Slava Leningrad!

Today was the last day of double grammar class for St. Petersburg, and may I say a huge FINALLY. I love class, it’s great and I learn lots, but 4 hours of grammar is enough to make anyone want to kill themselves. Anyways! After class today the girls and I walked past the Cherneshevskaya metro station to the Leningrad Blockade Museum. Once again it was our student IDs to the rescue and everything was vesplatna! I’ve written before about the mentality of St. Petersburg and how even the young people who live here still feel the burden of the blockade, and when you go through the museum you can truly begin to understand why. There were pieces of recovered planes (with full records of the pilots who went down with them), the personal effects of soldiers who never made it home, lots of WWII era posters, several pieces of decommissioned artillery, and many other interesting objects. In 2006, an excavation crew pulled a tank out of the Neva River in St. Petersburg. The tank was cleaned off and put on display in the city center the following year. Just sit there for a second and read that sentence again. They pulled a tank out of the river. How many places back home can recover such things from their city centers? Part of the museum was dedicated to recent excavations of the front line and the blockade mass graves. There are pictures showing people who have found full skeletons (sometime soldiers still holding their rifles with their shoes on) or buried artillery with multiple rounds of ammo buried alongside. 

Leningrad Blockade memorial ribbon

The museum was sobering and extremely interesting. You can’t really even begin to understand the Blockade until you see things like this in person. As someone who studies Russia, I thought I had a decently good grip on things such as this. However, now that I’m here in person, I’m realizing there’s so much more to the Russian mentality than what you read. Everyone here carries with them a generally sense of weariness over things that are far past or in the backs of their minds. If you’re ever in St. Pete’s, I highly recommend you make a visit to the Blockade Museum; it’s not big but well worth the visit, especially if you’re interested in WWII.

After a visit to the most sobering museum I’ve ever been to, it would only back sense to stick it to sobriety, or so to speak. Following a quick nap and some food, the girls and I met up on Dumskaya Ulitsa to hit up our usual bar haunts. Fidel was less crowded, so we sat our happy little butts down on barstools and ordered half-liters of beer. Our intention was to make the metro, so we started early at around 9pm, and by 10pm we were on our second round and had made friends with the group of Russian guys sitting next to us at the bar. I think there’s a misconception in the mind of Russian men that American women don’t drink because they constantly seem amazed to see us put away more than a liter of beer in a sitting. But we made some new friends and hauled ass to the metro, safely landing on the last train out. I got home and promptly passed out, which only serves to fuel my speculation that I don’t sleep much/well here. I’ll take sleep where I can get it, thank you!

All in all, it was a good Friday! Love and hugs to all!

Xoxo