As most of you probably know, I spent the first week of my spring break in St. Petersburg, Novgorod, and Moscow, Russia! It was an incredible, almost inexplicable trip - definitely not like anything I've ever done before, or will probably ever do again. Every time somebody asks me how Russia was, I find that I have a really hard time adequately explaining it. For starters, I went as part of a class, so there was much more of an academic focus than any of my other travels have had. It wasn't really a relaxing, vacation-y sort of place either, but that part didn't really bother me so much. I'm so incredibly glad I went with this group, because Russia is definitely not a place I would wish to travel to on my own. Hardly anybody speaks English, getting around can be difficult because the cities are huge and not all that friendly, and getting there in the first place is not the easiest or most pleasant experience. Our professor Jon acted as a great (albeit overly enthusiastic at times) tour guide, and I definitely got so much more out of my trip than I would have had I gone on my own.
Anywho, preamble aside, let me begin because our days were packed and I have lots of pictures to share. The post will cover St. Petersburg (definitely my favorite of the places we visited) and the next will cover Novgorod and Moscow. We left Copenhagen early on the morning of Saturday the 10th of April, and arrived in St. Petersburg around noon Russia time (2 hours ahead of Copenhagen). The first day was spent walking around St. Petersburg and getting a feel of the city, which is beautiful and much more westernized than the rest of Russia.
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| One of our first views of St. Petersburg, with the Church of Our Savior on Spilled Blood in the background |
The next morning we took a bus tour around St. Petersburg and saw many important sights, including the Winter Palace from across the Neva River, a famous statue of Peter the Great, the Peter and Paul cathedral, in which many famous Russian czars, including Peter the Great and Catherine the Great are buried, and a famous statue of Lenin standing on pieces of an armored car (a huge statement since most famous statues are of men on horseback).
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| Peter the Great |
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| Inside the Peter and Paul Cathedral |
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| Lenin on the armored car |
In the afternoon we took a walking tour of "Dostoyevsky's St. Petersburg" in which we saw the famous author's house as well as the house where the fictional Raskolnikov of Crime and Punishment infamy lived. We also walked the path he supposedly took on his way to murder the pawnbroker. I was lucky enough not to have read Crime and Punishment in it's entirety at any point in my life, but even reading the approximately 20 pages that I did for this class was really painful. As I'm not a huge fan of the book, I found this tour pretty boring. That evening, we went to the Russian ballet. This trip was optional, and I had originally decided not to go but was given a chance to at the last minute and decided, "when in Russia...why not?" I probably could have done without it, though, for multiple reasons. Instead of being one story it was lots of smaller segments from various famous Russian ballets, and the dancing was definitely not as good as I had expected it to be. Also - huge culture shock - people were dressed really informally, and the group of middle-aged adults sitting behind us talked and took flash photos throughout the entire performance, and they weren't the only ones. Needless to say, I was kind of horrified.
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| Canal on the Dostoyevsky walk |
On Thursday morning we got a "behind the facade" tour of St. Petersburg, which was a fascinating look at places that tourists definitely aren't supposed to go. We began at a kommunalka, or a shared apartment. Kommunalkas were big during the USSR years, and some still exist today. They are basically huge apartments that used to be owned by one aristocratic family but were split up into individual rooms in the early years of the Soviet Union, with each single room being occupied by a different family. Everyone in the building shares communal bathrooms and kitchens, and the building we saw (that is still in use today) was incredibly run down and kind of sketch. We had a key to get in, but our guide told us not to talk but just pretend we belonged there and get in and out as quickly as possible. Our next stop was at a huge market where they sold everything from fruit and vegetables to meats and cheeses. I got some delicious dried apricots for a steal! Our final two stops were to an antique store that had lots of old Soviet propaganda related things and to a vodka bar, which is exactly what it sounds like. The Russians love their vodka - so much that they refuse to drink it mixed with anything else! This place was literally a hole in the wall, with no bar stools or tables or anything, just a bar and huge shot glasses. There's nothing quite like watching a group of American college students take vodka shots in a hole-in-the-wall at 11:00 am in the morning in Russia.
In the afternoon, we visited the Winter Palace, home of the czars during the years of the Russian Empire. The palace is huge and beautiful and ostentatious and is home to the Hermitage Museum, one of the oldest and largest in the world. Most of all it was a huge contrast to see right after all of the stops on our "behind the facade" walk. The inside looked like it had been dipped in gold, and the museum held many important (but non-Russian) works of art. Although it was beautiful and definitely one of the highlights of St. Petersburg for me, it was easy to see why people revolted against the czar because one family had so much and so many else had so very little.
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| Winter Palace. The building is so huge that it was hard to get a picture that accurately captured it's size |
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| Inside the Winter Palace. Why, yes, those are columns made out of gold. Don't you have those in your home? |
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| Dance (II) by Matisse. Just one of the many famous paintings at the Hermitage. |
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| Church of Our Savior on Spilled Blood, so named because it was built on the exact spot where Czar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881 |
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