St. Pete

I always reserve the harshest words for those I'm close to. This is the best way I can think of to excuse my mainly critical words when writing about St Pete. If you've already detected from the last sentence that I could be inclined to slipping into a city-as-person metaphor, you won't be disappointed.


St Pete is so damn big and spread out, it goes on and on, with far too many empty buildings in it's centre so that its heart beats very slowly, almost inaudibly. In fact there is no centre. In Moscow, everyone knows where the centre is, and everything radiates from there. In St Pete, in the place where the centre should be, there's just water.


This absence of a centre makes people even more aware of where the real one is: for such a big proud city, it's painfully out of reach 670km south. Hence the city's strange swampy lethargy is redoubled by this lack of focus.


There are certain people you can meet who are alluring in their ability to be sometimes very charming and at others terribly indifferent. You grapple to find their heart: some solid yet tender area which, if reached, might give you a measure of the person and something worth gripping on to. But with some people it's just like St Petersburg, as you get closer to where you hope to find the heart, you find instead a kind of dark watery current that pushes along silently and can't possibly be seized.