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Hunks in marble
Holding up the entrance to the Hermitage museum.The cold-war Soviet Scientists appear to have managed to keep one key invention from the Western world. It seems they have invented a material that is incredibly light but incredibly strong. It keeps its strength even at a thickness of only a few millimetres. No doubt it was of much use in strategic weapons systems, but the modern day use seems to be to support the beauties of St Petersburgh as they elegantly perambulate up and down Nesvky prospekt on their three inch high stilettos. Apart from these incredible shoes, the predominant uniform is jeans (made from some kind of new polymer that keeps them incredibly tight), a leather jacket and accessories, including overlarge sunglasses that might have been modelled on Mickey Mouse's ears.
This is not the only kind of scenery that it is worth visiting St Petersburgh for. The city is based around canals and the delta of the River Nevsky. Hence comparisons with Venice are invited, but let's be honest here, St Petersburgh is little like Venice. Amsterdam, with its network of concentric canals, is another possibility, but canals aside to me the city has the look and feel more of Paris, particularly the central part around
the Admiralty and the Winter Palace. It goes without saying that this central part is very beautiful.
We left Tallin on a eurolines bus and drove through the wooded Estonian countryside. The roads were smooth and good. Our co-passengers seemed predominantly Russian - no backpackers yet. After a long delay at the Estonian border we passed over onto the Russian side across what looked like a fairly major river, with castle fortresses peering at each other from either side. The Russian border post and border guards seemed rather dishevilled in comparison.
Both Kim and I felt a slight sense of nervousness and here it was we made our first mistake - we crossed the border without incident. In fact, it turns out we should have insisted on going through the red customs channel and ensuring we had declared all our foreign currency and travellers cheques and then obtained the appropriate documentation. But we didn't, and to be honest, with no-one speaking English and no-one paying much attention to our enquiries, I'm not sure it would have made much difference. Hopefully we can conclude this part of the story in the Moscow report.
The Russian countryside was very similar
Blading in the Plaza
Dvortsovaya Ploshchad, The famous square that hosted one of the biggest turning points in world history is now a playground for roller bladers. to the Estonian countryside except the roads were noticeably worse in terms of bumps and potholes, and generally people looked a bit poorer. As we arrived in St Petersburgh we passed row after row of communist-style(?) tower blocks which were not particularly appealing. We arrived at the Baltic station, worked out how to buy a phone card, phoned our accomodation and then negotiated with a taxi to give us a lift directly into the centre (six gbp negotiated down from ten gbp). All without a word of English ( or Russian ).
Oli, a friend from Sheffield, is lucky enough to find himself researching for a doctorate in an obscure Russian artist. This means he has been fortunate enough to live in St Petersburgh, and put us in touch with his friends to help arrange accomodation. They found us a cheap (in St Petersburgh terms - 44 euros per night) apartment right in the centre, only 5 minutes walk from the Winter Palace and about two doors down from the Astoria, one of the top St Petersburgh hotels. This made life a lot easier, particularly since Kim had come down with a cold and so was taking things a
Dome
The dome of St Isaac's Cathedral from the inside. little easier (although still walking a good 10km+ a day sight-seeing).
The first thing I had to do was book a ticket for a train to Moscow and get our visas registered. The latter turned out to be very easy as I only had to visit the English speaking travel agent that had issued our initial invitation. They were 20 minutes walk down Nevsky Prospekt, the Oxford Street of St Petersburgh. The former would have proved impossible, were it not for the intervention of a young Kazakh student whose English and Russian was very good. The matriarchal
ticket agent in the central ticket office spoke no English - fair enough, why should she? Expecting this we had unambiguously detailed our requirements on paper using symbols and numbers. This she preceeded to misunderstand, insisting that we wanted a return ticket to St Petersburgh. Once this was in her head she was not going to be disabused of the notion, even when it was explained in Russian that we were headed on to Irkutsk, Mongolia and Beijing. Eventually sense prevailed and she chose to blame the layout of our initial request for her confusion, and so we got the tickets. Many
Cruising ...
past the General Staff Building, Dvortsovaya Ploschad. thanks to the unknown Kazakstani - whose conduct helped reinforce her suggestion we should visit her country as everyone was very friendly.
