
(Picture #1: Famous Onion Thing)
My journey to Russia began auspiciously, as the train arrived under Schipol airport, where it stopped and nothing happened. Nothing continued to happen, except that the cortisol level of the passengers worried about missing their flights increased. After a very long time, the doors made a strange sound and half opened, and that was good enough for me. In the airport, I found my check-in gate. This part was confusing to me because instead of a nice lady underneath a sign that said “Prague” there was an insistent lady telling me to go away and print a boarding pass at the automated machines, which in my experience are generally reserved for holders of e-tickets. She insisted; I obliged, and sure enough a pass was printed.
Which got me as far as Prague, at which point I rather belatedly realized that I didn’t have a boarding pass for the next leg: St. Petersburg. I tried to ask The Man there (a generic reference to anyone you ever need to ask anything), but the security in Prague is right in front of the gate so you can’t get to the people who know what they are talking about until you wait in line behind the previous flight of boarding passengers, who become irritated in Czech if you attempt to bypass them. When I finally got to the gate, The Man informed me they had paged me five times. (Apparently my name pronounced in Czech doesn’t cause me to have an orienting response.) I had not been checked in, and all the seats were taken. I decided not to freak out since I have learned if you expect everything to go wrong when travelling you usually have the satisfaction of being right, and occasionally have the pleasant surprise of being wrong and actually getting to your destination as planned. In any case, they bumped me up to “business class” and informed me of how lucky I was. The ticket printing machine wouldn’t print tickets, so they settled for scribbling one out by hand.
In any case, I boarded last, on a Russiya Airlines plane likely made over a century ago. Business class was quickly discovered to be the first nine seats of the rest of the airplane, cordoned off with a small curtain but otherwise alike in every way. Since I hadn’t paid extra and was actually on the flight, despite my incompetence with automated check-in ladies, I was feeling pretty happy and took the opportunity to evaluate the tangible benefits of travelling Business Class. There were three:
1) A cup of orange juice was served before take-off, and unused portions were promptly collected;
2) A moist, warm towel was offered before breakfast for the purpose of washing ones’ hands; and
3) Upon arrival at the airport, two big airport buses arrived to take us to the terminal. We 9 superior individuals had a bus to ourselves lest we be inconvenienced by the common masses, who all presumably were squashed into the other one.
Russian officials either scare me or provide me with a source of entertainment, according to my mood. This is because they never, ever smile, and the customs lady was no exception. In this case, I tried to be the most polite, friendly Canadian the world has ever seen, with the distinct goal of obtaining at least a sympathetic upward twitch of the lips. No luck. I laughed.
I stopped by the Tourist Information booth to pick up a free map, and found it strangely endearing that the info lady seemed to have cut out a number of subway maps from a magazine to supplement her supplies. I asked about the city bus, and she directed me outside the terminal, where I saw a #13 just about to leave a stop. My instructions explicitly said to check it was going to one destination over another, but it was unlabelled and there was no time to check so I just got on.
The bus was a bit of surprise. It looked like someone had left it in a sand dune for 40 years, exhumed it, and pressed it into service – all dirty, rusty and falling apart. Conversely, the Russians therein were immaculately dressed. One of them yelled at me for a while because I pressed her with my backpack, but I couldn’t help it because there was absolutely no room. I apologized and moved and then had to ignore her because I was all out of ideas. The bus was already enroute when I thought about a ticket – I was forced to enter on the back, there were none of the normal European Stamping machines visible, and definitely no way of getting through the crowd to the bus driver. I didn’t even know how much it cost. So I decided to do nothing, and tackle the next problem which was whether the bus and I were trying to get to the same place. This was satisfied by a man next to me via hand motions and map pointing. I was indeed on the right bus. Somehow I understood they were going to the same station, and I was to follow them when the time arose. I noticed people lining up with money to pay before getting off, which all seemed a bit backwards. The bus driver was a hairy, greasy, unkempt man grunting at people and smoking a cigarette.
My first impression of the Russian Landscape was not very positive, but I later learnt it was not a generalizable impression. Around the airport, construction was happening along the highways, leading everything to look like rutted dried mud. Also, when I left the Netherlands spring was well underway, and here everything is a bit delayed due to the latitude. Everything in St. P’s was brown, and the highway was reminiscent of those in China in terms of orderliness of conduct. I saw a man on a fast bike driving on the highway!
At the train station, the man and his wife waited for me to pay and took me into the metro station, where they aimed me at a ticket booth and disappeared. I waited in the mob, and when I arrived at the front I pointed at my map and held up one finger. I received some change that felt like it was made of aluminium, and a metal token with an “M” on it, and proudly presented to The Man at the gate. He agreed with my map-pointings but then suddenly stopped me “no biggidge!”. It turns out there is a special token if you want to carry things on the metro. I caught sight of the lady I met on the bus, still in line for some reason. She most likely asked me what was going on, and I pointed to my huge backpack. She bought me a new token and refused to take my money for it. The St. Petersburg metro is about 1 km underground, reached by extremely long escalators (why? To get under the rivers? To obtain thermal heat from the Earth’s core? As bomb shelters?). The station itself looked like a long hall with elevator doors along each side, which match up precisely with the train before opening.

