Random thoughts on St Petersburg

I bought my first train ticket yesterday. Quite an adventure. Here it is:



I had hoped to take an overnight train to Moscow, but I waited too long to buy my ticket and there were no seats available. Being an umemployed travel bum, I forget that some people actually, you know, work for a living. So it didn't occur to me that it might be a problem getting a ticket on a Sunday night. All the Muscovites who come to St Petersburg for the weekend take the overnight trains on Sunday so they can be at work on Monday.

So I had to book a train in the afternoon, which means one less day in St Petersburg, which means I won't be able to go to Pushkin Palace and see the famous Amber Room. Bummer.

I went to the Dostoevsky Museum today, which was a ripoff, but I did take this picture, even though I probably wasn't allowed. This is his tobacco box. On the lid his daughter wrote "Papa died today" and the date of his death.



(Note to my Russian friends: This is what the audio guide said it says. I take no responsibility for the translation.)

It was a nice, sunny day so, despite my first Russian hangover, I took some pictures of some landmarks. Here is one of the canals here in "Northern Venice":



Baltimoreans may recognize this guy. Yuri Temirkanov the Music Director and Chief Conductor of the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic but he was also Music Director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra from 2000 until 2006.

The Hermitage

Today I went back to the Hermitage and took about a million pictures, mostly of the rooms themselves. There are 1,057 halls and rooms, such as this one, which apparently is where the tsar watched TV. You think they could have afforded to buy a sofa and some chairs.



There are two small paintings by Leonardo da Vinci and they draw quite a crowd. They're both covered in glass so it's tough to get a good picture even when you've fought your way to the front.



By contrast, this room wasn't quite as popular. There are only two paintings. A recently restored Rubens, and another which is currently being restored. Every room in the museum has an attendant. I felt sorry for the poor lonely babushka in the back corner.



I suppose I should show some pictures of the artwork, too. This is "Bush" by Vincent Van Gogh:



"Crouching Boy" by Michelango:



"Young Women in the Garden" by Louis Valtat:



A couple more rooms. It's hard to believe that this was actually built to be someone's house. It's good to be the king! (Or tsar, in this case.)







In this last shot you can see how crowded the place gets. This next picture was taken at at 3 p.m.



This is the queue to get in. It goes all the way through the archway in the back and about 100 feet out the other side. The first day I went to the museum I waited in a line about 1/4 this long and it took an hour. So I don't think most of these people will even get in, let alone see anything.

I bought a ticket online for my second trip. For whatever reason it took several days for me to get it, but it was worth it. If you buy your ticket online, you don't have to wait in line. I went in through the exit door and went up to the information desk to ask where to redeem my voucher. The woman came out from behind the desk and personally escorted me to the front of the queue and handed my paperwork to the cashier! And yes, the people in line seemed pretty pissed.

Which country am I in again?

I had to switch hostels due to a typically Russian Orwellian mixup I'll try to relate in a future post. This is my new hostel:



Can you see it? Of course you can't. It's the unmarked red door between Citibank and McDonald's, and is anything more Russian than that?

For some reason Russian hostels are never marked. Finding them can be quite a challenge. These are the official directions to my hostel in Moscow from the hostelworld website:

""- Exit the Sukharevskaya metro station to the right. You will see a park in front of you. Walk along the park, following the Sadovoe Koltso road (Garden Ring in English) about 100 meters to the second intersection.
- Our building is 16/18 and it faces the Sadovoe Koltso road.
- Walk to the farthest end of the building. Our entrance is a doorway to the right of the French bakery with bread in the window. Please note there are no clear markings on the door indicating the hostel.
- on the intercom press 005K and we will let you in. Otherwise, you can press 222 K 222 and let yourself in.
- take the elevator to the 4th floor.
If you have any difficulties, please call us."

It reads like something out of a 1970s Cold War spy novel!

I'm starting to get the hang of reading Russian. One thing that helps is that, unlike English or Spanish, every letter is pronounced. (To my Russian-speaking friends: Yes, I know I'm oversimplifying. Work with me.)

The McDonald's sign is a good start for teaching yourself Russian. If it were spelled MacDonald's the sign would be the letter-by-letter phonetic equivalent.

The owner of my new hostel is a blind musician from New Zealand. As Dave Barry would say, I swear I am not making this up. I mention that he is blind because it perhaps helps explain the condition of the place. A CIA dossier on Che Guevara once famously noted that he was "really outstandingly and spectacularly dirty." I can't think of a better phrase for this place.

Russian hostels generally have a reputation for being a bit grubby. This place begs disbelief. It's downright funny. I don't want to sound too harsh. The owner took me out and got me drunk last night, after all. But when you travel on a budget you take your chances. I'm only here for one more night so no big deal.

In journalism school they teach you to look for the "telling detail," the one thing that best sums up your subject. Most hostels I've been in don't allow smoking indoors. I'm sharing a dorm room with five other guys, one of whom is a 60ish Irishman named Ed who apparently lives here. Ed has an ashtray in his bed.

St Petersburg at night

One of the iconic symbols of St Petersburg is its bridges. Peter the Great wanted a "Northern Venice," so the city was designed so that certain parts are best approached by boat via the Neva River or the canals that criss-cross the city.

There are seven drawbridges that open at close on a set schedule every night to let ships go through, some from 1:30 a.m to 5:00 a.m. If you happen to be on the wrong side of the bridge when it opens, well, as they say here in Russia, you're screwed. There is simply no way to get back until the bridge goes back down.

