A Backpacker in Russia

I'd just finished college and I wanted to travel, experience something far removed from ivory towers, escape to a foreign world and begin forgetting everything I had learned. I wanted to do it on less than two summers' worth of cafe wages. I wanted exotic and slightly hostile, remote and yet shockingly cheap.

It had to be Russia.

Thumbing though glossy guidebooks, I realised that to spend as long a time as I wanted in Russia, I'd most likely have to take a class. Even the cheapest one-year language classes, priced for Western tourists, seemed far out of range, so I began looking at volunteer work instead. Then I stumbled across it by accident the web site of a medical school in St Petersburg, offering in tiny English print a one-year Russian language course for the unbelievable sum of 700 dollars.

I made the arrangements and before my parents had time to object, I was flying into Pulkovo airport at midnight in bleak November, alone, hoping that the private taxi I had arranged would be waiting. There was red tape at the passport control, a bit of anxious waiting, but miraculously, there it was a dirty Lada with my name on a piece of paper taped to the window. The driver communicated by pointing and did not smile.

We drove to the B&B I had booked for two nights, where a motherly, talkative woman named Tatyana made me eat fish soup before turning in. I was tired but too excited to sleep. The next day, the real adventure would begin.

I set out in the morning to find my school, and having found it, to talk to someone who might know something about my existence. After all, I had registered and paid a fee, and had been assured of accommodation in the student dorm. The woman at the main desk was polite but proclaimed ignorance. I walked outside, spelled out the letters on the sign phonetically. I knew about three words of Russian by this time, and the alphabet. It was the right school.

I tried again and was directed to the foreign student office, where the secretary also gazed blankly. Defeated, I returned to the B&B. Tatyana offered to call the school the next day on my behalf. She spoke to three people in succession, the harsh Russian speech getting louder at each transfer. Finally she spoke to a fourth, this time in a more polite tone. It is the dean of the university,' she explained to me, during an interval. I'm telling him that he must provide you with accommodation. As agreed.' I nodded gratefully, feeling useless. The dean asked to speak to me.

Hello,' he said. We had no idea you came. We have no rooms for you. No suitable.' But the web site, I protested weakly. This Russian class is not really for you. For Chinese students who come here to be doctors, they take this class, part of their program. But we have never had English speakers. Try Liden Denz Institute.'

I handed the phone back to Tatyana, miserably observing that the L&D Institute would absorb my whole budget for the year in one month. She became righteously angry with the dean and the heated Russian exchange continued. Finally she turned to me, smiling beautifully. Get your things together,' she said. He will come this evening.'

He who? The dean of the college, naturally. He has found you a place. You will stay with his mother-in-law, at least for a while.' Who was I to argue? We had a dinner of borscht. Afterwards I fled into the cool St Petersburg dusk, wandering up and down the cobbled streets where light pooled in gemstone puddles, not daring to go too far.

The dean came to collect me in a dirty Lada identical to the one which picked me up at the airport. He spoke in halting English, apologising for the confusion and occasionally pointing out sites of interest. I could only respond politely my sense of grand adventure on a shoestring had disappeared and I felt like a foolish girl who had caused many people a great deal of trouble. We seemed to be travelling endlessly, the lamp-lit city far behind us and a wasteland of concrete ahead. When we finally arrived at the mother-in-law's block, it could have been the very end of the world; there were stray dogs howling around the corners.

This elderly woman with whom I was to live spoke no English. But she recognised a tired young woman miles from home. She made me tea with spoonfuls of condensed milk. I took out my guidebook. What's your name?' I asked, in hesitant Russian. She smiled hugely and we began to speak - I in recitations of guidebook phrases, she in rapid Russian, both of us with comic gestures to make our meanings clearer. She pulled me into the living room to show me her pictures. She had one daughter, now married. This was her husband now dead. She mimed dead' by folding her arms across her chest and closing her eyes. This was her wedding day, her first boyfriend, her school book with Papa Lenin on the front

It was too much for me. The long journey, the exhaustion, now the kindness of this woman and the sudden introduction to the course of her life, so foreign, yet so familiar. When she saw the tears, she led me to bed and brushed the hair from my face.

I had many frustrating bureaucratic encounters in my term in Russia, forms to fill, bizarre medical tests to take, a language class that proved a shambles. Doubtless if I'd taken a more normal path, and enrolled in a four-week class at the L&D with some students from home, I'd have had a fun time and some stories of who-did-what on the Metro on a particular drunken night. But to travel alone and on the less-travelled path, with all its complications, is to make oneself vulnerable to the world - and keenly receptive to the subtleties of a foreign land, and its people.

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