Санкт-Петербург/Saint Petersburg, Day 3

Unfortunately, I have put off writing about the last day of our trip to Petersburg for so long that I now have less to say about it. But I'm long-winded enough that this entry will probably be lengthy anyway.

On the third and last day of the trip, we got up and headed by bus out of Petersburg to go to Peterhof, a palace and a bunch of fountains originally built for Peter the Great. Yeah, by bus--our guide chatted with us the whole time. I was a little cranky about that as a result of sleep deprivation. When we arrived at the palace, we were swept into the building in front of a huge mass of people who were presumably waiting to get in. No idea why we had VIP status. The place was crazy and lavish and covered in gold like most things I've seen here, palaces and churches both. I think a lot of the more indulgent stuff appeared when Catherine the Great was hanging out there--the woman really enjoyed being royal. She was just GOOD at it.

I didn't enjoy the tour or the palace all that much, but the grounds of Peterhof were wonderful. First we headed to the shore--which according to Wikipedia was on the Gulf of Finland, part of the Baltic Sea--and I found a bunch of sea glass that I'm hoping to use to make pendants. Free souvenirs! I'm very excited about that. I hung out on the rocks along the shore with some friends, and then Steve and I set out to wander the grounds and see the fountains. It's such a beautiful place, it's too difficult to describe. Of course, it's very contrived beautiful--all of the trees were placed carefully, the lawns are meticulously cared for. But I liked it very much. It was packed with people. We had to leave too soon; lunch and then back to the bus.

We all fell asleep on the bus and we were woken suddenly, herded out, and made to walk up like 180 stairs. It was a bit of a shock! But when we got to the top, we were on a platform on a church in Petersburg that gave a great view of the city. It was breathtaking and full of tourists. We went back down to see the inside of the church and headed out again.

The chronology is a bit fuzzy now, but I think after that we went on the boat tour we were supposed to take the first day. We took the exact same route that some of us had been on the night before, only this time there was a very loud narration being provided via PA in English. We felt sort of conspicuous but learned a lot about the buildings we passed. After the tour, we were set free to say grab dinner and say goodbye to Petersburg. Jordan, Andrea, Rachel, Darcy, and I found an Abkhazian restaurant with excellent food and awesome dancing waiters. I finally had spice! After two months of being in Russia! It was glorious--adjika sauce.

We met up again and drove to the train station. The ride back was not as interesting as the ride there.

Here's what I intended to be the closing of my last entry about Petersburg; I wrote it right after I got back:

"Now I have a silly tan where I wear my watch—the sun here is kinder (I didn’t even burn)—and a big empty space where any motivation to do schoolwork once was. When we were in Petersburg I nearly forgot about Moscow and my life here altogether, but being back feels comfortable and right. Of course, this week, when I’m working on the four or five big assignments I have due, it may not be so pleasant. A big part of me would’ve liked to spend the rest of my time in Russia in Petersburg. Without that bus, of course."

I still have the watch tan.

Санкт-Петербург/Saint Petersburg, Day 2

I am going to try very very hard this time not to walk you through every moment of my day. Because really, the fact that the moments happened in Petersburg does not make them inherently interesting--but this day was something else.

The second day in Petersburg was a Friday. We woke up, had breakfast, and set out for our excursions—sans bus! It’s the little things. We took the Metro cheerfully and walked to the Hermitage. If you know nothing about Russia, you may not know that this is a Big Deal along the lines of going to the Met in New York or (probably a better comparison) the Louvre in Paris. What is now the main building of the Hermitage was once the Winter Palace of the tsars. We began our tour, led by a really adorable young woman named Ira (Ee-ruh, not Ay-ruh), in big grand rooms that gave you an idea of what the palace looked like when the tsars stayed there. Gradually the rooms turned into big grand rooms filled with art, and then upstairs they became small unassuming rooms filled with art. The best part, in my opinion, was the small unassuming rooms, which held newer art—Impressionist works and modern-era stuff. It was the obligatory St. Petersburg excursion, and I’m glad we went, but I don’t have much to say about it.