I had been meaning to walk down at night and take pictures of the bridges up. Walking around a foreign city at 2 a.m. seems a little crazy, especially in the rain, but a lot of people were down there, including guards on the bridges, presumably to keep drunken idiots from trying to swim home.

This is a really crappy picture because of the rain, but you get the idea:



This is a slightly better picture of the Alexander Column and vast Palace Square behind the Hermitage. At the bottom of the column on the left you can see a guy playing saxophone. At 2 a.m. in the rain.

The Russian Museum

Even though the Hermitage boasts the world's largest art collection it has very little Russian art. Works by and of Russians are housed primarily in The Russian Museum. In any other city this would be the centerpiece museum. But here you can walk right in while just a few blocks away people queue up for hours to get into the Hermitage.

Both museums are in former palaces, so it's often the rooms themselves on display, like this parlor. The windows on the right look out over a vast lawn and gardens.




The main attraction is Karl Brullov's enormous "The Last Day of Pompeii." It goes from floor to ceiling.



And I liked this rather different rendering of "The Last Supper" by Nikolai Ghe. The dark figure in the foreground is Judas. You can't tell from the picture how sinister he looks.



Ssh, don't tell anyone: I took these pix without paying the 200 ruble fee (about $10).

Dostoevsky Day

Today I decided to visit a few sites that would require me to navigate my way around the city. I wanted to work on reading maps and signs in Russian. I did a Dostoevsky tour. One of my favorite authors lived and wrote and was imprisoned and was buried right here in St Petersburg. It was another day of "Things That May Interest Only Me."

Just a few blocks from my hostel is a house where he lived. And at the far end of town is a monastery in which he is buried. It's sort of a celebrity graveyard, with some of the most influential and famous former city residents buried there, including the composers Rimsky-Korsakov and Mussorgsky.

This is me at Dostoevsky's grave:

First impressions of the Russians

I had planned on using today to run some errands and unwind a bit, but my new Aussie friends invited me along on day trip. Dima, a Russian guy from Moscow, also tagged along. I'm pooped, but I'm glad I took the trip. It was a good introduction to how to get around here, and having a Russian citizen along also saved me some money.

Foreigners pay far more than Russians to visit Russian tourist sites, usually two to three times as much. So Dima was able to score us all citizen tickets to Petrodvorets and save us a few bucks.

Petrodvorets is another imperial palace outside of town. This is not it:


This is a subway station. The subway stations here, and even more so in Moscow, I'm told, can be quite impressive, with statues, chandeliers, columns made of marble or, in this case, encased in carved glass. (The red wooden skirts are there to protect them.) St Petersburg also has the the world's deepest subways, with some of the stations nearly 200 feet below ground. That way they could double as bomb shelters. Hopefully I won't be putting that theory to the test.

This is the palace. Bear in mind it was a cloudy day:



This is a view down the canal from the Gulf of Finland to the palace:


Bear in mind as you look at this that the palace itself was actually closed today. Visitors were allowed to tour the grounds but not go inside. And the place was packed.

I wondered how many tourists I'd encounter here. They're everywhere. The Hermitage was so crowded it was hard to get around at times. There are a lot of cruise ship groups, but the vast majority of tourists are Russians.

My theory (as with all my theories, this is based entirely on my keen powers of perception and vast intellect with no actual evidence whatsoever) is this: During the Soviet era Russians weren't allowed to travel, and after the fall of communism no one could afford to. Now that Putin has the country back on its feet again people can travel, often for the very first time.

One thing I love about the Russians is how much fun they have taking pictures. They love to pose. You'll see families with elaborately choreographed arrangements. Girls here love to vamp, striking seductive poses, often going to great lengths to do it. Check out this girl:



The rock she's standing on is in the Gulf of Finland, so the water is freezing.
It's a cloudy day and there is absolutely nothing to see behind her! Here's another pic of the same scene:



In the center of this picture, in the distance by the far shore of the beach you can see another girl standing on the rock posing. And in the foreground you can see where raw sewage flows into the water...

First impressions of Russia

Tsar Nicolas I said of St Petersburg "It is in Russia -- but it is not Russian!" Peter the Great built the city from scratch in just nine years in the early 1700s because Russia was considered a backwater, and he wanted a more modern, more "European" city. The city is, by all accounts, one of the most beautiful in the world.

But it is not Russian. Moscow is Russian. So I'll wait until I get there to form any real impression of the country.

I did a foot tour of the city today with an Aussie couple I met here who were nice enough to invite me along. This is me on the the Neva River, with The State Hermitage Museum in the background. The city is at roughly the same latitude as Anchorage, Alaska. You can see I was quite comfortable in my shorts and a polo shirt, but it's 11:30 pm and the sun hasn't set yet!



The museum is the centerpiece of St Petersburg and of the world's great art museums, with the largest collection in the world. It's housed partly in the Winter Palace, a place of almost obscene splendor. You can see how big it is. Even at a distance it fills the camera frame, and it's as wide as it is long. I plan to go back and do a more thorough tour because, get this, you can take pictures inside! (For a fee, of course.)

The entry to my hostel is dirty and dingy and a little scary. The hostel itself is on the third floor, and it's wonderful. The girls who work here are friendly (and beautiful!) and speak perfect English. I'm sleeping in an 8-bed dorm room but this is the bathroom:



My hostel bathroom has a jacuzzi!

St Petersburg has produced some of Russia's favorite sons: Vladimir Putin is from here, as were Pushkin, Gogol and Dostoevsky. I can only assume that this place is named after of one of his novels, otherwise it's a pretty lousy name for a restaurant: