The diversity of St. Petersburg

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After another overnight train from Moscow to St. Petersburg (again, with little sleep), we arrived and were whisked off onto another city tour. Tsar Nicholas I was reigning during the construction of the Moscow - St. Petersburg railway and our guide told us that when he was drawing the line between the two cities, he accidentally drew around part of his thumb, creating a curve that is 17 km long! The architects were too afraid to point out the mistake and built the railway according to the Tsar's drawings.

St. Petersburg is a gorgeous city! The city centre is made up of historical buildings - there is one street where people are not allowed to construct new buildings. The city is made up of islands that are connected by draw bridges. The Neva River and bridges are the reason that St. Petersburg has been nicknamed "Venice of the North". While Moscow is a city of 10 million, St. Petersburg is about half the size and is very multi-cultural. People believe that there are way more immigrants than Russians.

Thankfully, our city tour was relatively short and we were allowed to do whatever we wanted until dinner. I chose to catch up on some sleep and visit the Alexander Nevsky Monastary, which was conveniently located across the street from our hotel. I was in awe of the Russians buried here: amongst them are Fydor Dostoevsky, Piotr Chaikovsky (yes, this is the correct spelling, it said so on his grave) and Alexander Pushkin's (famous Russian poet) sister. Before I knew it, an hour had gone by (the graveyeard isn't that big). It was really peaceful and beautiful.

That night, we were treated to a four-course Russian dinner, complete with Russian folk musicians. Miko showed us how Russians do vodka shots and the musicians played some games with us. It was a great evening...save for a group of students who decided to have their own party. Now, I love Spanish culture and have made some great friends in Kortepohja who are Spanish - there's a certain way that they party and it includes a lot of singing, loud talking and boisterous dancing. Most of the time, I enjoy being in that kind of atmosphere - when we're in our student building and not at a nice Russian dinner! Not only were these students loud, but they were outright rude. They would sing and talk over our guide (while he was making toasts TO US) and would sing and dance over the voices of the musicians. They would interrupt the games that the musicians tried to organize by making their way to the dance floor, singing Spanish songs and dancing to their own music. COME ON! Thankfully this particular group of students was from a different university than mine. I would like to think that my friends would've acted differently. A group of us who became fed up with their antics left the dinner early and made our way to a pub. My surly mood was tempered by some nice German beer 😊.

One of the best experiences I had in Russia was riding in the cabs in St. Petersburg! There are "official taxis" that are run by registered companies, then there are the random Ladas, which are driven by people trying to make some extra money. Some of these cabbies are school teachers who aren't paid enough; others are people who have bought beat up Ladas and don't mind driving around the city. Negotiating cab fare is part of the fun. As soon as you walk to the street curb and put up your hand to signal that you want a taxi, three or four will stop. You go to the first one and ask if he'll drive you for 'x' amount, if his answer doesn't satisfy you, you move on to the next cab, and then the next until you've found a cabbie who will take you at the rate you want to pay. Obviously this isn't the safest method of doing things - but as long as you're in a group, you're relatively safe 😊. The cabbie we met on this night was quite chatty and friendly, he was also absolutely nuts. Another thing about Lada taxis - they drive however the hell they want to drive. This includes pushing the car as fast as it will go, weaving in and out of traffic and taking turns at pretty much the same speed as on a straight road. Absolute madness!

The next day was one of my favourite days of the trip. We visited the world-class Hermitage Museum! The Hermitage is the fourth largest museum in the world and is in the beautiful Winter Palace. There are about 3000 exhibits in this museum and someone has calculated that if you spent 1 minute at each exhibit, it would take you two weeks to see all 3000. We saw a tenth of the available exhibits in 3 hours and walked about 6-7 km doing it. I got to see works by Leonardo DaVinci, Raphael, Rembrandt, Picasso, Matisse, and many, many other amazing artists. After all that walking around, my friend Melissa and I decided to have a relaxed night and opted out of the river cruise that the rest of the group took. It turned out to be a good decision since most of them came back sick. Apparently they were mixing Soviet champagne with vodka - not a good combination. Melissa and I on the other hand went to a quiet cafe and stuffed ourselves full of beer, pizza, baclava and cheesecake. Pure bliss.

