First things first: it got down to 38 degrees here last night! On June 3rd! They’ve had some serious summer heat spells here in recent years, but this summer is turning out to be a more traditional St. Petersburg one with some quite cool days (high temperature today forecast at about 52 degrees).
Prices in Russia for a lot of goods, especially most grocery items and some pharmacy items, are far lower than they are in the U.S. A few examples follow.
I can buy a whole large pizza in the deli department of the grocery store here for about $6.00 at regular price. A slice of the same can be had for about 75 cents. If I wait until after 8 P.M. when a 30% sale goes into effect on all deli items remaining, I can get that whole pizza for $4.00. I so far only managed to buy 3/4ths of a pizza because there were only 6 slices left of the one I wanted (the vegetarian one). So I paid about $3.00 for most of a pizza.
On a similar note, take a look at this little gem:
That's a lot like a personal pan pizza or foccaccio (Russians call this flat piece a bread lipyoshka, but this one has cheese, tomato, and basil on it). It can be had for about 80 cents in another grocery store we visited yesterday.
Eggs? Take a look at this ad from the nearby grocery store.
Yeah, they often sell them here in packages of 10 rather than a dozen. Contemplate that: 10 eggs for 59 rubles winds up being 75 cents at the conversion rate at which we exchanged our dollars for rubles. We got some eggs on a sale the other day that my wife discovered at less than half that price: 30 cents for 10 eggs!
Pharmacy prices on many things are much lower here as well. The accompanying photo for example shows a type of anti-bacterial ointment from the U.S. that sells for $4.50 (CVS brand--the name brand would be more) per tube. Here the equivalent tube costs 30 rubles or about 35 cents. A number of medications that in the U.S. qualify as prescription drugs can be bought here over the counter as well.
And below is proof that ice cream doesn’t have to be sold in a carton. Yes, that looks like ice cream extruded into a plastic sleeve.
There are other peculiar ways of packaging ice cream here that I might document later. And by the way, the ice cream is much better here than in the U.S. since they don’t add all kinds of exotic substances meant to mimic milk fat but rather just leave the milk fat in.
Finally, I leave you with the following unsettling photograph. Yes, that is a pizza with strawberries on it. The ones they previously sold in this deli had slices of pear on them. This is a violation of everything I hold sacred about pizza so I obviously did not try it. I guess maybe it could be viewed as a lesson in cultural (mis?) appropriation, like the baked sushi they sell at some places here in Russia, sometimes even made with chicken or beef.
