Expat life in St. Peterburg

In this first blog entry, I want to share some experiences about living in St. Petersburg as an expat. When moving here in the beginning of May 2017, I was struck by the beauty of the city, and the cold weather. On victory day 2017 it was windy and snowing sometimes, while in my home country Austria it was already 20 °C at the time. From the start I was very lucky to have a lot of support from the ITMO Fellowship program coordination, and from my university faculty.

ITMO helped for example with getting registered in Russia and receiving the migration card and all other paperwork, which would have been rather impossible to do myself. Furthermore, a colleague from my institute rented out an apartment on Vaska, not too far from the office. Great.

University work life in Russia, at least in my experience, on the one side includes some pressure regarding KPIs (key performance indicators), but on the other hand offers a lot of freedom on how to achieve those goals, including some flexibility in substituting performance in one area with another. This is important, as the acceptance of journal and conference publications (research KPIs) is often quite unpredictable.

As an expat new in a country, it is important to create a social circle. For meeting locals, I found language clubs, for example English or German speaking clubs very helpful. And for meeting other expats, there a few organizations like "Internations" which organize regular meetings for networking. Both were helpful in the beginning to not feel too lost in a new country where people speak such a "strange" language :)

In the free time of the first summer, I enjoyed many of the sights in and around the city, for example the park in Pavlovsk, Catherine palace in Pushkin, Kronstadt, Peterhof, and Vyborg.

2017 went by, the white nights were exciting, the summer was rainy, and the winter was cold. Actually, I found February and March 2018 beautiful and spent a lot of time walking on the frozen Neva, and almost froze off my fingers when I couldn't stop taking photos at -25°С. Then the situation changed rapidly, and when my little brother came to visit at the beginning of May, we were sweating on a boat trip at the same place where I was walking on ice just a few weeks prior.

July included a trip to the north, to Murmansk, and driving around Kola peninsula with a rental car for a week. In Murmansk, it was all the time around 30 °C. Plus, not minus! :) And midnight sun. I never expected to be swimming in lakes in the polar region, and the water was actually warm.

In general, life as an expat in a new country is not easy, but it is a very interesting experience, especially in a place that has so much to offer in terms of culture and history. Many of the typical superstitions about Russia turned out to be wrong: Russian people are not "cold", they don't drink much, and there are no bears to be seen. The last fact is a bit sad :) What surprised me is that most services here are extremely cheap compared to Western Europe, that people travel to Finland to buy Fairy dish-washing liquid, and that in Russia there is such a big gap in prosperity between the two big cities, and the countryside. In Austria the situation is different, those living in the countryside are often very well off, and social problems are concentrated in the cities.

And sometimes funny things happen, for example last week I picked up a new bank card, and it states that my name is "Dr Mag" :). Anyway, looking forward to the rest of my second year in St. Petersburg, and in an upcoming post I will writing in more detail about experiences at ITMO and Russian university life.