St Petersburg, Russia, October 2025
At least part of the original intent behind creating this blog site was to keep a travelogue—somewhat brief trip reports with selected photos, to help preserve the memories. Well, good intentions pave the road to you know where. Turns out I am too busy. Or too lazy. Or both. And yet memories fade too quickly if you don’t write them down. So, let us try one more time. If I make one post a week, I should clear the backlog for the last 2–3 years quite quickly, and beyond that, the memories are faded already.
Going back to my home city of St. Petersburg is always a challenge. Choosing what to do and who to see in one week is tough, and the time zone change is not helpful. This time, I had three main goals—to see my 98-year-old aunt, to pick up some leftover money from my mom’s pension, and to submit dual citizenship paperwork. All three were accomplished, at the expense of coming back completely exhausted.
Since I was flying to St. Petersburg on Turkish Airlines from New York through Istanbul, the trip started with getting a rental car, driving to New York, getting a haircut at our family’s favorite Korean hairdresser shop, Kakaboka in Flushing (from the owner Michelle), sleeping in a Best Western, and finally getting to JFK on the morning of Friday, October 24th. The Best Western in Jamaica looked like it was in a not-so-safe neighborhood, and Highway 678 was partially under construction due to a major remodel project at JFK, so a 10-mile drive took me 40 minutes. But other than that, no complications to report. The Turkish Airlines check-in counter was nearly deserted—I guess the tourist season must be over. Both flights, to Istanbul and to St. Petersburg, were right on schedule. Despite early morning fog in Istanbul, my luggage arrived safely, border control was fast once I figured out there were separate lines for citizens, and my dear best friend Vadim was already there at Pulkovo Airport to meet me. The drive to the one-bedroom apartment one block away from my aunt’s place near the “Ozerki” subway station—rented for a week for about $220—was quick, and getting in with a key from the little safe box on the wall was easy.
This was not the end of the adventures for the day, though. One of my favorite Russian rock musicians, Viacheslav Butusov, was giving a concert that evening in the Oktiabrsky Concert Hall, and Vadim helped me get two tickets. I took a quick shower, lay down to rest for an hour or so, and headed to the subway to get downtown. I had a quick bite at one of the diners that are plentiful in the city and met with my first love, Inna, who kindly agreed to go to the concert with me, since Vadim is not interested in this kind of music. She looked great—some people commented she looked 10 years younger than me in the photos, but I have the excuse of just having flown thousands of miles.
Butusov’s old band, Nautilus Pompilius, was absolutely huge when I was young. I liked them a lot and collected all their records. Sadly, none of us are getting any younger. Viacheslav is now 64, and his voice is not the same. It didn’t help that his new band, Orden Slavy, is just three guitars and drums—a very heavy sound that does not fit all of his songs. The old familiar hits like “Alain Delon Speaks French” and “Bound by One Chain” were still great, and the encore “Goodbye, America” still drives the audience wild, but overall I was a bit disappointed, and his new songs did not connect with me at all. Neither did the vague references to God between the songs. After the concert: taxi back to my rental apartment, and that was the only night the entire week I slept for 11 hours—waking up at 11 a.m. the next morning—which actually ruined my sleep pattern for the whole week. I kept not being able to fall asleep before 4 a.m. and waking up at 11 a.m., closer to New York time, which is seven hours behind. The good news is it made switching back after coming home super easy.
The next day, Sunday the 26th, was a bit more restful. I walked to visit my aunt Nina. She is now almost completely blind—a consequence of glaucoma and not having cataract surgery in time—sad and very cranky. My poor cousin Olga, her daughter, is temporarily living with her and taking care of her, and I was very concerned to see how tired Olga is and how much weight she has lost. So part of what I tried to do that Sunday, and also Wednesday and Friday, was to bring good food and wine from the nearby OK supermarket and feed them both. The wine is amazingly good and inexpensive in Russia—a typical price is $5, and the most exquisite one from Crimea cost me $11. Also that Sunday I went to a nearby Italian restaurant, Bona Capona, for lunch, to meet with my old friend Natalia and her son Vladislav. I made the mistake of ordering lamb tongues, which were probably not too fresh and quite oversalted, but the dessert was great and so was the conversation. (See my other post on choosing a name for human connection.)
