Our next stop was in an attempt to buy a copy of the film The Barber of Siberia . Spotting some videos at the back of a shop, we dived in and headed straight for the counter. Whilst Tasha was stood there, squinting at the video stock, I took a look around and was surprised to see that the shop also sold what looked like weapons.. at least I think that is what they were. My eyes moved over to the next shelf, which sported a startling range of vibrators. Within seconds I realised that we had actually stumbled into a sex shop! Quickly deciding that maybe their video selection would not meet our requirements, we spun around and made a hasty retreat to the street outside.
We needed to run another errand - this time at the post office. Tasha had to send some stuff back to the states. It took an age to sort through all the regulations, fill out the paperwork and pay the neccessary bribe to the guy behind the desk, who then directed us to another desk, where a young girl was casually flicking cockroaches off her keyboard whilst barking at customers and hammering papers with a huge rubber stamp. After about an hour, most of our postal requirements had been met and we continued through the city.
Our next encounter was with a middle aged woman outside the Church of the Resurection. She was one of those ladies who confusingly sits on the fine line between Zhenshina and Baboushka, too young to be old and visa versa. She was sat on a bridge with a collection of puppies, a kitten and a couple of collection boxes - a common, glorified, Russified and seemingly legalised version of begging. We stopped to admire the little balls of teeth and fur. With Tasha's reasonable grasp of Russian, we managed some conversation with the woman, who very openly launched into her life story, never complaining and always smiling over issues, which to a Westerner would be quite unmentionable. This lady was half Russian and half Ukranian and had spenther childhood in Estonia, which at the time was one of the Soviet Republics. At the age of 14 she married a 26 year old Russian as a way of getting out of her village. She casually explained to us that her period had started at the age of 11, so quite naturally she was ready to get married. She couldn't understand why we were both unmrried and as she spoke she would periodically ruffle my hair, muttering krassivi, krassivi and insisting that a man with a beard has a rich heart. Formerly working as a nurse she had earned 500 rubles a month (about 17 dollars), but on the street with her puppies she can earn as much in a day. The life history went on.. Her grandmother was Russian and her grandfather was a gypsy from Moldova. They had married and had 17 children, the last one being born to a mother who by then was 52 years old. Rather than follow in the footsteps of her grandmother, the dog lady , as we now refer to her had five children, but had also had 14 abortions - each one self done with a pair of 100 mm scissors and a bottle of vodka... clearly her years of nurse training didn't go wasted. I winced at the thought, but still she ruffled my hair beautiful, beautiful. And then she moved unexpectedly on to religion, saying how she did not believe in the Christian God, but in the God of the trees, God of the air, God of the Sun... her own God, possibly the only sentiment she might share with a visiting tourist from Britain.
The story continued with how she had been thrown out of Estonia for not having a passport. We began to loose the thread. My head was still trying to decide where to file the admissions of the last fifteen minutes. The conversation ended wtih another short bout of hair ruffling and a big gold-toothed smile, wishing us well on our journey.
Looking for further entertainment, Tasha and I walked back to Arsenalnaya Nabrezhenaya to do a bit of prisoner spotting, an ideal tea-time activity when cruising around St Petersburg. Bizarrely, the main prison in the city, Kresty Prison, is on a main road along the northern edge of the Neva river and is right next door to the hostel. It is not unusual during the early evening to find a group of well-wishing friends and relatives to those poor souls incarcerated withing the walls of Kresty lining the boulevard to signal messages up to the windows. First they have to identify their friend, by looking up at the windows from which the inmates dangle items of clothing. The windows are small barred holes, so it is umpossible to see their faces. Once Uncle Vlad, or brother Igor has been identified, the tearful relative then launches into a slow process of signalling Cyrillic characters by waving their hands in the air, as if landing a carrier jet, until the message is complete. Inmates signal that they have understood by waving the chosen piece of clothing up and down, whilst a sideways movement indicates that the message was not clear enough.. We stood for a while and watched from a distance, then went back to the hostel to drink some Bochkarov and carry on muddling through our travel plans.