The rail journey from Moscow to St. Petersburg is the most popular journey in Russia. A 650km journey rides from land locked Moscow, the northernmost megacity on earth and where largest community of billionaires is said to reside, to St. Petersburg, teetering on the Gulf of Finland, a mere sneeze away from falling into the Baltic Sea, the once regal capital of the autocracy. Our ride would snake along for eight hours. It would stop suddenly and unexpectedly and remain stopped for irregular periods of time. The Russians always took this as an opportunity to have a smoke break on the tracks. Between five and ten minutes, people would just...appear outside your window, dozens of them, smoking leisurely, staring silently into space.
Rolling into Glavny Station, the air was noticeably cooler, crisper. The station opens like a beach onto where St. Petersburg's most popular street, Nevsky Prospekt crosses with Ligovsky Prospekt, the street on which our hostel sat. It was our first and only hostel. We had found it on AirBnB where it was listed as a design project. An abandoned bread factory had been bought up and turned into an art exhibition space. With over 3500 square feet of exhibition, they decided to turn the remaining space into a hostel. The Loft Etagi Project boasts a lounge, a cafe and bar area as well as access to all of the exhibits. The whole idea that I could be in St. Petersburg in Autumn, sleeping in a renovated bread factory pretty much felt that the accommodation gods had designed something specifically for me. And in my mind, the Accommodation Gods look curiously like William Shatner in his Priceline commercials.
The listing read that the hostel was a mere ten minute walk from the Glavny station. Setting out, again with my arsenal of maps and directions from the host that would AGAIN prove to be next to worthless, we wandered along a street still bustling with activity at 1100pm. I was beginning to recognize the cyrillic alphabet better now. I didn't have to physically stop in my tracks and follow along with my finger -Sound it out…- anymore. I began to see the landmarks that I had marked down. I stared at the address. 74. Okay, that's good. Now where the hell is it? Peering into the door at our left, it led into a dark cubicle. Why not? Soldiering through, we were met with the glare of two stoic Russian women behind the shatterproof glass. I tried to figure out what to say, how to say it.
"Hi there, I paid someone on the internet. They said they'd give me disposable slippers and a pillow. Am I in the right place?"
A couple came through the door and pushed past us."Loft Etagi," they muttered.
"Yes," I gestured towards them, smiling as I could at the two ladies. "Loft Etagi. That's us. As well."
The light on the turnstile flicked on green. Pushing through, we stumbled into an empty construction site. "What the f***!?" I may have said.
What am I doing stepping over rubble and rebar at eleven at night?!
I had a niggling thought in my mind as I clambered over crumpled cardboard into the darkening light of a concrete staircase: "I may leave here in a body bag. But I'm going to KEEP ON GOING." Because that is the wisdom of North American invincibility.
Climbing the stairs, I began to see more signs with Loft Etagi on them. I also began to see pictures of women in burqas holding the limp body of a man and another photograph of a bare abdomen with the Chanel logo branded on to them. I later found out that these were each a part of a exhibition that was currently showing.
There are NO SIGNS. First we wandered into what we later found out was the hallway of rooms before we found the friggin reception to check the frig in. Frig.
I stood in front of what I assumed was the check in desk. A girl was sitting there, half asleep, and didn't make any immediate movements to greet us.
"Baby what is going on," Moozh whispered. What were we doing here? What were we doing in Russia? Why do my attempts to plan always seem to follow the form of outrageous and disastrous. I felt like a toddler holding a firework.
Eventually the girl at the desk roused herself. "Hello."
"Hi we would like to check in." I said it politely, I swear to god. I gave her our name.
"Do you have the printout of your reservation?"
"Uuuuuuhhhhhh. No. I was told I didn't need to bring anything for check-in."
"No that's correct. We're just having computer problems."
It was too late at night at that point for that to seem legit. She tapped at the keyboard a few times before departing, without any mention to us, to the next room.
I cautioned a sideways glance to Moozh. He looked tired. He looked confused.
"I got this babe. No worries."
"Mm-hmm."
The girl returned at a leisurely pace with a guy in a Velvet Underground t-shirt and some disposable slippers like the ones we were promised. He gave us some paperwork to fill out. He found our booking. He understood when we were a little freaked out about handing our passports overnight so the sleepless-nutbar-drones of the night shift could register us.
Deus, his name was, took us to our room with our fresh laundry and showed us where everything was. He also promised to bring our passports back in fifteen minutes. Flopping into our room, we made our bed and grabbed our toothbrushes. A knock at the door. It was Deus with our passports in hand.
"Your team is the Oilers," he said, pointing at me. "And yours, the Flames." He pointed at Moozh.
