As the airplane nosed through the clouds, I caught my first glimpse of the city: a large smokestack and row after row of identical apartment buildings. This was Saint Petersburg, Russia — my home for the last three weeks.

It really is a peculiar city, an uncomfortable amalgam of European-style palaces, Russian Orthodox onion-domed churches and Soviet concrete apartment complexes, with the new addition of American golden arches.

Busts of Marx and Engels are locked into a permanent staring match in a park overshadowed by the tall white domes of Smolny Cathedral. On a street with McDonald’s, KFC and Sbarro stands a monument to the Great Patriotic War—when more than a half-million residents starved to death during the 900-day Nazi siege of Leningrad.

A few miles from the sprawling Winter Palace, with its red-carpeted marble staircases and gold chandeliered dining halls, lived my Russian host, a retired ballerina, in a tiny apartment in a 12-story white and blue-tiled building with a groaning elevator that smelled of… well, I did not unplug my nose long enough to find out.

The building itself is dwarfed by its surroundings. Four identical 20-story high towers stand between it and the canal, and a single 15-story complex stretches for a mile along the opposite side. The street corner sparkles with hundreds of beer bottle caps pressed into the dirt, and lights flash at the grocery store disguised as a disco-club.

My host did not speak a word of English. Our conversations were either a game of quasi-French, quasi-Russian, charades or a series of Da-or-Nyet questions.

Only one “conversation” touched on the world of politics. “I love Putin,” my host declared out-of-nowhere and with no further comment. She had said it so forcefully that I thought perhaps the apartment was bugged.

Upon further reflection, her comment should not have been surprising to me. Judging by the quantity of statues in the city, St. Petersburg residents are quite possibly the only people more obsessed with their famous natives than Iowa residents are obsessed with famous Iowans. And if I were to rank my favorite Russian heads-of-state for the last 100 years, Putin’s name would unfortunately be not far from the top.

Still, her low standards were troubling to me, and they seemed to be shared by her fellow citizens. One tour guide told our group that Russia is in the “post-communist era” and not even Russia’s greatest minds can come up with a label better than that.

The most common tourist T-shirt for sale displayed a picture of Lenin in front of golden arches over the title “McLenin’s.” I think that is Russian for “how things change and how things stay the same.”

Both communism and capitalism have failed to live up to expectations, and Russians have learned not to hope for too much.

“Why do you want to study here?” a Russian student asked me. “Russia is a country of great political and economic uncertainty.” That was certainly true — uncertainty about when the hot water will be working, uncertainty about whether there will be toilet paper in the restrooms, uncertainty about whether the window will still be open when you get to the front after waiting in line for an hour and uncertainty about whether or not your bus driver will be detained by a member of the militia in the middle of an intersection.

Despite the unfortunate circumstances of the average person, St. Petersburg residents did not seem unhappy (except when riding the metro).

Nothing is more pleasing to them than fresh cut flowers, long warm “white nights” when the sun’s light never completely fades from the sky and Brazilian soap operas dubbed poorly into Russian.

It does not make sense to me that people can live so contentedly, when they can see the palaces, the prosperity and the broken promises.

And the answer is invariably the same, every time something doesn’t make sense: “Yes, but this is Russia.”