"Home Sweet Home" - Not American Version

Older apartment buildings

We've lived in St. Petersburg for close to two months and have yet to see "the American dream" - a single family house. Here, everyone lives in an apartment, located either in an old building in the historic city center or in a new high-rise farther out.


The high-rise buildings are everywhere you look--in the center of everything, or at the edge of one of the many rivers.


We keep hearing about the communist era cement buildings, but we haven't seen many that look too old and dilapidated. They are probably replaced by the new high-rises built since freedom came in the 1990s.

We live in one of these new high-rise complexes. Our third-floor apartment is in a 21 story building in a complex of five other buildings (called korpus in Russia). We live in Korpus 3.

This complex includes several modern, colorful play areas for the children. It also includes an underground parking garage for the many cars that people own. In fact, the playground is located over the parking garage.


The interesting thing is that the modern buildings are sometimes built right next to an old factory or vacant parking lot mixing the old and the new in a strange combination. It seems like the old is not cleared away before the new one is erected adjacent to it.

A good example is our building complex, pictured on the right. This is the view we have out of our front window. Right in the middle of these beautiful new buildings is this half-built apartment building with a fence surrounding it to keep the children out.

I would guess that this apartment building was started in the early 1990s right after freedom, but the builder ran out of money and abandoned it. Then the the land around this hulk was purchased by a developer in the last couple years. He built new high-rises around this eye-sore and left it like that. 

We love our new, modern apartment, but the view of our living room window leaves something to be desired.