shoe shopping in Russia

Oy. I hate shoe shopping. A lot. Shoes are, generally, expensive, and once you wear them outside, you can’t return them. Also, I’m picky. Therefore, it is a high risk activity. I don’t like high risk activities.

However, this week it became necessary. You don’t know how necessary shoe shopping is until your snowboots break (yes, break), and your Russian babushka professors get on your case. And when the Russian babushka professors get on your case, they spend 20 minutes in class telling you just how necessary it is for you to buy new shoes, and then they spend 20 minutes in the other class telling the other students that they need to ensure you buy new shoes. Okay, yes ma’am. But still… hate shoe shopping.

they broke.

I went to this place called “Galleria.” I didn’t know what it was, except that apparently all of the shoes in the whole place were on sale. Good grief. It was like the Mall of America, I think, except maybe bigger. There must have been at least 50 stores that sold only shoes, let alone the 300 others that sold shoes + other things. So this was overwhelming, to put it mildly.

Besides that, it did not take long for me to figure out that I could not pull my normal American model of “how to buy shoes” for this errand.

So here is a maximally efficient way to describe the situation.

What I Usually Do

• Go to a store.
• Pull out boxes for 3 different styles of shoe in 2 sizes each.
• Try them on, weed out the ones that are immediately “no”s, try on the rest again.
• Choose a pair, buy it.
• Go to the next store.
• Do exactly the same thing.
• Rinse & repeat, up to 5 or 6 times.
• Take these 5 pairs of shoes home, sit on the decision for a day or two, return the ones I don’t want.
• If “the ones I don’t want” are not 4 but rather all 5 pairs, start from the beginning and do it again.

Reasons Why This Doesn’t Work Here

• Most stores are of the Macy’s sort of model, where you have to ask to try on a certain shoe in a certain size. The employees will only bring out one at a time.
• I don’t mean one pair. I mean one shoe.
• Carrying five pairs of shoes home on the metro/bus sounds like a gigantic pain.
• I’m operating on cash. 5 pairs of boots would come out to 10,000-20,000 rubles. I, on principle, do not carry that much cash EVER.
• It’s very weird in Russia to return things once you’ve bought them.
• I hate shoe shopping, and I’d rather only have to drag myself out once.

What I Ended Up Doing

• Looked at shoes in ~7 different stores.
• Dismissed somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 otherwise viable options, because I don’t really want to spend $200 on a pair of boots when I don’t even have my mom with me to confirm that this is a good idea.
• Dismissed somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 otherwise viable options, because they weren’t waterproof.
• Dismissed somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 otherwise viable options, because they weren’t well-insulated.
• Dismissed somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 otherwise viable options, because seriously do all Russian women wear 3 inch heels all the time.
• Tried on a total of 2 pairs.
• Dismissed them both because of reasons.
• Bought a can of waterproofing spray at Payless and determined to just wear three pairs of socks with the brown leather boots I already have, which didn’t break in half.

So there is my tale of woe. I hate shoe shopping. Do I really need snowboots anyway? I don’t have to be outside that much, and this year is warmer than usual. Right?