The study-tour to St. Petersburg has been a huge experience and an adventure for everyone of those 12 foreign students who were for the first time of their lifes in Russia. To live in a city which is definitely a city of differences was a real culture shock for all participants of this tour.
In Finland everything is quite and tranquil whereas in Russia the mentality and the every-day behavior of the people is based on noisyness and hectic. People are pushing and don�t seem to have much time.
At the border one could get the totally opposite impression because nobody seems to be in a hurry and waiting for hours is expected to be normal.
So, Russian mentality differs a lot and one has to take into consideration in which situation people are and how they behave. But we will come back to this point later.

The title of this report is: �St. Petersburg - the city of differences�. In which respect is it possible to speak of differences refering to a short visit in this city?
The differences are huge and obvious and even if one only stays there for one week, one cannot avoid to see and to feel the differences within the city. In this case there are not meant any differences between Russia and the Western socities but the differences within a Russian metropolitan area.
The first day in St. Petersburg began with different problems concerning the accomodation in the student hostel which is supposed to be the most comfortable one in St. Petersburg. One room was tremendously polluted with cockroaches and flies and a terrible smell has been in the room because some old tires were burnt near the window which created this terrible smell. We were in a suburbian area and the differences to the central area of St. Petersburg with the western style supermarkets, hotels and fast-food-restaurants were immense.
The housing-conditions for students are very bad in Russia whereas only 10 km away one can live very comfortable if enough money is available.

Russian people (especially the older ones) are used to their old communistic system. That became obvious when we had some problems with our passports in the student hostel. The old woman at the reception was very nervous because one name was written two times in her list whereas my name was completely missing. This little error caused a lot of problems for her and she was talking in Russian to us for more then half an hour although she knew that nobody could understand her language. When the Russian professor came back with our passports, the problem was solved. This is a remnant of the communistic system where such administrative things were much more important than the room conditions in this hostel.
So, we saw some buildings which were in a really bad condition. Also some WC�s were such dirty that no one of us could believe that anybody would use these toilets regularly. Nobody had an explanation why Russians don�t care about hygiene and about the conditions of their daily surrounding. The only explanation could perhaps be that they don�t care about non-privat property because they are not willing to do anything which would not only be good for them but also for other people.
This would be that method: �If you don�t do something, I don�t either...!�

Otherwise we were treated different in comparison to the other students in the hostel because we were served whereas the others had to take the self-service area in the cantine. We got different, even better, food than the rest. Nearly erverybody of the staff in this hostel treated us respectfully whereas the Russian students who wanted to join our evening parties were treated different. They had to sign a document that they only wanted to stay until midnight and afterwards they had to leave! The staff acted rather strict in this respect so that at midnight all Russians had to leave the hostel.

The tour was estimated as a study tour, so we had to follow some lessons. First of all the lesson of �Russian for foreigners� conveid a way in the Russian language and was quite interesting whereas the �Russian Business� lectures didn�t convey more than only data about the Russian economy after the change without any conclusional aspects or discussions in it.
Also in university we were treated like being different from the others students. We always had the impression of being strangers in the Russian world. That became very obvious when we were going along the corridors in the university and everybody was looking intensively at us.
In the presentations-forum of the bank and of the technical research center we were treated as potential future customers e.g. Western managers of the future who should get a positive impression of what the Russian economy is able to establish in near future.

In the city that was a bit different because there were more foreigners and tourists and the Russians were used to be confronted with foreign visitors. The city is full of souvenir markets and products designed for tourism, for example old Russian army staff, paintings of St. Petersburg buildings or just T-Shirts with certain printings like �McLenin� etc.
The difference between the new rich Russian people who use big American jeeps as a symbol for their new status and the very poor (mostly old people) is very huge. I can remember one scenerie were an old woman, looking like the personified death was begging for some rubels in front of the hotel Europa. On the other side of the street David Copperfields big American limousine was waiting for departure. This picture of �new Russia� was very impressive for most of our group because it was a symbol for the problems the change of systems had caused in Russian every-day life.
Another good example for this was the statement of a �private� Taxi driver who took us from our student hostel to the hotel Europa where we were waiting for our bus. He pointed out that before the �Perestroika� mostly everything was better because every Russian was treated equally. They were living on a lower standard but they felt save in the system because everybody had a job, medical health care and social welfare on this low level but it was enough to cope with every-day life. Today there is a huge amount of unemployment and everybody has to fight for his living-standard. This taxi-driver described the situation of living in St. Petersburg today like this: �Russians can�t cope with the rapidity of change because in former times changes were protracted processes. If somebody isn�t fast enough today he has no chance to survive in this system which has become brutal!�

For the new rich Russians (they are able to react fast and have accepted the new rules of economy) it is a status symbol to eat in a fast-food-restaurant whereas the old ladies in our student hostel were very happy when we gave our empty beer-bottles to them because they could get a little money, when giving them back to the kioskes where we bought them before. The main difference lies in the character of those people who are arrogant and rich and those who are brave and stay poor...!

If their are differences in the social status, they are huge. There is nearly no social level in between very rich and very poor.
We also saw some huge price differences within the city center of St. Petersburg. On the one side of the street there were some Fast-Food restaurants such as �Grillmaster� or �Carrols� which were very expensive and only available for tourists or rich Russian people. On the other side of the street there was a Russian pub where no tourists were found because the surrounding wasn�t that much comfortable. The prices for one meal differed from about 30 FIM in the fast-food restaurants to 12 FIM in this special pub.
We were the only foreigners there and we were treated friendly because we also behaved that way, for example with trying to order our food and drinks in Russian language as far as possible.
Everybody has noticed that in Russia many people are employed in jobs which would not exist in a Western society. For example in the Metro at the down end of the escalator there was sitting somebody who was responsible for serving the third escalator which was switched off when there was no rush hour and two escalators were sufficient.
Only when 2 Metros came at the same time and many people had to get upstairs the third escalator was switched on by the responsible person. We never saw these people doing something except waiting. The same kind of jobs they have for policeman who are responsible for serving the lights in the city. At every crowdy crossing in the city one policeman was serving the lights manually. It must be cheaper for the community to pay those employees instead of installing a certain technology.