I have always thought that as we walk through any place, a part of us stays there. Every street, monument, and museum that we have visited in our life, keeps a touch of our essence forever, in the same way that our memory helps us preserve all its features in our minds.
Whether or not this is a universal truth is irrelevant. I believe it and thus it is true for me. I very much enjoyed this thought as I roamed around the streets of Saint Petersburg, thinking that a young version of my grandfather, the General, remained encapsulated within the aura of its buildings.
The previous days in the Venice of the North had been quite agitated. In an attempt to absorb hundreds of years of rich history, and an equal amount of gallons of potato alcohol, in only a few days my friends and I visited countless historical sights, galleries, important streets, museums, and nightclubs. A couple nights earlier I had met a girl who would later become an important part of my life, and soon I would be returning to Stockholm, in order to continue my studies in Economics.
As my time in Russia came to an end, and as the buildings in every street spoke to me, I found myself thinking about the General and his past. It then struck me as necessary to bring him an adequate souvenir from a place that had been important in his career. Thinking about his anecdote regarding the Georgian army and his brush with a spy from the Kremlin, I quickly arrived to the conclusion that no gift would be better than a nice bottle of Russian vodka, and so my search began.
You would think that getting a bottle of vodka in Russia couldn’t become much of a story. Well, think again. There I stood in a medium-sized local, surrounded by countless matrioshkas of repetitive designs, figures within figures of themselves, reminding me of fractal structures that seem to reveal a hidden meaning after every iteration. Colored eggs, communist flags, music boxes, army hats and uniforms... the list went on, and then I finally found a wall devoted to different vodka brands.
I approached the person working in the area, a man not much older than myself, to ask for his guidance.
-‘¡Hola!’ he said, recognizing my accent, ‘how can I help you?’ he inquired in perfect Spanish.
-‘This is a surprise, your Spanish is quite good’ I said, genuinely startled.
-‘Thank you’ he said, ‘I am fluent in seven languages, including your own’. He somehow began to remind me of C3PO, but I digress.
-‘I was wondering if you could recommend me a nice bottle of Russian vodka. It’s for my grandfather, he…’
-‘Say no more!’ he interrupted me, and he took out a bottle of a Polish transparent drink. He made a large shot glass appear out of I don’t know where, and filled it with the vodka imitation. ‘Drink, all of it!’
Now, for context sake, let me tell you that this was a Sunday morning, around 10:00. That day in particular I hadn’t had breakfast because I had overslept, and of course, as people in the store realized what was happening, they began to gather around us.
I drank the whole thing, and felt the burning liquid as it made its way down my esophagus. I could still feel it consuming my inside as it settled in my stomach.
-‘Muy bien’ he said, ‘Very good, now choose one of our Russian vodkas, anyone you’d like to try’. I began to apologize, but he wouldn’t let me go, ‘come on amigo, I’m letting you taste it before you buy it’.
There were dozens of bottles, many of them with ingenious or funny shapes, others looked rather sophisticated and had very detailed patterns embedded in them, I thought those were the most expensive ones. I went for a standard-looking bottle right in the middle of the display.
The polyglot man took it off the wall without hesitation, and poured me a shot all the way to the rim of the glass. ‘I want you to drink it all, move it around your mouth, and then let some air in as the vodka flows down your throat, it will help you savor it’.
Again I emptied the shot glass, following his instructions. This time there was barely any burning feeling, and the taste was quite enjoyable, almost sweet. ‘I’ll buy this one!’ I said after I swallowed the last bit of it, sure that I wouldn’t be able to find a better brand.
-‘Oh, my friend, do not rush! Please, try another one before you decide’ he said with a smile.
Was he trying to make me drunk? Again I tried to excuse myself, but the other costumers encouraged me to accept the man’s nice gesture. I went for a more refined bottle, hoping this would make him happy and let me buy it after I tried it. He repeated the ritual, and I did as well. Surprisingly, this vodka was even better than the previous one, less burning and sweeter.
-‘I would really like to buy this one’ I said, almost worried, but in a very good mood.
-‘You liked it more, didn’t you? It’s a good bottle, and I would recommend it. But before you buy it, I would like you to try one more, just to be sure, pick again!’ he said enthusiastically.
This story is already too long, so I will avoid the details, and just tell you that within the next ten minutes, I tried at least six more kinds of vodka. I am quite sure that by the end I could even speak a bit of Russian, or so it sounded like. I can’t recall much of what happened right after the tasting session, but I do know that I left the store with a bag full of extra souvenirs and a bottle of what I assume was the last vodka I tried. I also seem to recall giving my (parents’) phone number to one of the girls who worked in the store, and having an episode of incontrollable laughter back in the matrioshka section.
To this day, the General hasn’t opened his bottle. ‘We should save it for a special occasion’ he said right after I gave it to him, when I came back home from my semester abroad. Maybe I’ll tell him this story one of these days; we’ll open the bottle together, and see for ourselves if my purchase was a good one, or a mere consequence of those nine shots of vodka in my system.
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