We must have squinted at him for too long because he continued nervously."I love North American hockey. If I lived there, I would be a hockey fan. We have a team here but it is no good." He handed us our passports and disappeared around the corner, paper slippers flipping and scuffing along the concrete floor.
I was far more excited for St. Petersburg than I had been for Moscow. St. Petersburg had been where my love began. For my birthday every year, my grandpa would take me out for the day and do whatever I wanted. While all of my cousins did outrageous -and childlike- things like paintball and rollerskating, I think I chose lunch and a movie from the time I can remember. I was nothing if not placid as a child. For my eighth birthday, I wanted to see the movie Anastasia. I remember looking past even the catchy music and the heartwarming (and manufactured) ending, at the horrible story. I remember feeling saddened by something that was far beyond my understanding, something more complex than my eight year old life had grasped before. There's a piece of my memory of the movie, of where I learned to love Russia, that always makes me think of my grandpa, my dedushka. Later in life, I made him sit through the seemingly endless expanse of The Aviator and Memoirs of a Geisha. (I was on a Oscars kick). We would always talk on the way home about the movie. The further apart my grandpa and I grew on the political spectrum, the spectrum of spiritual philosophy, and generational framework, this never stopped. After Anastasia, I had asked him if it had actually happened, if all of that scary stuff had actually happened to her. I wanted to believe in the music, in a girl who found out she was a princess. He had answered that no, it was a movie and they can make stuff up if they wanted. But he said that there had been a Princess Anastasia. He didn't tell me that while maybe she wasn't pursued by a possessed monk and a bat that could talk, she was shot point blank by Bolsheviks soldiers and her remains likely burnt while her family was buried in a mass grave in the Siberian woods. My dedushka was a very diplomatic man.
We walked along Nevsky Prospekt, THE MOST popular street in St. Petersburg, where anybody who is anybody is. (Disclaimer: This is actually how I read Nevsky Prospekt described on a travel blog.) On the way to the Russian Museum, I did the stop in my tracks, slow motion back track. The Eliseyev Emporium is a patisserie and luxury goods shop on the Nevsky Prospect. Fine caviar and scotches, charcuterie and artisanal cheeses line the one wall. All of that was very interesting but I had seen it all. What I was shocked by was the pastry. Gorgeous laminated pastry, sablees, pate de fruit. Macarons of perfection, flecked with sesame seeds or flecks of coconut. And not just that. The whole thing is Art Nouveau, big prints of Alfonse Mucha lining the walls. There's also a giant pineapple in the centre of the room. I had zero expectations for Russian pastry. Zero. But I was pleasantly surprised by Kuptez Eliseyev. Moozh and I grabbed two sablees, and two macarons, a lime and a pineapple. We passed another statue of Pushkin -I wonder if posthumously, that guy knows how much fanfare he's getting- and snapped some pictures of the Russian Museum.
Around the corner, along a canal is the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood, which is the St. Petersburg version of St. Basil's. Colourful onion domes, gold leaf, Russian ikons. It was built as a memorial to the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, who died of a car bomb in front of his son and successor. It was ransacked during the Bolshevik Revolution and during the famine that occurred during the Siege of Leningrad in WWII, it served as a morgue for those who died. It seems like every remarkable building in Russia has some kind of remarkable connection to a dead body, doesn't it?
We criss-crossed some canals into the Field of Mars, originally known as the Pleasure Fields. Add a statue of a military leader dressed up as the God of War and suddenly a walking park with ornamental cabbage and flower baskets seems less 'pleasurable'. Rename it, you can even keep the flower baskets. As we wandered through the park, we were met by uniformed police standing along the peripheries of the path. Uniformed police soon became military personnel and once we had reached the eternal flame in the centre of the park, there were formations of SWAT in full on riot gear. Turns out they were preparing for a pro-Communist rally -we saw the police transport vans later- but at first, I'm not gonna lie, I thought Russia always has riot police hanging in parks.
The Summer Garden sits across a canal from the Field of Mars. They were established by Peter the Great, apparently not shortly after he established the city of St. Petersburg itself. It is a rambling plaid of greco-roman statues, fountains and sculpted friezes of grass patches. Our walk along the Neva River was peppered with over eager retellings of everything even remotely related to Russia I had ever heard. Thank goodness I went to Russia with someone who is forced to stay with me. Traveling with anyone else, I'm not so sure they would have tolerated the CEASELESS TALKING.