We grabbed (a slightly more successful) lunch at a café nearby and then headed across the river to the strangest experience of my life. An alley and a creepy barren courtyard let us to the back entrance to Kunstkamera, subtitled “Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography.” Don’t let them fool you. Although most of the museum is occupied with weird “anthropological” exhibits of mannequins dressed up like people from various ethnic groups, what the museum is really all about is the biggest globe in the world, located in the barely-reachable tower of the building, and the 300-year-old, deformed stillborn infants that were the original exhibit of the museum in Peter the Great’s time. I am not kidding. 300-year-old, deformed stillborn infants. In jars. Please refer to the Wikipedia article for more information. It says this sort of collection was “a very typical type of collection in the period.” But it is no longer typical! Why does it still exist? I bet it’s because the curators have no idea how they would go about disposing of the 300-year-old fetuses.

I can’t believe I can say I saw that. To be honest, I wish I couldn’t—it was pretty disturbing. But some of our group really dug it.

Afterwards our younger tour guide dragged us off towards the river to show us “the sphinxes.” We apparently had to see these sphinxes—which turned out to be two small statues by the Neva, given to Russia by France. France apparently has a thing for statue-gifting. A very drunk middle-aged woman was swimming in the river in her underwear and talking to a bunch of young people hanging out on the steps near the Sphinxes. When she left, led by a younger woman, she let out a really excellent, animal howl. She was trashed.

We parted with our guide and Vera and headed to a dock nearby, where a few of the guys in our group were sitting with their feet in the river. Can’t say the Neva’s the cleanest water I’ve ever seen, but we all joined them anyway. The water was ice cold but we were all cheerful, looking out across the river at the beautiful European buildings that line it. Then we found a Baltika stand and indulged in beer and ice cream—some of us more than others. The sky looked threatening, so we dispersed.

A handful of us went and met up with a girl named Beth who was in our first year of Russian class and who has been studying in St. Petersburg for a year. We got potatoes at Kroshka Kartoshka (a potato-hawking chain that seems to be more popular in Moscow), then took a walk and talked. We saw some Ren-fair kids camping near the Petropavlovsky krepost—Beth explained, but I don’t remember why they were there. I heard Beth on the phone and died of envy—her accent is excellent.

Our group split up again and Trever, Kevin, Darcy, and I met up with Costya and Vladimir from the train. They took us to a place that sold beer in plastic liter bottles—whether or you were, uh, dining in or taking it to go. I found that really charming, although admittedly wasteful. The guys led us back to the apartment they were renting for their time in Petersburg, and Sasha, Masha, and Nikita were there. It wasn’t long before a Russian-English game of charades began, which was a lot of fun. Kevin got ahold of Adam and he showed up with Ben, Graham, and Steve in tow.

After the game, we all set out for the river, where we were planning to rent a boat. It immediately was obvious, standing outside the apartment, that the building was a popular place for young people. There were loud groups of people our age standing around and being idiots. Some angry tenant dropped a paket (a form of packaging that some liquids come in at the grocery store) of something from one of the top floors and it landed right in front of me, getting my feet (in sandals) and the bottom of my jeans wet, even splashing up to my shoulder. I was pretty pissed off, but luckily the liquid wasn’t sticky or fragrant. I’m just going to pretend it was water or beer.

We got to the river and each of us paid 400 rubles (about $13) for the boat. We climbed across a few others to get to ours—they were full of people, but ours was empty. It was just for us. Once we were all on board we pulled away from the dock. The buildings along the Neva were illuminated, the bridges were covered with lights, we were all giddy, and the wind was in our hair. I tiptoed to the rear of the boat to savor a moment to myself, riding backwards and watching the buildings and bridges and people rush away from me. Not far into the trip the bridges began to rise, as they do every night to admit big boats, and everyone cheered. We turned down a canal and wound through the center of the city. It was so beautiful. It felt like an eternity. It was one of the best nights of my life.

We got back to the hotel around 3:30 in the morning. The birds were already beginning to sing.

День Победы/Victory Day

This is, I guess, an obligatory post--I can't not write about Dyen Pobyedi, and I'm going to be in St. Petersburg tomorrow until Sunday--but I doubt it'll be very exciting. I apologize in advance.