That evening we did the short walking tour suggested in the Lonely Planet, around the Winter Palace, the Hermitage, the Cathedral on Spilled Blood and back to Nevsky, where we found a very pleasant Italian restaurant (chain style) and had good beef carpaccio with truffles, foccacia and pizza.
The historic heart of St Petersburgh includes Dvortsovaya Ploshchad, the huge square containing the Winter Palace, home to the Tsars from 1762 to 1917, the 47.5m Alexander Column that commerates the 1812 victory over Napolean, and the former General Staff Building of the Russian army (1819 -29). This famous square was where on Bloody Sunday in 1905 the tsarist troops fired on the workers who had peacably gathered sparking the 1905 revolution. It was also the scene of the storming of the Winter Palace in the 1917 October Revolution when the Bolsheviks took power. Sitting in it it seems a place of revolution, although these days it forms a centre for rollerblading, jogging and a racetrack for Russian Mods who push their underpowered scooters to the limit around
Nevsky Prospekt
Petersburg's main drag the famous monuments.
The penny-chew-blackpool-rock coloured Church on Spilled Blood, a.k.a. the Church of the Resurrection of Christ, is partly modelled on St Basil's cathedral at the South end of Red Square in Moscow. It is so named as it was built on the spot where Alexander II was blown up in 1881. This church is but one of many large and impressive buildings that heave into view as one wanders down Nevsky prospekt.
Just down the end of our street was the similarly impressive St Isaac's cathedral, designed in 1818 but not completed until 1858. On our second day in St Petersburgh we climbed to the colonnade around the main dome for a panoramic view of the city. In all directions spires and domes were to be seen, to the west was a forest of huge tower cranes, presumably the shipyards, although one could imagine they were some invading martians from War of the Worlds. From this vantage point the contrast between the immaculately restored and the crumbling became more obvious. Kim's dad visited St Petersburgh ten years ago and said that at that time the whole city was crumbling and in decay - without
serious investment
the infrastructure was on it's way out. We found a much more positive state of affairs, at least in the centre, and it seems that this investment has been made, and hopefully is continuing to be made.
Another obvious contrast was on the roads. Every other car is a Lada. Every other car is also a large black Beemer, Merc or big 4x4, with darkened windows. There seems to be little space or appetite for the mid-range car - maybe a Renault perhaps, or a Toyota maybe. We read in the local english paper that Toyota are shortly to open a factory in Russia, as will the German giants.
Black is very much the order of the day, particularly for the gentlemen. Black boots, black jeans, black T-shirt and a black leather jacket. For the full effect you need black hair and black stubble. On the third night we strayed to a sports bar, somewhere near the flat where Dostoyevsky wrote Crime and Punishment, (the night before we had stopped by the restaurant "The Idiot", also in the same area). This wasn't really a sports bar in the American sense, but it did have a projector and a
Our flat
St Petersburg may be beautiful, but it is still crumbling. big screen. The occasion was the Champions League first leg between Liverpool and Chelsa. We were pleased to note on entering a large number of red-shirts sitting in the centre of the bar.Everyone else was wearing the black uniform as described earlier. There was a bit of interest as we walked in, and several healthy stairs for the leather-jacket brigade. As the match started they sat around the outside and it became quite quickly clear that all the swarthy gentlemen were Chelsea supporters. However the atmosphere was very good-natured, with quite a bit of banter between the two sides, and we had a really great evening.
