We left Moscow in the evening last Friday night from the Leningradsky train station. My landlady still calls St. Petersburg Leningrad actually. It's what it was called when she was born, and her whole life until communism fell. Actually it's had three names: it was called Petrograd after the start of WWI because Saint Petersburg sounded too German. Anyway, we traveled platzkart which means that all of our beds were basically out in the open--there weren't any closed rooms or cabins I guess you call them in English. My bed was not long enough for my body, therefore my feet stuck out into the aisle when I stretched out all the way. It wasn't too big a deal, I didn't sleep too much. I chatted a bunch with my comrades and played uno, and went to sleep around 1 o'clock. My bedroll was extremely lumpy though I didn't sleep too well, and when they woke me up at a little before 4 o'clock I wanted to punch them. But we rolled into Petersburg at around 5 in the morning and we dropped our stuff off at the hostel.
Immediately we noticed a difference between Petersburg and Moscow. The city's just set up differently, everything leads to the bay, whereas Moscow is very much a city with a nucleus that spreads out around it in all directions. Petersburg was also all built in the same time period (start of the 18th century and so on) whereas Moscow has buildings from all different time periods. On basically a zero amount of sleep level and still having the sniffles and with my voice beginning to get very low from my cold, I set out to explore the city after a mediocre breakfast of warm milk and cardboardish cornflakes, plus I suppose some nice herbal tea and bread and hard-boiled egg. We wandered the city, with our original intent being to go to Peterhoff Palace, but not getting anywhere near it. We walked on Nevski Prospekt, a large boulevard that leads to the Neva river (which leads out to the bay of Finland) and sort of got side-tracked here and there and everywhere. The first thing that caught our attention was the Church of the Savior on the Spilled Blood. You may actually be able to form a mental picture of this cathedral if you hearken back to the end of Anastasia's song "Journey to the Past" where she sings the last note and you see the city of St. Petersburg in front of her with a big church in the center. Well that's the one. The "spilled blood" part means that this is the site that Alexander II was assassinated (somebody chucked a grenade/bomb into his carriage). Since Alexander II was actually one of the only good tsars that Russia had (he abolished serfdom, sold Alaska to America, liberated Bulgaria from Ottoman rule), it's too bad that he had to go out that way. So they built a really cool church on the spot where he died, in like the 1880's.
We didn't go inside, we just appreciated it from the outside. We are cheapskates. We continued along till we reached the Winter Palace, which we just admired because we weren't in the mood to go into (it's the location of the Hermitage, where we would go later). We ended up just seeing a bunch of cool stuff there in the center area, before heading back to the local Carl's Jr. Yes, there is a Carl's Jr. in St. Petersburg, and it is a glorious place. Yes, the food is slightly expensive BUT you get free refills and free ketchup, BBQ sauce, etc. This made it an incredibly unique place, and island of Americana if you will, in the heart of European St. Petersburg, and we ate there everyday except for Sunday. I mentioned this over a Skype conversation as well, but just to let you know the power of American food, I was having some annoying diarrhea the two days before I went to Petersburg, and then the whole trip in Peter (the Russians themselves refer to the city as simply "Peter" colloquially) I experienced zero stomach problems off of my diet of Carl's Jr. Now back in Moscow, I have been suffering from diarrhea AGAIN since the day after I got back. Hmm.
Anyway, one of the highlights of the St. Petersburg trip, nay, one of the highlights of my whole Russia experience, was seeing the ballet Swan Lake that first evening in Aleksandr Theater, I think the oldest running theater in Russia. The Mariinskiy theater is supposed to be cooler, but this was cool enough. The music and dancing were amazing, and probably the biggest miracle of all was that I didn't fall asleep, nor did I even have to fight to stay awake. It's hard to describe a cool aesthetic experience like this so I will just tell you guys that it was an awesome experience, especially to see it in Saint Petersburg with Russian musicians, dancers, and music composed by Tchaikovsky himself.
The next day... Sunday? We all planned on going to church, and we all failed. We didn't know that it took an hour to get out there, and we had wanted to see the Hermitage but the Hermitage closes at 5, so it just didn't work out to go to church. As it was we probably waited half and hour to 45 minutes in line outside to get into the dang palace, before I realized to my horror that we had to wait in ANOTHER line to buy the tickets to get into the museum. Oh well; we got in, and we saw a lot of cool stuff. There was a massive Picasso exhibit that I sort of glanced at, not out of disrespect to the guy but because I like Impressionism better. The Van Gogh pieces, Manet, and several other French dudes have some of their stuff in the Hermitage and it really was incredible. The major drawback about the Hermitage? Absolutely jam-packed with tourists. Of course, that's what I was, but I wasn't part of some huge Asian tour group with some frantic Russian tour guide shouting above the din in whatever Asian language those people spoke. Yeah I think the problem was just the time frame that we were in Petersburg, which I will explain here:
We came right at the end of the school year, so we got to see (oh this also happened Saturday night) the graduation party (absolutely ridiculous, drunk people EVERYWHERE) and it is also the time period called Beli Nochi, tranlated White Nights. White nights, because as I myself can testify, it didn't get dark until midnight, and started getting light again at about four in the morning-- because of the summer solstice. Longest day of the year, so party on. Not only foreign tourists come to Petersburg at this time, but tons of Muscovites and Russians from all over go to Petersburg for the party. So, I think if I ever went back to the Hermitage, I would do it 1) not on a Sunday, when everybody else has a day off too 2)not during peak tourist season, during the summer or more specifically not during White Nights.