Anya, Grisha, Lyova and I set out on Sunday morning for Grisha's sister's school. Varya is nine and we joined her class on their trip to Переделкино (Peredelkino), a village at which many Russian writers kept дачи (dachi/summer homes) in the Soviet era. Now the dacha owners are mostly obnoxious snobs with Range Rovers who don't seem to enjoy living near the museums. But Pasternak, for instance, once had a dacha there. We visited the dacha-museum of Korney Chukovsky--less exciting than Pasternak because he is less internationally famous and more exciting because he is beloved in Russia, was a children's writer, and his dacha is probably not a place most foreign tourists visit. Behind the dacha is a clearing in which he held bonfires for children with magicians, clowns, poets, and other entertainment. We waited there until our tour began. I liked the dacha very much. Two favorite things: 1. Next to the house, there is a tree covered with children's shoes. When Chukovsky's daughter was small, she buried a shoe in the yard and said it would grow into a shoe-tree. Chukovsky then wrote a story about the shoe-tree. 2. In Chukovsky's room, there is a table covered in books (mostly in English--he was a translator and spoke English fluently)--the books that Chukovsky planned to read, but never did because he died before he could get to them. Morbid, maybe, but I found it interesting. On the bottom right corner of the table sits Catch-22. I thought it was a shame he never read it.

After the trip, I returned to Moscow. In Peredelkino, it was possible to forget completely that the city was alive with tanks and people and planes and music--the Victory Day celebration, which seems to be the biggest, most important state holiday--but when I got back I traveled to the center, where people were swarming the area around Red Square. I wandered and watched people while I waited to find out what my friends were up to. I realized that being a lone девушка (young woman) in the swarm of people was going to get annoying after I was approached by a couple of guys, one of whom was pretty bold. The phrase "I really like you" is somehow creepier in Russian.

As much as I appreciated the offer of ice cream, I wasn't interested, and so I headed towards Christ the Savior/metro Kropotkinskaya/Beard Papa's to meet Darcy. We got some celebratory cream puffs and settled down near the river, enjoying the sunshine. It was easily 80 degrees. I got a text from Graham saying that he was at Park Pobyedi and that there would be fireworks later. Darcy and I said goodbye and I made my way to the park. I expected the metro to be packed, but it wasn't--until I got to the Park Pobyedi station. It's usually quite empty but everyone in Moscow was turning out for the celebration. It was so insane that I didn't even have cell phone reception for a while. I finally got ahold of my friends--Graham, Ben, Hanna, and Katie were there, along with a Russian guy Katie had met on Friday and some friends of his. Ben had purchased a пилотка (pilotka), a military-style hat that was being sold everywhere, and Graham had a gigantic Russian flag. The Russians in our group were the most laid-back strangers I'd met in Moscow, and we asked one another lots of questions and talked about the holiday.

It began storming very suddenly and beautifully. The thunder shook the ground and drove the revelers into the woods and under the cover of the Museum of the Great Patriotic War. Once the rain died down, we left the park and walked towards the next metro station (the Park Pobyedi station was closed to incoming traffic). But the rain stopped and so did we, waiting for the fireworks. The Russian girls started a game of charades, but it wasn't long before the show began--and it was beautiful. I wish I could have had a better view, but there were many people around and the euphoria and sense of collective celebration was more exciting than the lights in the sky. Everyone smiled, whooped, chanted, and sang. It was long, but over too early anyway and I didn't want to go home.

Famous Dead People

Graves I saw today: Boris Yeltsin, Nikita Krushchev,* Anton Chekhov, a bunch of other people of varying degrees of fame whom I'd never heard of

I will post pictures if I can steal some from the blogs/Facebooks of my friends here. EDIT: Here's one Hannah took of Chekhov's:

Fun fact: The city of Moscow has deployed its fence- and curb-painting army, which has descended upon almost all neighborhoods with terrible, acrid paint that gives off the strongest fumes imaginable.

Another fun fact: Car alarms go off ALL OF THE TIME here.

*I don't know why his name is transliterated that way and not Krushchyov, which is closer to how it sounds/is spelled in Russian.