St. Petersburg
Trip Start
May 24, 2005
1
22
25
Trip End
Ongoing
St. Petersburg,
Russian Federation
Friday, August 12, 2005
Oh, what joy to be back in the land of hatchet-faced landladies and ten-pence ice creams! The roads have been cleared of pot holes (we went in search of the one Helen fell down and, with mixed feelings of disappointment and relief, found it had been covered up), beggars, old ladies selling frumpy grey blouses and old men selling panty-liners and cheeses out of cardboard boxes. Gone also were the little octagonal kiosks with their windows crammed with all number of random objects, or - even better - with loaves upon loaves of bread and pies galore that used to crowd Sadovaya metro station. In their place have mushroomed fields of Pepsi Cola umbrellas, under which Pepsi Cola stands sell plastic-wrapped versions of the old-style fast food. According to Anton (a guy we met during one of our stops in the franchised pancake house 'Teaspoon') Putin has put in place a Mayor from Moscow who has succesfully driven all the poor people out of Petersburg in order to make the city more attractive to tourists
Canal Boat Trip
. How considerate.AH me. But the light still hit the city with the same sparkle, and the Hermitage, Bronze Horseman, St. Isaac's Cathedral, Spas Na Krove Cathedral, Nevsky Prospekt and the Summer Gardens were still standing proud, attracting the throngs. We did a lot of the things you're supposed to do: get seriously lost in the Hermitage to the point where you almost panic; take a river cruise along the Neva and the myriad little canals; stroll down Nevsky; go the Marinsky Theatre to see a ballet (Romeo and Juliet); have dinner at the Idiot cafe; and go for a stroll in the summer gardens; watch a movie dubbed in Russian and listen for the delayed laughter from the audience...Sadly, there wasn't time to take in the palaces beyond the city, the bread museum was closed and St. Issac's Cathedral was impertinently charging inflated tourist prices to see the malachite columns otherwise we would ahve pretty much done all the things we had on our list.
And we did some of the things you are not supposed to do: get accommodation by loafing around the train station (our landlady had the humour of a dead fish); try to post presents (Helen got a sharp dressing down for being so impertinent as to think that they would accept an envelope that had not been addressed 'according to the regulations'); have lunch at a cafe obviously designed for Nouveau Riche Russians (the waitress actually raised her eyes to heaven and sniffed each time we ordered!); buy tickets for the Marinsky from someone on the street (hmph); eat enough Blinis (pancakes) to sink a Russian mini-sub (thankfully, the mini-sub that sank whilst we were there was rescued by the British navy so no tragic repeat of the Kursk disaster)
View of Hermitage from the Neva
.All in all, the love affair with St. Petersburg continues...If only it weren't for the politics...
Moscow was really only a stop-over to get Mongolian visas and book train tickets (now THERE's a good 24 hour task for you!) but Helen was delighted to see that the pirozhki (pie) stalls were still lining the underground there and we happily got stuck in..Eoghan now can proudly say 'pirozhok s yablokom'.
So it was that, after queuing in about fifty queues, we walked out of Yarasalvsky Vokzal the proud posessors of two tickets in cattle class on train No. 364 bound for Ulan Ude, a few kilometres from Lake Baikal and tantalisingly close to the Mongolian border.
