They say a man's home is his castle. The Russian version of the saying goes "My house - my castle." I thought of it often as we made our way up to my parent's apartment each day. In order to get to it we had to pass through five doors, four of them locked, plus throw in the elevator doors for good measure.
First, there is a large iron door leading into the apartment building itself. In order to open it you have to have a magnetic key. If you don't have one, you can buzz the apartment you are going to and they will open the door for you.
Then there's an old wooden door about 3 feet from the first one. It used to be locked instead of the first one when I was growing up, but that is no longer the case. I think it's a much better idea to have the very front door locked. I remember often being nervous in that tine area between the two doors when coming home in the dark (and it gets dark in St. Petersburg very early!)
Past this second door is the elevator. After reaching the 9th floor (there are 16 total), you'll find yourself in a small area with doors to your left and to your right. The door on the left leads to a garbage chute. But it is the door to the right that is much more interesting. Once again, it is iron. On the level of a person's head there's a square opening with iron bars across it. A long time ago when crime rates in Russia soared my dad helped put this together. If I am not mistaken, the small window and the bars were his idea. Perhaps he even helped procure the actual door from the steel-rolling plant where he was working at the time. Those were the times when you couldn't just go out and buy any door you liked. If you don't have a key to unlock this door, you can buzz your hosts, but this time they'll have to come to the door to unlock it from the other side, thus the window. Past this door you'll immediately run into another one. Both are locked with dead bolts. This second one wasn't there 3.5 years ago when I last visited my parents.
Having passed this double iron "gate," you'll find yourself in a curved hallway with apartment doors on one side. Sometimes these doors will also be iron and often double, but my parents' is a single one and wooden - there's not much to steal inside. But if that is what it takes to get into a poor man's house, I can't imagine what the rich have to do.
What a contrast it was to go through all these doors and think of a single wooden door with a large window that is sufficient for so many houses in the U.S. I wanted to take pictures of them all and post them here, but by the time I finally got my act together my camera ran out of batteries.
On April 1st, as we made our way to my parents' for the last time, we were trying to come up with a joke. We finally settled on having Ryan pose as a plumber when we buzzed my parents at the very first door. As my mom answered the call, Ryan dramatically cleared his throat and said, "Plumbing service!" (in Russian.) The only thing we heard of her response was, "What plumbing service?" Then the door opened, but not because she let us in. Someone else was coming out, and we were disconnected. Usually someone would be waiting for us on the 9th floor to open the double iron doors, but when we took up the elevator, no one was there. It took a while for someone to come out even after we rang the bell. My mom told us that she had no intention of opening that first door leading into the building, because all kinds of people pretend to be a plumber and try to get in when they have no business being in the building.
I am not sure who ended up being the April fool.
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