Grigori Rasputin, considered an enemy of the state -and of the sanctity of the Royal marriage- was poisoned by nobles, notably Prince Yusupov. Cyanide-laced cakes and red wine. This accomplished as much as to make Rasputin slightly sleepy and when the nobles approached him to make sure he was dead, assuming he would be, he -understandably so- lunged at them and tried to strangle them. Seems fittingly self-preserving. (But that sounds like I'm defending him when, to be certain, his death only adds to the gritty obsession I have with Russia.) Somewhat taken aback by his….fortitude, the nobles shot him numerous times, assuming maybe the cyanide hadn't taken effect yet. But when he failed to fall, they beat him into a coma and rolled him up in a carpet. Wrapped up so neatly enabled them to take Rasputin to the bank of the River Neva -in the middle of DECEMBER- and toss him over. When his body was discovered, the autopsy revealed water in his lungs -he had died of drowning. I guess, according to legend, we should be surprised that he died at all. It's a story of imagination, I can't even get over it. How much of it is true, we'll never completely know. But a story doesn't have to be true to be captivating, as we've learned from James Frey?
St. Issac's is an exercise in how dusty rose marble can be made masculine and truly intimidating. Gleaming marble, further polished by the sleeting rain, rises in monstrous pillars capped and laced with inky black slate. It's dome, once painted a drab grey during WWII as a camouflage tactic, now gleams gold against the grey sky. St. Isaac's with the Cnyiyi Bridge, aka "Blue Bridge". Behind it, the infamous Bronze Horseman. Peter the Great rises high above, astride his horse in regal pomp and circumstance. The statue was a gift from Catherine the Great, in her desperate plea to legimitize her claim to the Russian throne and endear herself to the Russian people.
"They loved Peter the Great," she thought. "If I love him too maybe they'll love me by proxy?"
When we got back, I had my first (albeit significantly delayed) realization that hostels can be amazing. Targeted towards budget travellers, like ourselves, if the accommodations are good, they are usually cheap and usually so is the food and beer. Unlike the $7 coffees of Moscow, I got a freakishly large, steaming bowl of borscht and a 600ml beer for $5.
600ml!
Fun Fact: It wasn't until 2011 that beer was considered an alcoholic beverage in Russia. Anything with less than 10% alcohol was considered a soft drink.
In that moment, I realized the only people who seem to enjoy an gluttonous mega-stein of beer more than Canadians would be the Germans, but the Russians would not be far behind. The borscht was unlike anything I had ever tasted before, chock full of shredded cabbage and huge chunks of beets and potatoes. We even got an authentically snobby, curt waitress just like I had been prepared for in Russian class. I couldn't muster a similar bilious attitude towards her but when her shift ended we got a really sweet waitress who chatted us up because we reminded her of her Swedish boyfriend. (My tan was obviously not that great.)
I almost couldn't sleep that night. Visions of what I imagined the Hermitage to be like fluttered through my head, full of childhood inflations and romantic idealisms. I was positive that I would wander through and be able to slot in the various Romanov anecdotes I had obsessed over. I imagined all the fingerprints of life would still be there. Unkempt stacks of papers on desk, clattering tea sets uncleared from an afternoon, a dressing gown dangling from the corner of a privacy screen. The next day, the sun was ceaselessly bright, so much so anything white had to be merely glanced at or seen indirectly. We passed a Lada bedazzled in bumper stickers. Even the car I learned to drive in was Russian. The radio station would change every time you changed gears but her name as Stella and we loved her.
Walking Nevsky Prospekt, warmed with coffee -FREE coffee- from our hostel, my steps picked up discernibly as we rounded the corner in Palace Square.
"Russia is happy I am at The Hermitage today!" I remember screaming.
I also remember the impromptu judo session and handing out of glow stick bracelets that was going on in the background. Apparently, some kind of radio promotion. Any amount of panic I had felt over my expectations not being met by the Hermitage was quickly quelled. We bought our tickets. We picked up a map.
"Where do you want to go first?" Moozh asked.
I stared at the map.
"There's the Egyptian antiquities exhibit through there…"
I just stared.
"Babe?"
"I want to go where they lived. Where they slept."
Moozh opened his mouth to speak, graciously trying to give me what I had in my head I wanted, but then glanced back at the map. "That's kind of…" He looked up at me. "That's kind of the whole thing."
But that was before I realized some of the earliest bust of Augustus Caesar are in the Hermitage, as is Rembrandt's "Prodigal Son" and "The Sacrifice of Isaac". It was before I stood and gawked at the replica of Bernini's "Apollo and Daphne". Matching busts of Catherine the Great done up as a sphinx. Just as the Vatican museum and the Louvre before it, the Hermitage is as much a beautiful building as it is a house for beautiful things. The monarchy was all about glitz. I had heard about rooms done floor to ceiling in gold leaf. One room dripping with chandeliers and cut glass ornaments. Ornately lain hardwood flooring and grand marble staircases. Ballrooms, more than one, that could hold up to five hundred people. The royal portrait hall was my favourite, of course. The seemingly endless corridor stretches down the centre of the Winter Palace, everything from Peter the Great to Rasputin's assassin Prince Felix Yusupov. Ten foot tall portraits of Tsar's. Alexander II standing broad-shoudlered and barrel-chested in full uniform. Tsar Nicholas II looking sheepish and shy, painted from an odd distance. My favourite, a portrait size Tsarina Alexandra, with her characteristic sadness.
