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Published: September 22nd 2007
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The Three Brothers, Riga
Each house represents different architectural epochs, from medieval to baroque. They are the oldest residential stone buildings in the city. (P)
13 September Up at 3 a.m. (having gone to sleep at 1.30) for the 06h00 flight from Liverpool to Riga in Latvia. Unsurprisingly slept until we touched down. Riga is a city we are on familiar terms with, having inter-railed there in 2001, so we enjoyed checking out the old haunts. Over dinner Nick had a Adaris beer (reminding him of John Aldridge, so he says).
14th - 19th September Having caught up on sleep, we brunched and did a DIY walking tour of the Old Town. Wandered in to the former aircraft hangar food market and bussed overnight to St. Petersburg. Procedures at the Russian border in the middle of the night were interesting. All disembarked from the bus as expected, and we were asked unexpected questions (in Russian) at passport control such as "how old are you?", "why does your passport last for 11 years instead of 10?" and "how can you possibly be embarking on such a long holiday??!!" We were let through eventually.
On arrival in St. Petersburg at 7 a.m. we got to our hostel with surprising ease - hooray! (Note to self: must re-learn cyrillic alphabet I apparently mastered at G.C.S.E.
Restored army barracks, Riga
It's a really long building, which Allan, Louise, Prime and Simon will recognise from our Baltic travels in 2001, when it used to have coins painted on the end. On the left, there is the Powder Tower and to the right (out of picture) is an entry/exit barrier - since we were there 6 years ago, there is an entry charge to drive around the old town. The youth hostel in which we stayed in 2001, also just out of view, seems empty now. but have since erased from memory. Street signs and menus are quite a challenge to decipher, but we're getting there...)
Breakfast was included at the hostel but each day there was a ‘new’ dish to tickle our tastebuds, ranging from pancakes and rice pudding to spaghetti and cheese!
'Fact' of the day: your average Russian gets through 1 litre of vodka (or "little water") each week. Believe it if you will...
As we discovered Saint Petersburg (SPB for short) on foot for ourselves, we ambled by the
Admiralty Gardens and a park outside the grand
St. Isaac’s Cathedral where there many newlyweds posing for photos, replacing the “cheese” with chants of “vodka, vodka!” Dvortsovaya square housing the
Winter Palace (better known as
The Hermitage) was a very vast open space, like I expected in most of the city, but it wasn’t the case at all. It was rather more like a European city with ornate building facades, statues like I would expect in Rome and brightly-painted palaces. (Peter the Great, who had this city purpose-built was strongly influenced by his trips to Europe so the stereotypical Soviet-style buildings are few are far between).
On the main
drag,
Nevsky Prospect, we crossed over several of the canals which wind through the city, on one seeing the
Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood (you know, the one that looks like it has several coloured onions atop), where Alexander II was assassinated in 1881 by anarchists, hence the gruesome name. We caught part of a service at the
Kazan Cathedral (unusually there are no seats so everyone stands, perhaps to stop the congregation from dozing off…). Napolean’s flag was proudly on display (Russia is very proud of defeating him for once and all in 1812), along with the actual keys of French fortresses taken by the Russian army! The line-up of eye-catching buildings continued as we walked on, in the form of a library, shopping centre and theatre. Sushi restaurants are overwhelmingly popular here, evidence of the city's cosmopolitan streak. In the end we opted for an Armenian dinner, as you do. We squeezed into a popular bar hang-out called Dacha later on, glad to be “out” on a Saturday night, a welcome change from long overnight bus journeys generally falling on that day of the week during out time in South America.
On other walks we
took in:
- St. Nicholas’ Cathedral (with an “invisible” - well, hidden) choir (again, no seats)
- Yusupov Palace (the family were richer than the Tsars, not quite sure how they managed that…)
- Menshikov Palace. Prince Menshikov was a friend of Peter I, but took a chunk of the state treasury for himself and built himself a palace among other extravagances.
- Anthropology museum. Yes, I know it sounds a riot, but we went to see a real woolly mammoth, discovered frozen in Siberia in 1902 and aged at around 39,000 years old.