Sunday was a relaxing day as well; after we got kicked out of the Hermitage, we explored more of St. Petersburg adn just enjoyed each others' company. That night we stayed up to watch the bridges raise to let the ships through at like 1:30 in the morning, which was fun, but not quite as epic as I had hoped (it may have been the particular bridge that we watched).
Here I want to insert a little addition. I forgot to tell about the way we passed the time from about midnight to one o'clock in the morning. We went into a park towards a fire that we assumed was some sort of Eternal Flame, the likes of which are seen at several places in Moscow, i.e. the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and so forth. Instead of an eternal flame it was just some sort of young punk flame. Gathered around it were several musically inclined, as well as alcoholically inclined locals. We sort of crashed their party, and their ring-leader dedicated a few songs to us туристы. Some were really funny, at least one fairly meditative, but all in all it was a pretty cool experience. We left them as they began wetting their throats with cheap beer again, and made our way to the bridges, which I mentioned earlier. I will probs try to upload a video of one of their songs on Monday when I have a fast internet connection again.
Monday we went to a place sort of outside the center of the city called Tsarskoe Selo, or King Village. It's basically another palace, with surrounding gardens and park-type stuff. I liked it fairly well, but getting inside the palace was... difficult. We waited in line for about a half hour before somebody told us that they were giving priority to the groups and that the line wouldn't move at all for the next two hours. So we wandered around for two hours and tried to enjoy ourselves despite our thirst, hunger, etc. We went back and waited in line forever until we got in. Of course, as soon as they let us in, we had to get into another line to buy the overpriced tickets, and then had to get into another line to go through the security thing, which when we arrived there the security dude told us that we had to go all the way back to the garderob (coat hanging-up place? I forget what it is in English) and put our backpacks there, so me and another dude booked it back there hauling three backpacks apiece and then returned to find out that we had to put on these dumb little booties to keep the floor clean, and then the lady at the door almost made us wait again for more English-speaking people to show up to attach us to a tour-guide, when I almost shouted desperately "BUT WE UNDERSTAND RUSSIAN!" and we barged through the door, because by then the whole dang place was supposed to close in like half an hour. Basically my patience had run very thing with this palace, but once we got in and sneaked away from our boring Russian tour guide we saw enough gold leaf to... cover all the angel Moronis in the world. The most impressive room was the Amber Room, a room that had amber from Estonia encrusting all the walls, the ceiling, and forming all the picture frames.
We saw the Amber room and beat a hasty retreat out of that garrish place. We made our way to Carl's Junior and had another great meal. And after that... I can't remember what happened. I think we just got a decent night's sleep back at the hostel.
The next day, our final day, we set out for the Peterhoff Palace. I loved that place. We didn't dare to try actually going in, 1) we're cheapskates and 2) we'd had enough of those terrible lines and waiting. And really, because the grounds and fountains at Peterhoff are glorious enough by themselves. So beautiful, I believe that every person in our family should make a pilgrimage to Peterhoff for the purpose of enriching cultural lives. It was a really pretty day that we went, too-- at least pretty according to my standards, overcast, grey, which brought out the green of the trees and grass, and didn't wash out the texture of the gold statues lining the fountains. I won't go too much into detail, because the pictures that you guys will eventually see can speak more eloquently than me. But the Bay of Finland was cool. Skipping rocks in the Bay of Finland is like one more goal reached.
One more addition: it rained quite a bit at Peterhoff. So it was a wet experience. In addition to the rain, however, were several hidden fountains that are hidden in several places around the grounds. We had fun tripping the traps of those hidden, or trick fountains. One of them was not really a trick fountain at all, though; and I took the opportunity to do a little dance. Hopefully that link works.
After Peterhoff, we gathered one last time in Carl's Jr. before going out to explore one more corner of the city. We eventually found a cool church, something about being Lenin's church or Lenin's wife being buried there or something, I can't remember why it was important. One person just wanted to go there. P.s. it was like 10:30 at night when we made it to this church, and I honestly thought it was like 4:30 in the afternoon from how light it was outside. We headed back to the hostel, exhausted, grabbed our stuff and got on the train, where I fell asleep very quickly and we woke up in Moscow.
Congratulations, if you made it through. Stay tuned for my next post about the Russian Circus.
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