After a restful sleep, it was off to Pushkin City/Tsarskoye Selo. Here we took a tour of Catherine's Palace. I think "opulent" is the best word to describe this estate. Everything in that place was gold! There's so much gold in that palace that one of the princesses living there got sick of staring at it and had designers change two of the room into more modest ones. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves. Unfortunately spring is just beginning and so the palace grounds weren't as blossoming and beautiful as they would be later on this season. Nonethless, they were still beautiful and impressive.

Next came the cathedrals tours. We visited the Cathedral on the Spilled Blood and St. Isaac's Cathedral. Tsar Alexander II was assassinated on the street in front of this cathedral and later died in his palace. The stones with his blood were taken from the street and placed in the cathedral in his memory. St. Isaac's Cathedral is the largest cathedral in St. Petersburg and was designed by a French architect who was relatively unknown during his time. Tsar Alexander I happened to like one of his outlines and seemingly on a whim decided to use him in place of more famous/well-known architects. During the beginning of Soviet rule, the cathedral was abandoned and used as a storehouse. This cathedral is also famous and considered especially sacred because it was able to withstand WWII. Bombs were being dropped regularly and were completely demolishing other structures around it. None of these bombs hit St. Isaac's.

We had free time after the tours and Tahir and I decided to hit up one more museum: the Soviet Military Museum. The name is pretty self-explanatory and it's hard to describe what I saw because nothing was in English. Even though I couldn't understand any of the descriptions, I pieced together what I know from high school social studies with the dates on the description tags.

After all this history and touring, it was time to party! We went to a HUGE nightclub called Metro that had three floors, all with different themes and music genres. The place was packed with young people. When I say "young" I mean pre-teen young. 16 is the age restriction but security obviously isn't diligent about checking ID because I saw many a 14-year old. I had a great time, but the young kids began to creep me out a little and I left earlier than the rest of the group (2:30ish instead of 6 am like most of the others, haha!). I took a cab home with two other girls in my group and this cabbie wasn't as friendly as the last. We'd bartered beforehand that he would take us to the hotel for 100 roubles. When I handed him the money at the end of the ride, he said, "No, 200". I told him that I wasn't paying more than we'd bargained for and quickly got out of the car! We didn't have anymore trouble from him.

The next day was all bus. We left St. Petersburg at 11 am and arrived in Jyväskylä at 11 pm. Fortunately there were quite a few stops along the way - we had plenty of opportunity to buy cheap vodka, souveniers and food. One of the reasons for the long trip was border control - there were three Russian checkpoints to pass through and Finnish customs. On the way home, we passed the city of Vyborg which is an interesting place because of how many times it's changed hands between Finland and Russia. The architecture is a mish-mash of Russian and Finnish styles and apparently, there are quite a few Finns still living there.

Well, I hope you've been entertained by my descriptions of Russia. I strongly recommend going there if you ever have the opportunity to. You may want to get friendly with a Russian or two before planning a trip.

As always, the photos I wasn't patient enough to load onto this website are available on my Picasa website: http://picasaweb.google.com/Melanie.Leeson

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Photos

Entrance to restaurant
Russian dinner evening

Arts Square
View from the colennade at St. Isaac's. I walked up 264 stairs for this!

Catherine's Palace
Bling bling!

View from Military Museum
The spire is part of Peter and Paul's Cathedral, which is part of a fortress

Me and Kalashnikov
Propaganda poster of Mikhail Kalashnikov - designer of the AK47

Comments

[Sabine]

heippa
Hi Mel, Looks like you're having lots of fun!! We miss you at the lab, hope to see you when you come back. Enjoy the rest of your stay :) Sabine