27. Social life

The only person I knew in St. Petersburg before I moved here was my colleague who formerly worked in Colorado, but he lives in the suburbs and has a young child, and we have not yet spent time together outside of the office. So of course I've been spending most of my free time solo during the evenings and weekends. However, I have hung out with a few groups during my first month.

I attended a performance of a Russian play at the Musical Comedy Theater just off Nevsky Prospekt on May 19. Another colleague had an extra ticket, so I met up with her, two of her friends (one local, one expat), and her expat friend's brother and a bunch of his college friends. I believe many of these individuals were from Estonia. The play was of course all in Russian. I understood the general outlines of what was happening, and the singing and dancing was relatively universal, but almost all of the jokes and double entendres were lost on me, as well as specifics of the story. The theater complex featured an impressively ornate grand staircase, but the performance was on the smaller of two stages in a relatively modest space. Afterwards, part of the group was planning to go out drinking on Rubenshteyna street (conveniently, where I happen to live) so I joined them for a whisky at their first stop.

Some of my colleagues frequent pub trivia contests several times a month (team name: "Babushka's Effect"), and they invited me to participate one day after work in late May. Of course I would be useless in a Russian-language trivia contest, but the theme this particular night was English-language questions. So, I guess that made me the ringer (we were certainly not the only team with a secret weapon). There were 10 rounds of 8 questions, all in different categories, some of which were elementary for a native English speaker but many of which were quite challenging and with a difficulty level not related to one's English proficiency. There was even a round where we didn't answer a single question correctly, but we concluded the evening in fifth place out of 24 teams. It was nice to spend more time with several colleagues outside of the office, and for once feel useful here with my English-only language skills.

 

At the end of May, I met up with a bunch of people from the local expatriate community at an Italian restaurant. I thought it would be a dinner event, but nobody ordered food so it was just drinks and antipasti. These were not just Americans; over 24 countries were represented among the 80 pre-registrants. I would guess that approximately 50 people actually showed up, and I met expats of all ages from the US, New Zealand, South Korea, and Italy. However, the primary nationality represented in the room was Russian, so they were not technically expats (although many were from elsewhere in the country, including even the Russian far east). The Russians were there for a variety of reasons: most wanted to practice their English skills, some were interested in hanging out with foreigners, a few were looking for business networking opportunities (several asked me if I was hiring), and a few younger women were looking for men, as far as I could tell. Most people there were friendly and interesting. These events are organized through InterNations, which has chapters in cities all over the world and seems relatively active here in St. Petersburg with multiple events scheduled each month.