On our first day in Saint Petersburg, we actually wanted to treat ourselves to the city’s biggest highlight: the Hermitage! But thanks to Couchsurfing, Uli and I’s plans changed suddenly when we got up. I had indicated that we were currently in Saint Petersburg and would like to meet people.

I get a message from an Olga (of course it’s an Olga) asking if we’re spontaneous. I briefly remember the time two days ago when we were standing in a broken-down car not far from Munich and reply that spontaneity is our middle name. Would we like to visit her at her dacha? She could also show us an abandoned Soviet camp there. – Yes, of course we’d like to!

Then Olga begins with the directions: “Okay, you have to take the Red Line from Sasskaya station to the end in 20 minutes, it takes about an hour, then you get out and go up the stairs to the station, there you go to the ticket counter and show them the following text. You will then receive a return ticket. You travel to Kuzmulovo, my town, in about half an hour. Get out, go left to the road, then right. If you want really good Russian bread, buy it from the stall there. Behind it is a market. Buy some vegetables there.

There are always cars opposite. They are taxis. Give the phone to a driver and I will explain the way to him.”

Wow. I’m briefly stunned, then I pull Uli out of the room so that we can catch our subway in time. Olga’s plan works like a charm. At the train station, we’re unsure at the ticket counter and stammer something in Russian and hold Olga’s text up to the eyes of a railway employee. The cheerful, round woman laughs and takes us to the right counter. She says a few words to the colleagues there, after which we immediately receive a few tickets, which she immediately punches and lets us through to the cordoned-off platform.

The train clatters through the forest for what feels like an eternity until we reach Kuzmulovo. We buy bread and vegetables, talk to the first guy with a car we see and hold my phone to his ear. The guy is wearing sweatpants, of course, and is driving the most run-down junk I’ve ever seen outside of a scrap yard. But this is Russia. He smiles and nods, smiles and nods, smiles and nods while Olga talks to him, until after an eternity he passes the phone to me. “Alex. How are you? You – that’s not a taxi driver!”

But the guy waits with us, smiling and grinning. We chat with our little Russian vocabulary (“Mercedes good“) until another junk car arrives, which is actually a taxi. Our new friend explains to the driver where we have to go to finally enter the greengrocer’s shop for his shopping.

The taxi leaves the village, the road and the last remnant of civilization and rumbles along for a while over gravel into the forest until it reaches an even tinier village of wooden huts where no one has even bothered to asphalt anything. The driver stops in front of a fence and we give him a few rubles before he leaves us again.

We peek through the garden gate and are greeted by Olga – a young woman with messy hair and a jacket in the same turquoise color as the walls of the dacha behind her. The hut also seems to be held together by this very color.

We reach the hut with peeling paint.

Olga has traveled the world for several years herself and spent years in Southeast Asia, so we quickly have topics to talk about. World travelers always get along well because they share a certain mix of curiosity and relaxation.

After an initial round of getting to know each other over tea from the garden, we take a walk through the surrounding forest to see the promised Soviet ghost camp. Olga knows every plant and its effects. We don’t know every name in English, but we’ve already seen most of the plants. She is very interested in the inhabitants of nature, but lives in St. Petersburg and only comes out to the family dacha when the opportunity arises.

A dacha is a holiday home

Through the bushes we spot a few half-ruined wooden houses, which give us an idea that they once had a nice coat of paint. The paint is pale and cracked, and there is dust and splinters on the ground. This place was a youth camp for the young communists, explains Olga. At one point we see a huge, grim bust of Lenin on a pillar that has already been taken over by the trees in the forest.

“The young people gathered here every morning and sang a communist song,” Olga explains to us as if she had been there.

We leave the Soviet camp through a dilapidated iron gate, above which the Cyrillic letters of the name are lost in the rust.

Not far away is a thin hill. Apparently people go there to ski or sled. But they don’t get very far, because after a few meters the forest begins again.

When we return, Olga sends us both into her garden to collect ground elder for her stew. She takes the vegetables we brought with us and, due to a lack of space, mixes everything together in a pan and various pots. The “kitchen” of the dacha consists only of a hotplate. Water comes from a tap outside the house. There is also a small outhouse behind the house.

She throws herbs and vegetables together while she continues to chat with us.

She also gives cooking classes, she says, while I’m trying to breathe life into the dead plants in front of me with lots of salt. Apparently, Russians love bread with sunflower oil and salt for food, and it’s actually pretty tasty. My smartphone suddenly rings and it’s a lady from O2. She laughs in surprise when I tell her that I don’t have time for her offers right now, as I’m eating in the wilderness north of Saint Petersburg.

Olga is excited and wants Uli and I to speak more German. “I love the German language. Please, talk a little bit more.” We had never heard that before. But we heard one word in particular from Olga very often: “tak.” This word is a filler word and is used by Russians at will in pauses or at the beginning of sentences. A tak always fits into a silence.

Uli and I want to set off slowly, as we still have a long way to go. On the way to the train station we meet Olga’s grandma. The two of them had spoken on the phone beforehand and we recognize each other on the way. The lady still speaks a few words of German and wishes us all the best.

The way back to Saint Petersburg goes without any problems. Instead of taking a taxi, we decide to walk to Kuzmulovo. We are very impressed by how clean it is here in the village and in the city of Saint Petersburg. We hardly saw any rubbish. They are very clean, these Russians.