Saint Petersburg

Greetings from Saint Petersburg!

The second largest city in Russia (after Moscow), it has also been known as Petrograd and Leningrad, and has twice been the capital of the Russian Empire. Despite this apparent schizophrenia, it is often described as “the most Western European city of Russia” and exhibits a much more consistent style throughout than does Moscow. In short, Saint Petersburg is a very nice town to explore — it is spacious in design and contains many parks and gardens whose trees are covered with golden leaves that glisten in the sunlight, giving the city a consistent appeal that was missing in Moscow. This appeal was especially well exhibited, since almost every building is lower than five stories.

Saint Petersburg is also beautifully illuminated at night — the buildings, the parks, the many spires — and it was a real pleasure to stroll through the gardens well into the evening, seeing the grass glow a brilliant emerald green and the trees shine in several colours. The city spans several rivers, and the many bridges are also brilliantly lit at night. Every night, a brief fireworks display would come from somewhere along the river, but I was unable to find a single person who knew anything about this phenomenon — the fireworks, their location and their purpose remain an unsolved mystery. Also interesting to behold was the raising of the bridges at 2am, which is not merely ceremonial, but allows large boats to traverse the river. It also presented an exciting moment, when a speeding motorbike swerved through the barriers and looked for all money to jump the ever-widening gap, only for the Russian police to foil the spectacle at the final second.

There were many sights on offer, and due to a combination of a lack of time and the beginnings of travel fatigue, I concentrated on only a small number. The State Hermitage Museum (referred to as “the Hermitage” by everybody) is one of the largest museums in the world, and also one of the oldest art galleries and museums of human history and culture in the world. And it definitely lived up to its reputation — it was amazing. However, it was the building itself (the Winter Palace) that was absolutely stunning! It truly was the first palace that I’ve been in that has seemed truly worthy of that title — each of the countless rooms were magnificent and opulent, but each room was also quite different from the others. The exhibitions themselves were almost only a bonus!

The Church of the Spilled Blood was also magnificent, proving somewhat reminiscent of St Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow, and its location between a river and the Mikhailovsky Gardens was a nice touch. Just behind the church was a flea market selling all manner of Russian souvenirs (as well as the ubiquitous Che Guevara shirts), giving me a chance to mangle the Russian language in ways previously unknown. The Peter and Paul Fortress (founded in 1703 and not attacked until the revolution of 1917) was also nice to walk around, and from inside it the picturesque spires of the Peter and Paul Cathedral glistened alluringly across the river.

The Kunstkammer was the first museum in Russia, established by Peter the Great in the early 1700s, and was dedicated to preserving a large assortment of human and animal fetuses with anatomical deficiencies. Indeed, it would have been a rather standard museum experience except for the “natural and human curiosities and rarities” section, which presented a large number of preserved fetuses suffering from various deformations — a gruesome and sometimes stomach-turning exhibit that was definitely the highlight.

The Naval Museum was also interesting to visit, once I managed to find the well-hidden entrance that eluded me when I first came across the museum. In a surprising turn of fortune, my very limited Russian repertoire was good enough that I was charged a price reserved only for Russians! I must have pulled off “one student ticket” (“один студенческий билет”) with a convincing accent. (During my two weeks in Russia I learned to read the Cyrillic alphabet, which often proved helpful as a remarkable number of Russian words sound similar to their English equivalents. However, apart from some stock phrases I did not learn any of the language itself.)

Aside from the “traditional” cultural forays, I also attended two KHL hockey games. The KHL consists of teams from Russia, Belarus, Latvia and Kazakhstan, and is considered the second-best league in the world after the NHL. The two games I saw were very fast, intense, quite physical (especially for “euro hockey”) and also highly exciting — one game was pushed into overtime with only 9 seconds to go! The teams also boast a lot of talent — for the curious, the SKA Saint Petersburg roster included Sergei Brylin, Darius Kasparaitis and some goalie by the name of Robert Esche.

I was also excited to go for a skate, because the public skating sessions are held at the same rink as the KHL games — I actually skated on the same ice, looking up at the stands and the jerseys and flags flying high about the ice! Of course, the surface was in excellent condition, as were the boards and (gasp!) perspex. I also used the same changerooms as the KHL teams, but that wasn’t quite as exciting. It was especially fun to skate with Lynn and Summer, a fantastic American couple whom I had met in Moscow and who were staying in the same hostel as me in Saint Petersburg.

In my opinion, the real highlights of the town were enjoying the quiet cafes and bakeries: apart from providing respite from the cold weather that became quite harsh when the wind was strongly gusting, they also provided some great food (including plenty of blinis, both savoury and sweet!) and a range of pleasant berry liqueurs. Unfortunately all of the blini cafes close at 10pm and so one night, after walking around for over two hours in search of an open blini store, I was forced to resort to baked potatoes (which were nonetheless delicious). It was also a pleasure to purchase blinis from the small stalls that dotted the streets and to walk around and observe the buildings and the people, who were less numerous and more relaxed than in Moscow. In a nutshell the town felt very relaxed and elegant, a place to enjoy slowly rather than dashing around from one sight to the next.

And thus concludes my stay in Saint Petersburg. At some ridiculously early time tomorrow morning, I’m crawling out of bed and getting on a train to Helsinki. It will be very nice to arrive in a country where the tap water is safe to drink! Seriously, it’s something that I’m still not used to, even after a whole two weeks in Russia.

Best wishes!

PS: I will post photos of Moscow and St Petersburg once I have access to a computer that will allow me to plug in my camera — hopefully some time in the next few days.