St. Petersburg, Russia

The time had come for my very own winter invasion of Russia. Unlike Napoleon or Hitler, I had chosen to attack Russia by bus.

I kept myself busy on the early evening journey from Helsinki to St. Petersburg by trying to speed-learn the Cyrillic alphabet. It was essential to pick it up – and seemed surprisingly easy: think our alphabet mixed with a smattering of Greek and you’re well on the way to getting there. Learning to read strange new characters such ‘я’ as a ya sound was easy; the most challenging part was the mental gymnastics needed when seeing a ‘С’ and prouncing it as an S sound, or reading a ‘Р’ and forcing yourself to read it as an R sound, supressing your ingrained instincts established since an early age to read them as we would.

By the time we reached the Russian border night had fallen. During the application process for a Russian visa, I quickly realised the Motherland was going to be a bureaucratic nightmare. It was the kind of place where you needed a permit just to apply for a permit. I gathered up my passport with visa, invitation, application form, and any other bumpf I thought might be relevant and joined the back of the queue outside the passport window in a shoddy outhouse of a building.

When my turn came, I stepped up to the line and presented my passport unsmilingly on the counter to the uniformed middle-aged Russian woman behind the border post, who returned my unsmile and eyed me suspiciously. It’s a common stereotype that Russians are not the smiliest of people, and like the best stereotypes, it’s largely true. When you greet a stranger in Russia, you don’t do it with a smile. Doing so betrays the fact you are either a foreigner or clinically insane (or perhaps both). But contrary to popular belief, Russians do smile – only generally when they are with friends or when they find something amusing, such as seeing a foreigner beaming inanely at a Russian stranger.

The Red Lady spent what felt like an eternity poring through my passport, far longer than she had spent on any of the others. She flicked through again and again, reading the visas, checking the feel and consistency of the paper, testing it under ultraviolet light, and checking my photograph multiple times. Anglo-Russian relations had, in recent months, taken a turn for the worse; a few tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats from London and Moscow had made diplomatic relations between the two countries decidedly frosty. I had convinced myself the Red Lady’s delay was just to antagonise me for my nationality.

I stayed unfased and unsmiling. In my head, I was no longer Stephen John James. I had become СТИВЕН ДЖОН ДЖЕЙМС.

Finally satisfied, the Old Batski tossed my passport on the counter and I picked it up with what I hoped was the Russian word for “thank you”, which had been taught to me by a random Russian I had met in Tallinn when out drinking with the baby from the Johnson’s Baby Shampoo commercial. It turned out to be authentic – he hadn’t fed me the Russian for “I’m a spy, cabbage face!” or anything – so I proceeded through the closed customs aisle and boarded the bus again in Mother Russia.

When we finally rocked up at St Petersburg, I was completely thrown. The bus terminated not where I thought it would have – the main bus station – but rather at some unknown place that looked more like a train station.

My trusty Lonely Planet guidebook map lived up to its expectations of being an utter useless pile of crap, seeing as the places on it were labelled solely in the Roman alphabet but everything around me was predictably in Cyrillic. I squinted at the strange letters forming the station’s sign, but found my speed-learning skills were no longer what they used to be, as I had consequently forgotten pretty much everything I had learned on the bus.

Bollockski.

On my own, late at night, in a city in which I couldn’t understand anything around me, without an accommodation booked, I felt a mild panic welling up inside me. Inside the station I collared a railway guard with a classic ‘Englishman abroad’ greeting in Russian – “Hi. Excuse me – English?” – which returned a slow and sombre shake of the head. I ploughed on regardless in pigeon Russian, which I had prepared prior to approaching him. “Here”, I said in Russian, pointing wildly at the floor and station signs. “Where?”

Eventually the chap – exasperated but helpful – said a word I could pick up on. Baltika. That was the name of one of the train stations I’d seen on the Lonely Planet map. I thanked him, and having calmed down now I’d nailed my location as somewhere south of the centre, set off on a walk north to locate the hostel.

It was a long walk through the city, and I wasn’t in any mood to take in the sights. Finally, at ten minutes to eleven in the evening, ten minutes before the place closed, I arrived at the doorstep of St Petersburg’s International YHA hostel. It was clear that the girl at the reception had been exposed too much to foreigners since working here, as she was smiling brightly. Then again, perhaps she was insane. Regardless, she was a welcome sight as I grabbed a bed and retired to the dorm, which it turned out I had all to myself. Exhausted at the mental and physical stress my journey into Russia had thrown at me so far, and grateful to be indoors out of the cold, even if it was in a Soviet-military chic dorm room heavy on exposed piping and light on charm, I went out like a light.