Earlier that day we had visited the State Hermitage museum, which has to have been the highlight of our visit. This collection of over three million items makes the Hermitage one of the largest museums, if not the largest, in the world. The building itself is adjoined to the Winter Palace, and so many of the exhibits are displayed in the sumptious rooms inhabited by the Tsars of old, worth seeing in themselves. The hermitage has good sized collections of originals from Raphael, Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse, Rodin, Gaugin, Rousseau, Cezanne,
St Petersburg, downtown
Kim's photo back towards our flat from the top of St Isaac's Cathedral Pissarro, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Rousseau and Boticelli, plus many more I hadn't heard off. There were also large collections of ancient Greek and Roman sculptures, Egyptian artefacts and more interestingly for us original Mongolian and East Asian artefacts. We spent the best part of the whole day their, and I could easily go back for more.
On our final day it finally rained, and was fairly miserable. Around 5.00pm we heaved on our heavy backpacks to get the tram down to Moscow station - no such luck. No-one with a backpack was getting on one of those crammed vehicles. So we tried the metro. After twenty five minutes sweating in the underground crowds we emerged back where we had started from, completely failing to find the correct platform. So we walked - it only took another half an hour - and we had fun dodging the dodgy police on the lookout for tourists to fleece.
We sat in the Republic of Coffee (a Russian copy of Starbucks) resting and Kim was approached by a young Russian woman who was interested in Kim's book. We got talking and, at our request, she recommended a bar we could visit whilst
waiting for our train. The literal translation of the name of the bar was something like "The diplomatic bag of the pregnant secret agent", and the decor was very much in this theme. We had a really interesting conversation with this bright and charming young woman on a wide range of subjects. She also is a Dostoyevsky fan, believing Dostoyevsky's novels capture the heart and soul of the Russian people. She talked of her grandmother, who lived through the siege of Leningrad (now St Petersburgh). In this 872 day siege more than one million Russians died from shelling, starvation and disease. By comparison the USA and the UK suffered ~700000 dead between them in the whole of WWII. To my knowledge it is only recently that Western historians are beginning to attribute correctly the vital role the Russian people had in winning WWII - the Germans were beaten in the East, not the West.
We also talked about the prevalence of American and Western brands in Russian and St Petersburgh. She felt that whilst many Russians eat in McDonalds regularly they don't get fat, mainly because they walk everywhere. Fair enough I guess. She also felt that the Russians
would not accept a total influx of Western brands, and in many cases rival chains owned by Russians serving Russian-style produce have arisen. Her father, a Professor of Philosophy, and herself both feared invasion by the Chinese more. The idea here is that the Chinese slowly but surely build up a presence of people on the ground in Russia, so that when they need more land it is easier for them to invade. An interesting proposition that I have never heard before, and I guess conceivable, particularly if that is something that your own country has done in the past. We had to agree to disagree about the influence of western brands though. As in Africa, almost every soft drink available, including much of the bottled-water, is from Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Nestle, Lipton or another Western company. Almost all products that we saw had some Western connection. However the Russians have been invaded many times before, and we know what happened.
We recieved this response from Kim's dad, and I thought it was worth adding as it gives some idea of the changes in both Tallin and St Petersburgh in the last ten years ...
"Have enjoyed reading of Sunbathing on the Nevsky
Leaning against the walls of Peter and Paul fortress, sunbathing in Russian is apparently best done standing up (and in the freezing cold). Estonia & St Petes. Sounds like things are improving and the tourist trade is doing well. Tallinn looks as though it is finished now; when I was there after WM at Tampere they were still doing roof tiles and plaster and paint. Do the taxis in St Petersburg have any windscreen wipers yet, that would be a sure sign of an improved economy. Glad to see vertical tanning is still the fashion and it appears that the locals have a little more flesh on their bones now. The Hermitage looks well worth a visit. It wasn't really open as far as I can remember in '94. Then again the temperature was hot enough to want to stay outside. Did you find the prison by the river? It was very sad with families communicating by spill messages thrown from the cell windows or by shouting up at the walls."
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aspiringnomad
Jason
Humbled...
Your pictures put us ALL to shame mate...respect!