Epilogue to a Travel Blog: First and Last impressions at Leon
by Alexandra Jarvis
Interior of a cafe with tables used for laptop working
(All images belong to the author)
The first day I was released from the persistent monotony of visa stress and document scanning, I naturally sought out a coffee shop. This was not a tall order for the streets of St Petersburg; you couldn’t walk three feet along the pavement without stumbling across another start-up with darkened back corners, a steamed-up display case of pastries and squealing coffee maker, all manned by an imposing barista wielding a copious menu and a card-reader. I had, as a matter of fact, ordered a takeaway coffee once from a place down our street under the careful gaze of the Russian friend helping us settle in. She ordered a бамбл for herself—a mixture of coffee and orange juice—which was not, as you could imagine, any good. It stood to reason that the second I was able to put my laptop in a bag and step out into the city under my own steam, I would find myself the first of many haunts that would see me through to the bitter (unexpected) end of my year abroad. I didn’t make it far for my first trip; the café across the road that I could see from my bedroom window, the one whose light never turned out at night, was to be my first and favourite. I had met Leon.
It was a strange place, all exposed brick, seemingly carved out of the buildings around it. I stepped into the main room and was overwhelmed with colour—glinting gold light fittings, deep greens splashed about, black and white zebra stripes across one wall. The beginnings of the zebra’s eye were just visible where the colours melted back into brick. The room was a jumble of surfaces; the back bench was covered in fake grass, with the smattering of tables all different sizes. One of them was the old counter to a sewing machine, the machine itself long since jettisoned.
The food was similarly varied. The almond croissants were often soggy when reheated and not to my taste, but they did a mean vegetable and cheese quesadilla for around 249 roubles (very roughly: £2) —a bargain. They did often run out of vegetables, testament more to the laidback nature of the waitstaff (of which there were only ever two, at an absolute maximum) than to the popularity of the dish.
It was here, too, that I first met the raf’, a coffee which you need to know about—and preferably taste—to properly understand my obsession. Described drily by Wikipedia as ‘popular in Russia and the former countries of the USSR, appearing in the late 1990s,’ it’s a combination of cream, vanilla sugar, espresso, and milk, all foamed together (not just the milk). A heart attack in a glass—and they were usually served in a glass, too. Leon also helpfully provided a plastic straw to take the hot coffee directly to the back of your tongue. Though perpetually an indecisive coffee drinker—I’m never sure if I’m a fan of it or not—the raf’ was my go-to choice, delivering consistently sweet, all-enveloping comfort on demand.
In this way, Leon fuelled my Saturday morning homework sessions, my evening social visits, my middle-of-the-day attempts at looking over my Year Abroad Project. Here, too, I would write the notes that would later form the backbone to my novel-in-the-making, when I was supposedly on a writing hiatus; the dreamlike, out-of-time feel to the place seemingly had that effect on most customers. It was here that a friend and I would taste Leon’s own take on Russia’s fascination with putting new spins on coffee—we ordered a suspicious blue drink, only for it to be a murky grey thing with a light blue swirl across the top. Far later, I arranged to meet someone here for what was ostensibly a coffee date, only to be told that they didn’t like coffee. Or tea. Or hot drinks in general.
My relationship with Leon had its humble beginnings back in September, when my first impressions of the city and the people I’d been thrown together with were still forming. Its mismatched nature very much reflected my own experiences. It was friendly and familiar, despite the plugs sparking at me and my socket adapter. I whiled away hours here, sheltering from sun and snow and bureaucracy, just across the street from my flat. As a matter of fact, it would be the last place that I would get coffee from in Russia; far later in February, a flatmate and I carried tall red cups of raf’ upstairs to nurse while we packed with steadily increasing stress levels. We would disappear into the small hours of the morning, pulling unruly suitcases through the thick last slush of winter, all of us piled in the back of a packed taxi while that ever-bright coffee shop light still illuminated the road.
