ooops

So it has been a few months since I've blogged... Sorry about that. I have other entries, but I will add them later. This is the blog I did for my program.

Now that the weather has warmed up, and most of the snow has melted, or been shipped out of the city, St. Petersburg has once more evolved into almost a completely different city. I have found that with every season, the city has taken on a different personality. Now, as I stroll around the city, taking in its beauty, I see people everywhere; people of all kinds, of all ages, and of all social groups and from many different places. People dress in such a wide variety of cloths, there isn’t really a St. Petersburg style, anything goes. This city is very diverse, as many Russians have told me, “St. Petersburg is the New York of Europe”. Saint Petersburg is kind of a melting pot of people. We have a lot of people from different regions of Russia, as well as other countries. Every day, walking to school, or wandering around, I see hundreds faces. We don’t always think about these other people, they are just faces to us, but when we pay attention, we realize that each of those faces belongs to a person, a life, a story. Sometimes while I am on the escalator, descending into the underground world of the metro, I imagine the lives of the people passing me by on their way up to the surface. The older people captivate my thoughts as I daydream. They have lived through so much. I have a friend whose grandmother is in her 90’s. She lived during the time of the tsar, through the revolution, through the Soviet Union, and now into the 21st century and in the age of the Internet. She even knows how to send email.
Just by looking at these people, you would never know who they really are, and what their lives are like. I live in a building that is an apartment, but hotels are located on the lower levels. We have about five men who work at the door as the concierge for our building, and they are wonderful. The other day, I noticed an unfamiliar man sitting at the reception desk, so I introduced myself and started chatting with him. This man’s name is Vladimir and he is probably in his 60’s, with crazy black hair that only grows on the sides of his head. After a few minutes of chatting, he told me that he used to dance in the Mariinski Ballet. He had the lead in many productions such as The Nutcracker and Swan Lake, and he traveled around the world with the ballet. We chatted a while and he pulled out an album of photos from his days as a dancer. The photographs were amazing, and he was so happy to share them with me. Vladimir was also a film actor. He informed me that next Friday, if I tune into channel 1 at 21:30, I might watch a film in which he performed the lead role.
I do not understand how someone who used to be a dancer at the Mariinski and a movie actor ended up as my concierge, but this is just one more example of how people can surprise you here. I am glad that I got to know this man. He even invited me to go to the Ballet with him. Russians are interesting people full of surprises and secrets, and they will share their story, we just need to ask.