St Petersburg

The thing that I didn’t talk about in my Moscow blog was the people. The fashion in particular. It’s like they’re twenty years behind the western world, which to be fair they probably are, with good reason, but it was also very hit and miss. Some people looked great. Some looked terrible. Amanda and Steve were told by some friends before they got to Russia to look out for “Ruski's”, and to photograph them and put the best photo of the day on the net. Of course we all got involved in that. I personally have not posted any of them on the net… until now. One thing that really amazed us was that all the women wear high heels, everywhere. Even though there are lots of rough footpaths and roads and cobblestones. Crazy.  I particularly like the tights here:

The overnight train from Moscow was far better than I had expected (after overnight trains in Egypt where we didn’t have individual compartments and we were in upright seats hanging onto our bags all night). Pat was a bit shocked that nobody was coming to make the beds for us. The beds were relatively long and comfy but not ideal, I didn’t sleep much more than an hour or two, and Adrian didn’t really sleep at all.


We got to St Petersburg at 630am, but our hotel wouldn’t check us in until 2pm. So we went out for an orientation walk. We were all sooooo tired. I enjoyed St Petersburg, but I liked Moscow better somehow… St Petersburg is dirtier, a lot of buildings have dirt and soot on them. When we left Russia, I knew I could’ve spent another week in Moscow really happily, but I’d seen pretty much everything I wanted to in St Petersburg.

View from our hotel window.

Not the view from our hotel window.

After lunch that day, we had a guided tour at the Hermitage Museum, which is in the old Winter Palace, for two hours. I personally think it would’ve been better to have done the tour in the morning, or the next day, because we were all exhausted and out of patience. We had been warned that the guide wouldn’t wait if we were dawdling, because the museum is so huge and we had such a short time to see it in, but she was actually starting to talk when there were only one or two people there, out of the 15 of us. She was also talking really quietly, and with the number of other people and other tours in the place, we didn’t have a hope of hearing her unless we happened to be standing right on top of her. The first two people lost patience about ten minutes in and buggered off to wander around by themselves. I made it to 45 minutes, and by then I could see that Amanda (who has had a hip replacement) was very uncomfortable, so the two of us and Steve did a bit of a fade out and took our own little express tour through the palace, then went to the coffee shop. It was a real shame that the guide didn’t work out so well for us. The palace is stunning, every room is different, and it’s rammed full of art, but then again art and museums are not really my thing even on a good day.

Kat and me outside the Hermitage.

It was raining almost the whole time we were in St Petersburg. On the second day I decided I needed a sleep in, because we’d been on the go since we started the tour and after the overnight train I was totally wrecked. Most of the group went out to see the Peterhof fountains, and apparently Adrian got absolutely drenched in the rain, but I stayed in bed til 11am or so. Then I met Kat at the music museum, which was full of very helpful and very lovely Russian ladies who didn’t speak English. They tried very hard to tell us about everything in the museum. Lots of hand gestures. We wanted to pack them into our backpacks and take them on tour with us.


Then I went to see the woolly mammoth!!!!! It was the one thing I’d read about that I really, really wanted to do in St Petersburg. It was at the Zoological museum, which was much bigger than I’d expected somehow. It was pretty cool. It was about the only place in Russia that I saw any kids… which was the weirdest thing, there were just no kids anywhere. Not on the metros. Not in the streets. Not in the hotels. Apparently the population is declining in Russia, but there was a total, unexplainable absence of children pretty much anywhere.


The woolly mammoth was awesome!!!!!!!! He only has half a trunk and only a few patches of wool still left on his body. I think they dug him out of the ice in Siberia, I remember it being in the news at home when they found him. They had two or three babies as well, which had been found in different places. One of the babies was really fluffy and cute. I only had to push three or four kids out of the way to get my photos. Being 6ft tall has its advantages.

And the baby woolly mammoth!!!

Kat, Tony (the tour leader) and I had decided to go to the ballet in St Petersburg (again), and this time Tony organised the tickets and made sure it was Swan Lake we went to. The metro stops are quite far apart in St Petersburg, and we didn’t know where we were going, and so we had to wander round for ages finding the place. But we found it in the end. The ballet itself is beautiful, of course, but the dance company were not as good as the one we saw in Moscow. There were a few off-balance chorus ballerinas. We were sitting right down the front, by the orchestra, and Kat and I spent at least as much time watching the orchestra as the dancers. We spent a lot of time giggling. I even had one of the members of the orchestra trying to make me laugh towards the end of the ballet, when he had this really long sustained note to hold and he was running out of breath.


