The food: Pickled vegetables

Where to find it: Georgian Illegal Workers’ Market, St. Petersburg, Russia

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These pickled vegetables are probably the most vibrant colors I saw during my whole stay in Russia. The city of St. Petersburg erects monumental buildings and structures like the Winter Palace and the Narva Triumphal Column. The Russians paint these constructions of Communism and tsardom-past in glowing pastel colors. Easter egg blue washes the Smolny Convent and shamrock green paint wraps around thousands of priceless paintings and artwork in the Hermitage Museum. The bombastic presence of Russian power thrusts up in an odd “We’re here, we’re queer (ehrm, I mean Russian)” kind of way. Think: Roman Empire gargantuan edifices meets Miami Vice-like pastel suit paint jobs. However, St. Petersburg’s smoggy sky weeps over everything. Therefore a receding layer of soot climbs and crusts up every single bare surface in the city, often numbing and cramping ‘burg’s style.

That sooty presence looms over everything and everybody. In St. Petersburg there ain’t no fluffy bunny clouds drifting over your city park benches. Think of a large slab of dark condensation hovering in perpetual doom. The clouds’ residency is so interminable that it even seeps a mile-deep into the city’s nuclear-blast-protected underground subway system. You can read only depression on most subway riders’ faces.

I did not feel surprised when glum faces greeted me at the food market, as well. In this particular food market illegal immigrants from Russia’s southern neighbor, Georgia, congregate to sell all manners of edibles: fruits, dates, slabs of meat and pickled vegetables. All of the food in the market radiates glowing tones of reds, oranges, greens, etc. How ironic that you also find hundreds of pale and unenthused illegal workers here.

I don’t blame the workers for their dull demeanor, though; as I’ve already mentioned, Russia can exhaust people. Also, I should not forget to mention that the St. Petersburg police often stops by the market causing the illegal Georgian workers to scurry and hide like cockroaches only to emerge twenty minutes later when the cops leave. That’s even more exhausting.

Besides its neon-lit strip bars, St. Peterburg’s only solace of enduring color is its food.