Next day, Vadim and I planned something unusual. The place is called Flotarium, and it is a sensory deprivation experience. You float in a chamber filled with salt-saturated water in complete silence and darkness for an hour. I found the experience interesting but not exactly enlightening. I’m not sure what exactly I expected, but it is not complete deprivation. You still feel the warm water on your back and warm air on your belly. The sensation of floating is cool, but I did not succeed in getting into a deep meditative state. I think part of the reason is that the entire week I could not help feeling very anxious, so even floating was not enough to get me fully relaxed. Vadim liked it quite a bit, even though he did not take the 30-minute massage session following the float (I did), and he claimed he had not a worry in the world afterward while we were having tea in their lounge. We finished the night with dinner at our favorite restaurant, Ferma (“Farm”), which has consistently good food, amazing desserts, and extensive wine and tea selections. The conversation grew deeper than usual this time, touching on our emotional states and the details of our private lives. I guess we are getting older, and it is starting to dawn on us that the end of it all is drawing near.
Tuesday, we met with Inna again to go see a ballet at St. Petersburg’s best theater, the Mariinsky. I took the chance to walk about a mile from the subway station to the Georgian restaurant near the theater where we met for dinner before the performance, and although the sky was gray and it was drizzling, as it did all week, I could not help being delighted by how beautiful my home city is, even in the rain. The performance consisted of four miniatures: Le Carnaval, Le Spectre de la Rose, The Swan, and Scheherazade. Fantastic venue, beautiful costumes, wonderful music. Scheherazade was the longest at 45 minutes and connected with me the least. It was too modern and almost X-rated, with performers caressing each other half the time instead of dancing. The Swan, performed by Ekaterina Kondaurova, music by Saint-Saëns, was the shortest at 4 minutes and beyond words. She can move with ethereal grace, and her arms flow in waves as if she had no bones.
On Wednesday there was no cultural program; it was the day I started navigating the labyrinths of Russian bureaucracy. To make the long story shorter: to submit dual citizenship paperwork you need to register with the State Services agency, and for that you need a bank account to pay the fees, and as it turns out for anything at all—especially opening a bank account—you need a local phone number to receive SMS messages with secret codes (so-called two-factor authorization). The bank offered to sell me a SIM card right there, and I happily agreed, which was a nearly fatal mistake. My Verizon phone, although unlocked, refused to connect to the carrier affiliated with Sberbank, Sber Mobile.
I went across the street to a tiny phone repair booth, and after tinkering with my phone for a while a kind young technician managed to place a call. Back to the bank I went, full of hope, but it was not to be so simple. To complete the account setup, an SMS with the secret code had to be received not once, but about five times. And my phone was losing the connection every couple of minutes. The very patient bank clerk suggested that we go to the window to get a stronger signal. In the end, we went to the window five times, the whole thing took 1.5 hours, but I walked out a happy owner of a bank account and even a debit card. Although they will accept cash, a debit card is the preferred way to pay for goods and services in Russia, as you receive a small bonus from the bank each time, and if you do it often enough, it compensates for the account service fee (approximately $2 per month).
I did stop by the local State Services office, but the line was too long—about an hour wait—so I decided it was enough hard work for one day and went to get food for Olga and Aunt Nina. The OK supermarket next to the Ozerki subway station is my favorite place—they have a fantastic variety of prepared food, including dozens of different salads, four or five kinds of grilled fish (I chose ocean perch), and an extensive wine section, where I got an amazing Crimean Saperavi.
I went back to the State Services office the next morning (Thursday) and the wait was only about 10 minutes, but when I got to the window, the first thing I was told was that to register with them I needed, guess what, to receive an SMS message with a secret code. This time going to the window didn’t help, and neither did connecting to Wi-Fi. We even went to their computer in the lobby to try some different way to proceed, and then the lights went out for a few seconds (a very rare thing in St. Petersburg—must have been just my luck) and the computer restarted. The clerk told me I could actually finish the procedure from home, so I took pity on him (and on myself) and left. To spare further details, after a long and frustrating struggle, by Friday afternoon I had completed the whole ordeal, including submitting the dual citizenship form. My biggest surprise was that I owed about $23 in taxes, which is mysterious because I have no income and no property in Russia. But I had no energy or time to go to the tax office, so I just paid.