On our last day, we were leaving from the hotel to catch our bus to Estonia at midday, so by the time we rolled out of bed and wandered down to breakfast and took long showers and repacked our bags we didn’t have a lot of time to go and do much. But we were taking photos out of the window of our room, and there was a beautiful church a block away, which we hadn’t seen from street level. So we walked over there. Then we had pancakes with chocolate from a street vendor. Yummmmm.


And then to the bus and Estonia!!

McDonalds in Cyrillic.  Important stuff.  Phonetically it reads the same as in English.

More Moscow Madness

It's pronounced "stop"!!

I ended up loving Moscow, after being so nervous of the place on the first day.  We went to the Cathedral of the Assumption and attendant bridge...

...back to Red Square, and to visit Lenin's mausoleum.  He's very "waxy", you might say.  It's worth seeing him so you can form your own opinion.  Jason and I got in trouble for talking as we were going in, and we'd already been warned about smiling. 

Russia is crazy.  There are security officers and police absolutely everywhere.  And those are just the ones you see, we're pretty convinced there would be plainclothes all over the show as well.  It's particularly noticeable on the metro, but you see them all through the streets as well.

The metro is so fantastic.  I'd heard about it before I arrived and been really keen to see it.  It's absolutely stunningly beautiful.  There are 180 stops and I'm pretty convinced they're all different.  There's marble everywhere, and statues or frescoes or paintings or anything else you can conceive of decorating each stop.  You're not allowed photos of train drivers, officials, or the escalators, which is a shame.  We did a tour through the metro, which I loved....

Julie rubbing the bronze dog's nose for luck for the day!

   



The same guide, Helen, had taken us that morning for a tour of the Kremlin.  I'd pictured it being an enclosed palace, but it's actually a mini city inside a fortress wall.  There are heaps of churches, a big bell, and my favourite building was the one that they used as a residence.

Katherine by the bit that broke off the biggest bell in the world. 

"Imagine the bong that that would make".  I wish I could remember who it was that said that.

On the second night we were there, I went to the ballet with Kat and Adrian, the one single guy on our tour.  We had a great time trying to communicate with the Russian lady in the ticket booth, but we got tickets to something by Tchaikovsky, which we kind of ended up assuming was Swan Lake.  It wasn't.  It got to the interval and we all looked at each other, and Kat said "shouldn't she be a swan by now?"  In the second act there were a lot of toys dancing around, and she and I started to recognise the music.  The one piece we could name was Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy, which helped us come to the realisation that it must've been The Nutcracker.

Don't look at me like that.  Everything's in Cyrrilic.

This is Adrian.  He's very tall.  Standing next to him is Steve, of Steve and Amanda fame.  It's entirely possible that they don't know I took this photo.

After the ballet, the three of us had crapdogs for dinner.  Crapdogs became a bit of a running joke amongst the entire tour group, which may or may not have been started by me.  Check this out:

Adrian and I waited for Katherine to eat hers before we bought ours.

Then we went and met Steve and Amanda for a drink.  This is Amanda:

I love this photo.  She had just been to the toilet.  However, the puddle of water is from her washing her hands with water from her drink bottle.

The following night the five of us went out for dinner, to the Pushkin Cafe, which is meant to be one of the best restaurants in Moscow.  It was rather expensive, and they told us there was a dress code - no jeans for the boys and no bare shoulders for the girls.  We were all worried that we wouldn't get in, because it's not like the boys brought suits with them, and what we do have that's nice is not necessarily going to cover our shoulders completely.  However, we managed.  The boys wore dark jeans and nice shirts.  Everybody scrubbed up pretty well!  And the meal and the service were really excellent.  It was a very fun night.  We'd invited Tony as well, the tour leader, but he didn't come in the end.

Me, Amanda, Steve, Adrian and Kat at Pushkin Cafe; my meal; Kat and me still at Pushkin.

Previous three photos by Amanda and Steve Tilley

The last day we had in Moscow was a free day.  I went out by myself, to the Gulag Museum (which was fantastic, I was there for hours), then to a street exhibition of photographs by Pattie Boyd which I stumbled across (she was married to George Harrison and then Eric Clapton), and then to a sculpture garden, which was originally a dumping ground for old Soviet sculpture but has since had bits added and has turned into quite a lot of sculpture in quite a big area.  I had a great day.

We had to get the metro from our hotel to the train station, and then we had an overnight train to St Petersburg.  After having beautiful weather for the entire time we'd been in Moscow, it absolutely bloody POURED as soon as we decided to leave the hotel.  By the time we got to the train, the water was running out of my hair and right down my shoulders and into my clothes.  The train was better than expected, but the beds were still too short for me and Adrian, so by the time we got to St Petersburg at 630am and to the hotel at 730am we were pretty damn tired.  And this time we couldn't get into our rooms!!

Watch this space for St Petersburg info and photos...