Time Travel

Being stuck in Leningrad for 3 days had me feeling homesick. Not for home, but for Moscow. I don’t know when that happened! Emotional attachment creeps up on you so that before you know it, you are “at home” in a place.
I was reading a bit about the “mental clock.” There are many many parts of our brain that interpret time in various ways. Since I’ve been here, my mind’s clocks have lost their calibration and my sense of time is all distorted.
In the old days of naval navigation, the captain (or whoever was doing the navigating) relied on “dead reckoning” to estimate the longitude. There were tremendous error margins involved with this method, but it remained the standard until the 1770’s. The difficulty of calculating longitude lied in the inability of mariners to keep accurate time on board. The rocking of the ship immediately made pendulum clocks untrue, so knowing time at the appointed meridian was impossible.
To calculate longitude is rather simple if one has an accurate clock: there is a difference of 15 minutes for every longitudinal degree. So, one must only determine the local time (at high noon) and compare it with the meridian time.
In one of my temporal perceptions, very little time has passed since I’ve been here. I remember saying goodbye to my parents and my first day in Russia like it was just a few weeks ago. I suppose it really was just a few weeks ago (almost 12), but my mental conception of what 12 weeks feels like is a lot longer than what I’ve actually experienced.
When you travel at the speed of light, time does not exist. If you head at light speed away from the earth for a few minutes (relative to you), and then turn around, you will find that years have passed on earth. My internal clock says that I haven’t been here long, yet my date of departure is near.
On the other hand, it’s like I’ve been here for years. I’ve already settled into social equilibrium- I have friends and schedules and can text in Russian as quickly as in English! I know the people who work at the grocery store, the shwarma stand, and the fruit stalls. I just ran into a Nigerian guy who I know yesterday, like, I have people who I know in Moscow! It’s all become so familiar and lovely. I suppose that because I have taken in so much these past few months- been so hyper-stimulated- that my mind assumes this must have been a longer period of time. It’s like packing many years of social, cultural, linguistic, and emotional learning into a 3-month frame. I can really say, “I lived in Moscow.” I have lived life here, not just visited as a tourist.
When you’re a child, time moves slowly. This is not just an illusion: time, relative to you, actually does pass more slowly because your brain is taking more time to process the new information. Big programs run slowly on a computer because they involve many more processes. Remember, a computer’s processor is electro-mechanical, a series of switches either in a 0 or 1 position.
Our brains are no different. Big new mental stimulation requires more brain processing. So, one’s perception of time actually slows down because it literally takes more time for the brain to interpret what is going on.
The novelty of the experience makes the brain work harder, and so time creeps like a lagging computer.

Anyway, St. Petersburg was a bit of a let down for me. To me, the interesting part of traveling is seeing how different people live. There are so many realities on the planet that it seems a waste to spend the time and money to get to a place just to see your own reality in a different location. Being stuck to a tour guide with a rigid itinerary on a pre-packaged trip has a way of killing the excitement of travel and the genuineness of observation.
Not only that, Russia is this giant country full of crumbling Soviet buildings, corruption, poverty, alcoholism, and so on. St. Petersburg is a façade to show tourists; it’s a fraud! I love Russia for what it is, and to me it is not St. Petersburg.
I’ve always disliked Washington D.C. because it’s not a proper outgrowth of human society. It was planned from the top down and so it has none of the interesting quirks that color a large urban inhabitation. Nobody even lives there except for students, young people, the super rich and the super poor. Boring. St. Petersburg was built in this same fashion, although I grant that it is a much more living-and-breathing city than D.C.
If you have or have had the chance to visit both Moscow and St. Pete’s, let me know what you think. I want to get out and see more of Russia. Moscow is like New York: a little taste of everything that the country has, but invariably detached from everyone else. So, I need more Russian experience methinks.