The struggle was more than compensated by the joy of visiting the Grand Hall of the Saint Petersburg Philharmonia. Once again we met with Natalia and Vladislav and started the evening with dinner at a Georgian restaurant, Mamalyga, situated behind the Kazansky Cathedral in the very center of the city. I didn’t bring enough cash, nor did my brand-new bank account have enough money to pay the ~$330 dinner bill, so Natalia had to chip in. While not unusual by New York or European standards, this is far above typical prices at St. Petersburg restaurants, even good ones. For comparison, on Tuesday we only paid about $50 for two at another Georgian restaurant near the Mariinsky Theater. I guess around Kazansky Cathedral is about as popular a tourist spot as it gets (big crowds on Nevsky Prospect, the central artery of the city). One more thing of note: across Nevsky Prospect from Kazansky is the biggest bookstore in the city, The House of Books, where I bought the latest novel by my favorite writer, Viktor Pelevin, A Sinistra (so far proving to be a bit of a disappointment, but I am not finished reading it yet).
The concert featured operatic soprano Vasilisa Berzhanskaya with the Quantum Satis chamber orchestra, performing arias and concertos by Vivaldi and Handel. To say that I was impressed is to say nothing. The orchestra was excellent, but Vasilisa is an instrument of God. Her voice covers several octaves, from contralto to coloratura, and she certainly does not need a microphone. This is not the first time I’ve heard opera, but the first in a concert hall more intimate than the Metropolitan. On some high notes, I thought the chandeliers would shatter and fall down. Nice to see the stage decorated with flowers, every seat in the theater taken, and people (including us) having a great time.
Friday, October 31st — more fighting to receive the SMS messages, and finally completing all the forms. Since it was still early afternoon, I decided I had time for one last cultural immersion and took a subway ride back to Nevsky Prospect to visit the Russian Museum. I got lucky — the Benois Wing featured a large exhibition of Russian avant-garde, early 20th-century art: Kandinsky, Malevich, Chagall, Filonov, and others. Not only were there many paintings I had not seen before, but what I especially liked were the posters with painter biographies, details of that historical era, descriptions of the art, and some of the things the painters had to say about it. Apparently, Kandinsky believed that painting should be like music — a symphony of color and shape rather than depictions of familiar objects. I believe the example below expresses that idea quite nicely. It is called “Two ovals”. I challenge you to find the two ovals in it 😊.
I came back and had the last dinner with Olga and Nina, and then it was time to pack the suitcase. As a proud owner of a debit card, I was able to call my own taxi using Yandex Taxi, a service similar to Uber. The brand of the car was “Jag,” one of the obscure Chinese-made brands flooding Russia, and although it looked nice inside and out, the driver complained that the reliability was really bad. I was nervous and got to the airport around 4 a.m., 2.5 hours before my flight. To my great surprise, checking in, passing security, customs, and border control all together took 15 minutes, so I ended up inside with nothing to do except buy and consume an almond croissant and a cappuccino.
This is a good place to note that they have no idea how to make good coffee in Russia. Every morning of the week, I would try a new little café or bakery, and while the pastries were great, the coffee was consistently disappointing. They would have brand-new Italian machines, three different grinders for different beans, and still—disappointing.
Well, the flight left on time, but my next challenge was the 4-hour layover in Istanbul. The Istanbul airport is huge and full of shops and restaurants, but the prices are scary. I paid 11 euros for a small scoop of gelato and a glass of mineral water. I walked back and forth across the enormous airport to pass the time and was almost late for my flight to New York because they have not one but three (in a row) additional passport checks for American flights.
Not sure if I drifted off at all on the 10-hour flight—must have—but I still arrived at JFK completely exhausted. Global Entry helps, and my suitcase arrived relatively quickly, so in another hour I was at the Avis car rental and driving soon after. In hindsight, I should have booked the hotel closer to the airport because driving for an hour after not sleeping for 40 hours was tough, but I wanted to get out of New York City to avoid morning traffic. I made it safely to my Ramada Inn in Paramus, NJ. What a smelly little hole for $190 a night—what a contrast to my sparkling-clean apartment in St. Petersburg for $220 for the entire week—but at that point I did not care. I bought a bottle of water and dropped into bed. No jet lag. A quick visit to Starbucks (good coffee!) for breakfast and to the Korean grocery store (H Mart) for some delicacies, and I was finally on my way home. Just another 3.5 hours of driving.
Wow, this is a much longer write-up than I anticipated. I guess as I go back in time, they will become shorter.