Epilogue to a Travel Blog III: Those Nameless Places

Author’s own image.

Having spent six months in Russia’s second capital, Alexandra Jarvis takes us on a tour of the best (and the rest) of the cafés of St Petersburg. In their column, we will get tips on which joints to visit, what to order, and how to navigate the joys of Russian hospitality, all this advice peppered with anecdotes about the chaos that defines these institutions.

Besides a bitterly cold trip to Moscow and a Christmas spent in the perpetual night of the Arctic Circle, I spent December in St Petersburg feeling like I’d finally got my bearings. I frequented many cafés, testing each for its suitability as a study spot, a social evening, a writing retreat. There are many that I don’t remember the name of; their existence remains caught between my memory and my notes. I was often directed to them by friends whose number I no longer have, their details stored on a Russian SIM on my sister’s old phone, since wiped clean. My only memory is the chill, the route there, my impressions of the décor, or occasionally what I was escaping from—visa stress, YA unhappiness, lack of sunlight.

One such café sat on the lip of Dumskaya—the infamous clubbing street—perched on the broad pavement by the rearing gold lions on the bridge over the river. A mere ten minutes from our flat, the strip of clubs and bars renowned for its dangerous chaos was nothing more than a washed-up cut-through in daylight hours. I heard stories about the nights out too good to miss but only ever walked past the far end of the street at night—mostly sober on every occasion. I visited occasionally during the day, heading for the café. It was strange, always empty except me and whoever I was with. The baristas served a small square of apple cake with each coffee, which was decent. I would do my homework and, through the window, see workers clean up confetti and narcotic debris from the street. I could see the patch of pavement outside where someone had drunkenly run after me one night to apologise for their behaviour, and then to offer a date the next week. The gaslighting was at its peak, though the brow-bent streetlamps around us had long-since gone electric. I thought of that as I watched my flatmate slip between the chairs in their multiple layers of enviable velvet and flouncy skirts, polishing off the untouched apple cake from a recently-deserted table as she went.

Another, infinitely more baffling place took root to the right of our apartment door, advertising bubble tea. The aforementioned flatmate and I had been searching for some and so tried it out, descending the stairs into the narrowest café I’d ever encountered. Two identical men in matching brown plaid shirts uncertainly made us two teas, also handing us frozen rainbow ice-cream donuts smaller than my palm, unprompted. The whole thing was delirium-inducing - not helped by said-flatmate throwing her ice-cream onto the ground with a wet slap as we left – resulting in us being pressed to wait for another. Sadly, the drinks and melting donuts were roundly unbearable.

There was then the place on Vasilievsky Island that I remember mainly for its flickering lights strung up at intervals on wire nailed to the wall. There was a chipboard cabinet of cakes decorated with drooping helium blooms left to float across the snow trudged on the floor—it was probably less snow than slush and de-icer—and the lights flickered irritatingly every so often. They were presumably drawing from the same power as the neighbouring florist’s, accessed through the same outer door. In fact, the inner door to the café was held open, and so there was only one glass screen holding back the minus 22-degree frosts. Even so, I stripped off my layers and sat with my friend, working silently. I say working; I was, in fact, midway through an intense fanfiction that I read with chattering hands clasped around a bucket of coffee. The lights flickered more and more, occasionally dimming entirely. My laptop became my only steady source of light, what with the weak, snowy light filtering in behind me.

There are doubtless so many more; one on the Island where I cried into the arms of a new friend in the middle of planning our Moscow trip as the waiter practised his English over us; another on Kazanskaya, where I went to speak French with a friend from Cambridge, the pair of us filling our pockets with the stickers that now grace my laptop, my only other memory the Instagram handle that now crops up occasionally—that, and the weird feeling of my mouth moving in French after so long grappling with Russian.

Looking back, I was remarkably tenacious at getting out of the house and seeking out isolation, companionship, or merely a change of scene. The streets were death traps at the best of times; I suppose it was far cheaper to take a slide down a slushy street across the patches of ice bursting from the drainpipes, dodging falling icicles from the roofs, than head out to a rink at New Holland or Sevkabel Port. I never did fall.