(Picture #2: the metro in the bowels of the Earth)
They led me to my train and counted on their fingers to show me how many stops (10), since they were going the other direction. I thanked them profusely in all languages I could think of. I thought this finger-counting was a bit excessive, as I did have a map with the names in Russian and the matching up of symbols worked in China, but I was completely wrong, since the stops are not labelled when you actually get there (!). There was some more finger-counting, map-pointing, and smiling and I arrived at the station of interest, feeling slightly apprehensive, discombobulated, and conspicuously ignorant, but generally pleased with myself, the world, etc.
I navigated to my hotel on foot, marvelling at the ancient trams and funny-looking vehicles. The hotel was in a falling apart 1960s cement bunker of a building, but inside was okay, if a bit make-shift and low-budget. While trying to find the bathroom, I bumped into someone else who looked distinctly Mediterranean, and asked if he was there for the Neuroscience conference. He was. Later, after the Italian had slept off the previous night’s festivities, we met with our roommates who had also arrived, a Ukrainian and a Pole. We went to visit St. Petersburg!
The centre gives a much different impression to the bus + airport combination. It is full of interesting old buildings, nicely maintained, long bridges over the rivers, a fort, and various cultural curiosities. The weather was sunny and warm. We passed a pleasant afternoon. Our Ukrainian friend spoke Russian, and could be induced to solicit information from passers-by, so we ate quite a nice but non-fancy and un-touristic meal at an authentic local diner. Later, we had difficultly finding a bar/club, and ended up having cocktails (and vodka, but not for me) in a Sushi bar.
The next day we were collected by coach, already containing the 30-odd course participants and lecturers, and driven to our hotel in the woods. Besides the stupidity of only being given one key for two people, I liked the hotel very much. My Ukrainian and I are on the 9th floor, in a small but clean room with a peeling balcony, and our own bathroom. The food and most of our needs are provided for, so we just go to class and eat and go to class and eat pretty much all day.
The lectures are mostly interesting, though as in any such activity there are a range of instructional abilities, and some people are incomprehensible, or don’t bother to explain their acronyms or methods, which is a little frustrating. I am not deeply into the physics of modelling little details of ion channels and stuff so plenty was new and bewildering. As usual I am taking notes compulsively, so hopefully this stuff will stay with me and will make more sense as I continue to gather knowledge.
We also have had a couple of sports activities, notably a “run after neural treasures” orienteering exercise in the woods which involved running like mad through the underbrush and then stopping suddenly to try and engage our hippocampi in the activity of answering difficult/curiously worded neuroscience questions. My group came second (because we were late) and won a bottle of champagne. I got a wet foot and spent the evening padding around the hotel in socks, to my colleagues’ amusement or disgust. There is a lot of garbage dumped in the woods, which is a bit disappointing, but I still felt fantastic being around all those rock and trees. I remember my pet rats and ferrets when I was a kid used to go absolutely nuts when we took them up to the cottage for the first time each year – senses overloaded, nose, years, and whiskers twitching, and tripping over themselves with excitement. I felt a bit like that.
On the first evening, the organizers took us on a short walk to the beach where we built a fire and had beer (Irish beer?? Why?) and snacks (I tried to eat everything, including a unit of dried fish which was terribly fishy). We have repeated this procedure several times on our own in small groups, and it is Most Pleasant to collect wood, make a fire, drink a beer and sit around under a starry sky with a handful of very intelligent, interesting young people. Though I have to say things got a little neuro-geeky at some point after midnight when some of us started drawing and arguing over brain wave diagrams in the sand with our fingers to illustrate some of the finer points of our work. I have been mockingly dubbed “our Canadian Scout” on account of my fire-building behaviour.
It turns out I really like Russian food. At breakfast, the best thing is a variety of milky porridges made from grains with various interesting physical properties. At lunch and dinner, there are savoury meat-and-rice/potatoes combinations, and interesting salads and pickled stuff, and also nice soups and juice. I particularly like Borscht(?), which is very purple and made of beets. Some of the fish dishes are a bad idea, but I don’t really think fish taste good so this can be attributed to a personal bias. The bread is unremarkable, bordering on sub-standard, but it might just be this hotel.
The weather is nice, the days long, the neuronal models complicated, the air clean, and the trees treeful… I like it here.
Adendum: I’m home, sick, and miserable, but here’s a nice boat that did something historically significant: