Night life

I'm tired, still, woozy from fatigue and fighting to keep my eyes open. I don't think I slept more than 7 hours the From Friday to Sunday. What a weekend!

St. Petersburg is full of inconvenient time limits, deadlines and curfews. The bridges go up at around 2:30 AM to allow boat traffic through, so if you live on Vasilevsky Island (I do) or one of the other islands, you have to be across the bridge before then or wait until 6:00 in the morning. Then, the dormitory where I live locks its doors at 1:00 AM, as a safety precaution in a neighborhood where serial rapists have been known to lurk, which means that you have to be back inside by 1 or wait until they open again at 6:00. Finally, the last trains on the metro lines leave at midnight (buses stop running at 11), so unless you want to take a gypsy cab--or a real cab, for a much higher price--you have to make it back to the metro at midnight. All this combines to create a really interesting night culture in St. Petersburg. People generally either go out early and come back home around midnight or 1 AM, or go out on the last train and stay out until the wee hours of the morning. 12:00 AM is a really interesting time to be on the metro, because the early birds are raucous, rumpled, and swaying on the up-escalator, while the night owls are groomed and alert, ready for a night out that starts on the down-escalator into the station.

Friday I was ready for a night out. I had good company: a group consisting of Andrea, Alisa, and Gabby, my neighbors across the hall; Alesia, Dorian, Christina, and Lena, others from our program; and three internationals we picked up at the dorm. We left at 11:30 to walk to the metro, 20 minutes away. We were meeting our friends (Megan, Joe, David, Rachel, Paul and his girlfriend Ella, Cait, Alex, and Lila) at Fish Fabrique, the famous artsy bar of the Petersburg Avant-Garde--but word came down the line that there was an exorbitant cover charge (ha!) in the realm of 6 dollars, or 200 roubles, so we diverted ourselves and the two groups didn't cohere. Alex and Cait met us on Liteniey Prospekt and we walked to Griboyedev, a famous [infamous] club in the neighborhood. It wasn't raining, but it had been, and my toes were wet in my culturally-appropriate high heels by the time we got there. We managed to haggle the cover charge down from 300 roubles and went inside and downstairs into the dark, thumpingly loud basement club, where the walls were plastered with magazine cut-out collage and the luxurious couches occupied by beautiful young Petersburgers with legs crossed and shoes dangling, or smoking cigarettes and in animated conversation, or heads close together with secret smiles, whispering in each other's ears. On a whim I told the bartender it was my birthday and got a free shot of absinthe! It's a trick I plan on trying out every time I go somewhere new, because they generally don't ask for any sort of identification. This way it can be my birthday every weekend! (Isn't that the best way to do it, Katie?)

After having a dance-off (I think that's what was going on?) with a well-dressed, serious dark young man, I went up to the roof and met some linguistically confused Finns who were smoking there. The three of them wouldn't believe that my friend Cait and I weren't Russian and kept repeating "Oh! Bez accenta, bez accenta!" ("No accent!") until we broke down and admitted that we're actually from Moscow. One of them couldn't decide which language was best to speak in and slurred between Russian, French, English, and Spanish. He would ask a question in one language, then switch to another as soon as I'd answer in that language.

When that got old, about 3 AM, we took a gypsy cab to Dacha, a club in the international-nightlife district where a lot of Americans hang out (I don't know why, it's awful, and I don't know why everyone wanted to go.) to dance more. There I met Pasha and Roman, roommates who told me they were brothers and who I later found out were really just roommates. We talked a bit about music and decided to meet up the next night at another club where they were having a Beatles, Doors, and Rolling Stones themed dance party.

By the time 5:00 rolled around, my friends were all worn out, sitting in a 24-hour cafe around the corner from the club district, picking listlessly at their shashlik (shish-kabobs) and shverma (like gyros, with lamb and mayonnaise). We finally connected with Megan, Rachel, Joe, and Lila and walked to Chainaya Loshka, "The Tea Spoon", a chain tea-and-blini place next to the bus stop, to wait for the first bus to roll in at 6:03.

And it did, and we got on it, and went home. But now it's Monday evening and I have homework to do and a nap to take, so Saturday will have to be documented another time.