We arrived in Russia on a grey, overcast day with a slight little drizzle of rain and all of my childhood imaginings of Russia were confirmed. I made mental notes. Russian people survive in a colorless, tundra of political fear. (Just like Ohioans.) I immediately felt sad for Russia. Our first glimpse of town was city blocks of buildings exactly like this one.
This turned out to be a little overdramatic because once the sun came out and we rode into the city, it was very colorful and busy, and opulent. It was also mostly a façade but everyone is meant to ignore that part. Many parts of St. Petersburg were constructed in the hopes of finding investors to help finance the new city, so they made the fronts of things look really lovely and elaborate to attract people to town, but behind all that are normal apartment buildings and bland store fronts. In an extremely unexpected turn of events, I found the Russian history particularly interesting and couldn’t hear enough about all of the Peters and Nicholas’ (Nicholi?) of centuries past. Very interesting stuff.
St. P as a whole is much more cosmopolitan Europe than one would expect. It most closely resembles Amsterdam and Venice. Long windy canals snake through the colorful city. Wide streets, traffic jams, cyclists…. it didn’t feel like a scary soviet Russia. The only scary elements of our two days here were like old folktales that cause superstitions and the strict following of rules. We had to stay with a tour group. We were not to wander into the city without a Russian supervisor. They checked our passports and Visa’s any time we came or went from the boat and the customs people would not smile at you no matter how hard you tried to see their teeth. Things like this caused an air of worry but because we followed the rules (stand on one foot, hop three times, hold your nose…) we never found out what would happen if we opted out of that tourist credulity that tends to keep one safe in foreign places.
I have two days worth of pictures and notes and it’s just too much for one blog post. I already feel like I’m dragging this out. (You ever get tired of hearing your own voice?) I’ll tell you a few highlights. Right off the boat, we visited Peterhof Palace, an enormous chunk of land that took us hours to cover. It's well worth Googling about.
The next day we took a canal tour through town and it was notably hot there. The locals were in a tizzy, saying they get 60 days without rain a year and about 5 days of hot, bright sunshine. We were lucky to be there for one of them.
And one night, Ellen and I dressed up for “An Evening at Catherine’s Palace”, where we ventured into Russia without our parents and visited a huge blue palace filled with intricate gildings and were then given champagne while we listened to the Russian symphony in Catherine The Great's old Ballroom. That was a cool experience except that they made us wear bags on our feet so we wouldn’t scuff the floors. Ellen, a lover of opulence, sashayed through corridors like it was her own grand home. I enjoyed watching her greedy little eyes follow the lines of each room. We made it back to the ship after dark, and the six year old in me was relived to make it safely back to Mommy.
Our Russian ventures were filled with neat facts. For instance, back in the eras of having great feasts in these palaces, they used fake fruit as centerpieces so that when guests started trying to eat the fruit, they knew to stop serving them drinks. We learned from our various tour guides about how valuable an American passport is, the corruption they deal with in their government, and that they are normal people that have to live under these strange rules. They were all quick to point out that "We are not our government." The people we met were very kind, soft-spoken, generous, and easy to make laugh once they felt sure that you were harmless. The Russian people do not smile at you when you walk by. They are quite guarded but it doesn't take much to win their kindness.
Remember that first soviet-era building we saw? That's what most people live in. These buildings have a name that I can't remember but they are self-contained mini-cities. They have hospitals, grocery stores, gyms, sometimes office buildings on the bottom floors and the rest are all apartments. People live and work in these buildings, sometimes never leaving them for weeks (especially in the winter). This part did seem to fit that scary Russian bill.
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