St Petersburg :: Russia
As my comrades Russia with hammers and sicles.
Places: St Petersburg, Novgorad, Metz, Moscow, Kostroma, Oxtrino & St Petersburg
Coolest thing I did: Embark on a night big enough to have both KFC for breakfast and return to the hotel at about 7am.
Coolest thing I didn´t know: St Patrick wasn't Irish. He's from the Isle of Mann (yeah, offtopic I know...)
I'd have to say that the last two weeks in Russia have been both the most draininig and most rewarding of my travels to date. Even though the good people at Beetroot have been ferrying me around between St Pete's and Moscow, the average Russian speaks not a word of English, and even my regular pantomime confuses more situations that it clears up. Myself and Carl from England had the women at the supermarket in stitches just paying for vodka.
The people here are like no one else I've met. Due to the extreme crapness of the weather most of the year, and the violent Shakepearean tragedy that is the last 1100 years of Russian history, people are conditioned to not smile, queue, or quite often even register your existance on the street or in shops. Having said that, the second you've toasted a vodka shot to someone's health, you've suddenly got a friend for life. They like nothing better than to tell you how good and bad their country is at the same time, a strage mix of pride and shame. You get the feeling that everything is very black and white here. People are either in adject misery or having the time of their lives. It makes them pretty intense to be around.
For some reason, everytime I encounter a babuska (grandma) in a head scarf she feels it's necessary to yell at me in Russian, despite the fact it's obvious I can't understand her. I'm getting used to it.
As for cities, I'll start where I did, St Petes. It's nothing at all like the rest of Russia. This is due to a few things. When Peter the Great founded it, it was roughly at the same time as Paris had it's big surge during the Enlightenment. So, while Paris (which is a similar style) had to build on top of a century of cruft, St Petes was a start from scratch. Wide streets, baroque and neo classical buildings mixed in with traditional Russian Orthadox cathederals. The Winter Palace, built in a similar style to Versailes in France makes it look like it was a pretty humble undertaking. The adjoining Hermatage art gallery also seemed to have gotten a job lot on Picassos, Matisses and Cezanes. This place was the capital of Russia at the very height of it's Tsarist power, and it shows it, especially since it was all restored for the 300th aniversary of it's founding this year. It's the cultural capital, where the poets, novelists and composers you've heard of come from. This shows in the snobbish attitude they give to the Moscivites. Thanks to the Soviets deciding to move the capital back to Moscow, it was left to rot, rather than destroyed, saving it from the other capitals fate.
My favorites. The Church of the Spilt blood is one of those ice cream cone topped Russian cathederals, perfectly restored after WW2 and the site of the assasination of Tsar Alexander 2. His son ordered it built, the Nazis failed to bomb it and the Soviets left it to rot. As a result, it's was in pristine condition when they restored it last year. I also liked the site of Rasputins death. A Siberian mystic whose influence allowed him to practically control the Tsarina (the Tsars missus) and as a result, was killed by some nobles. It took 5 times the human tolerance of cyanide, 2 bullets, 1 stabbing and throwing him into the icy river to kill him. When they found the body, he was frozen into a position like he was trying to swim to freedom. Way cool huh?
The nightlife is far less scary than Moscow. The tour group started out for a couple of innocent beers with dinner and ended up in a night involving much vodka, including a round bought at the icecream parlor, one couple riding home on horses, a club called Money Honey, missing all the metro closings and openings, KFC for breakfast and a 7am bedtime. My memory is a bit foggy on the details.
Moscow is in very stark contrast to St Petes. If the latter is the cultural heart of the country, the former is the cold heart of it's industry. Having been raised to the ground by the Mongols, Tartars, Poles, French, Germans, it entered the Soviet era as the new capital. Stalin, being Stalin, decided to knock down most of the surviving buildings and turn it into a Soviet paridise. Somehow, he had a bad taste in architects and we ended up with Metro stations built like the inside of cathederals (a most impressive sight) and streets lined with the ugliest, grey concrete monstrosities man has ever devised. The Kremlin has been left well enough alone, but the decay in the cathederals inside shows. The most famous landmark, St Basil's (Bazzas for short) is even now under reconstruction, however it managed to survive Stalin's 'lets blow all the churches up' plan. Red Square is the momument you expected, but there's not much history left besides that. The fact that the best examples of Soviet construction now ring the city (the Ghostbusters style Seven Sisters skyscrapers) casts a gloom over the entire place.
However, the Moscivites are a hardier stock than the St Petersburgers. I admit, it's kind of worrying you have to get buzzed through metal detectors to go into bars and clubs, thanks to the heavy presence of the Russian Mafia (all those blacked out Mercs in a place where everyone drives Ladas from the 70s is a giveaway), the locals here go a bit more nuts than their counterparts up North. They do, however, close their Mc Donaldses before 4am in the centre, commercial suicide in Sydney.
The inbetween bits are a bit of a mix. The decay in the monestaries shows, and the wooden houses with sunken foundations that people still live in show who takes it in the pants when it comes to the low average wage. The forrest that used to cover European Russia is now mostly built over with the remenants of the Soviet's failed industrialisation plans, big ugly factories and smokestacks to the horizons. However, beer costs 24p a bottle and vodka a stupid 2 pounds. The results when we were left in a summer riverside camp, after a sauna or three, involved wrestling, nudity, toasts to nipple tassles and jelly wrestling and skinny dipping. Again, details are foggy.
Russia has impressed me. It's been one of those big unknowns when I've been trying to figure out all the other bits of European history, and now the gear teeth are starting to come together. Lots of blokes with names like Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great make me wonder if the man on the street has a similar system 'hi, i'm Yuri the Landscape Gardener'. Ok, maybe not.
So tomorrow, I get on a train and begin a 2 day combo train, bus, ferry, train ride back to Berlin. Visa and timing issues mean it's time for me to go the long way around the baltics. I would have liked to see Latvia and Lithuania, but it's become impractical. Perhaps later.