d hoped or expected. Because of the requirements for the course I had very little time to explore the city. In addition, I had very strong disagreements with the professor on what constituted good writing, or at least why my writing was good (or wasn’t); she asked us to write a modern “Nevsky Prospect”, Gogol’s short story about the famous street in the city, and when I did so with a sort of Gogollian treatment of death and emotion, she graded me down and said that what I wrote wasn’t realistic. Frustrating, but I’ll live.

The course was the worst of it, but there were other frustrating parts. It was frustrating to find that the inn we were told we would stay at wasn’t where we were actually going to be staying. It was frustrating that our water was often cold and always brown because of rust, and smelled like rotten eggs (I thought everybody’s was like this, but found out at the end of the program that no, just the place where we were staying had filthy water). It was frustrating that it was a long, secluded walk from the university where classes were held to our dorm, so we were in danger of being mugged. It was frustrating that there was no phone in our entire goddamn building, so the only time and place I was able to call home was in the Summer Literary Seminars office, during office hours.

But I digress.

I think what I learned most about my trip was that travelling can be a wonderful experience if I go alone, or with someone I love or really like; going as part of a course, a poorly organized course, soured the experience for me. In retrospect, however, I’d have gone even if I’d known about all the problems I was going to face, because I got to experience what I can say without a doubt is the most interesting city in the world (if not the most beautiful).

I’ll undoubtedly write more about Saint Petersburg and my adventures there later, but for now I’ve uploaded the most important photos from my time in Saint Petersburg (Russia) to Flickr, and you can view a slideshow (if you’re so inclined) here.