Growing up in St. Petersburg means living in an open-air museum. For a teenager like Kimmy, the daily commute might involve crossing the Neva River or walking past the Winter Palace. While tourists see these as relics of the Tsarist past, for a local youth, they are the backdrop to mundane life—waiting for the bus, meeting friends, or heading to school. This creates a unique psychological environment where the weight of and high art (the Hermitage, the Mariinsky Theatre) sits side-by-side with the globalised, digital reality of Gen Z. The Social and Digital Landscape

Education and culture are inescapable here. Kimmy’s daily commute might take her past the Winter Palace or the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood. This proximity to grandeur creates a specific kind of St. Petersburg identity: one that is deeply proud, slightly formal, and inherently artistic. Whether she is an aspiring ballerina at the Vaganova Academy or a tech-savvy student filming videos near the Lakhta Center, she is a product of a city that views itself as Russia’s "Window to Europe."