- Peter and Paul Fortress. The oldest part of SPB.
- Summer Palace and Gardens (fairly enjoyable in the Autumn rain)
- Astoria Hotel. Took Hitler’s fancy and he even planned a ball here, but never made it.
- Vodka Museum (almost), however upon arrival at alleged location we were duly informed that it had moved to Moscow 2 years beforehand (one thing on the list for the Moscow leg, then)
And we saw Swan Lake at the ballet! When in Rome...
Most impressive of all was the (entire) day spent at the Hermitage, the world-famous museum which is mostly set in the
Winter Palace built for Peter the Great. Even its entrance is very grand, in the middle of Palace Square (Dvortsovaya Ploshad), opposite the mundanely-named-but-highly-impressive General Staff building, which is made up of 2 great classical blocks "joined by arches and topped by a chariot of victory". Between this and the Winter Palace stands the 50m tall Alexander Column, commemorating the 1812 victory over Napoleon.
We admired many hundreds of original works of art from across the globe, European art being particularly well-represented. (Written below many pieces it stated the date it had been “acquired”, for this in many cases read "taken by the State from aristocrats" after the Bolshevik revolution).
As you know, we are not great art gallery devotees, however it would have been impossible not to have been blown away by the treasures inside; we saw masterpieces by no less than 17 grand masters - and here is a brief recap so you can get an idea of what I'm talking about! In more or less the order that we saw them: Still lifes by Matisse, countryscapes by Cezanne, Tahiti landscapes by Gaugin, various scenes by Van Gogh, Canaletto and Botticelli, portraits by Renoir, Picasso, Degas, Velazquez, Caravaggio
The Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg
Paula jumps for joy at the prospect of seven hours looking at paintings and stuff and Rubens, biblical depictions by Rembrandt, Raphael and Da Vinci, and sculptures by Rodin and Michaelangelo - as well as various Greek statues from AD1!
We recovered from our mammoth trek around the Hermitage at a quirky cafe interestingly named "The Pregnant Spy Girl's Handbag" where I must say I sampled my most delicious hot chocolate yet. As you entered, a dog statue barked (via a speaker beside it). Bit of a shock.
Wednesday night we borded a train bound for Moscow.
(N) It's nice to get one over Ryanair, which I feel I did on the outbound flight to Riga from Liverpool by scraping in under the 15kg luggage limit, and then using all the pockets in my coat to carry 3 guidebooks, 2 phrase books, 1 novel and a disposable camera!
Riga didn't seem to have changed
that much since we travelled there in 2001 with Allan, Louise, Prime and Simon. The cars seemed smarter and there is now an entry charge to drive around the old town, but it's still a great place to hang out. I was interested to read that the world's drunkest person comes from Latvia - "a few
years ago an unnamed vagrant was found unconscious by police and rushed to hospital where his blood test revealed an astounding 7.22 parts per million of alcohol. Before this, the medical community had agreed that 4 parts per million was a lethal dose for a human"!
Like Paula said, Saint Petersburg was a lot less Russian than we thought it would be, with its European architecture and multiple canals ("Saint Petersburg stands on the threshold of East and West, sharing in both, aware that it doesn't straightforwardly belong to either", according to one of the travel articles that we read before we left). There is still a lot different though, not just the cyrillic on the menus and paucity of toilets (e.g. only one per restaurant), but also many many people still smoke, and bars are just as smoky (probably worse) than their UK equivalents before July this year. Quite a lot of people wear black, and there are a lot of guys in military uniforms walking around, but not on the look-out, just going from one place to the next. Also the drains are much larger than ours, about 7 inches in diameter - I guess to let
all the melted snow down quickly....
Paula mentioned the hermitage - it was an amazing collection and I was particularly interested in the temporary black-and-white photo exhibition of Michaelangelo's sculptures from around the world, which not only had 'full length' pictures but also details (e.g. hands only) which made me think about how to improve my own pictures, and I had a go in the Summer Gardens where there were numerous marbel statues to experiment with - see lute photo below and let me know your thoughts 😊
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