The Hermitage is just like any other international museum. The building that contains it is as much a draw as the artifacts within it but what is within it is nothing to balk at. Rich Japanese tapestries and the gleaming curve of samurai swords. Samurai swords Greco-Roman gold earrings and Edwardian cameos. Boxes of mummified remains and sarcophagus that stand eight feet tall. Equally at the caliber of the Louvre or the British Museum, and equally as endless. We were kicked out as the museum closed for the day, a full eight hours spent wandering.
The next day our first stop along the canals was Trinity Cathedral. The history of the cathedral is much like most of Russia: breathtaking, a glimpse into history and nearly lost. Once resplendent, it suffered from years of neglect and just as a group of people were getting around to restoring it, it nearly burnt to the ground in a freak fire. Four years later, in 2010, it was restored and reopened but there was still restoration work undergoing there when we visited. Built as the church for the Imperial Guards, but has been flooded, neglected and nearly burnt to the ground in the ensuing time. It is for all intensive purposes a brand new church now. The use of military symbols in the design is clever. Upended cannons stand to support lanterns and chevron up the side of the spire.
One of my favorite movies when I was in elementary school, and still remains to this day, is Fiddler on the Roof. I did, early on, have a thing for tragedies. And I believe that movie to the genesis of some of the things I find the most fascinating in this world: Jewish people and culture, Russia and gingers. I felt like Lilo in her gallery of obese beach goers. A quirky obsession, "Aren't they beautiful?" It wasn't until St. Petersburg that they all collided. Snaking along the cross-hatching canals, a large slate blue dome rose above the rooftops, perched atop blocks of wheat and terracotta brick. A large Star of David hung above the door done in ornate iron work. It was the only synagogue I had seen since we'd been in Russia. The Grand Choral Synagogue is one of the oldest in Europe, built during the liberal reign of Alexander II. Just as I was commenting on the curling, filigree iron work fence, two kids -couldn't have been ten between the two of them, scurried past. The girl had her prayer shawl bunched up in her fist and the boy held his yarmulke on as they ran through the gates and ran quickly turned the corner. Unabashed red hair, somewhere between the very tip of a flame and the slightly burnished tone of terracotta, capped both of their heads. As they scurried past me I felt like I'd just seen a fairy.
"Babe did you see that?!"
"Why are you yelling?"
"You obviously didn't see it because then you would know why I'm yelling."
"Umm, yes."
"I just saw a four leaf clover."
From there, we were bound for New Holland, a previously abandoned man-made island corralled by canals. Peter the Great, who founded the city, visited Holland and was inspired by their canals and naval organization. When he returned he built New Holland, as a home for the future Russian Admiralty. It served as a base for the navy in various ways, military barracks and warehouses for shipbuilding, during the autocracy until, as many things did, it fell into neglect after the Revolution. It has recently been re-gentrified into a green space -similar to the reinvention of Gorky Park- with a cafe, community garden, children's play area and a large court destined for dusky summertime games of badminton, bocce ball and croquet. What remains after the fusion of the two, is a womb of green grass and glass-flat water encircled by walls of exposed brick and industrial iron.
Just as the sun was dipping low and setting the Neva ablaze, we made our way over to the Peter and Paul Fortress. Peter the Great, began to build a fortress fearing Swedish invasion -which I could only picture the Swedish Chef in the lookout coop and the members of ABBA steering, clad in psychedelic spandex and feathered hair. But the Swedish must have been a real threat if Peter the Great hopped to it as quick as he apparently did because the Russians seem somewhat hard to scare. But the fortress never got its day in the sun. Before it could be completely, the Russians wiped the floor with the Swedes -according to popular myth- and the fortress was utilized as a prison. Dostoyevsky was imprisoned at the fortress, which only makes him more badass in my mind.
And then we passed a man swimming in THE NEVA, in the MIDDLE OF SEPTEMBER in A SPEEDO. And not a single fuck was given. That is Soviet resiliency.
We headed back through Palace Square just as the sky had dimmed enough for the lights. They flickered on, like fluorescents in a classroom, but soon the entire square was light from the backlit statues that capped the buildings to the orb lights embedded in the cobblestones. I stood for a moment, in the chill of the air, to remind myself where I was, how long I had wanted to come here. I danced a little, hummed snippets from Anastasia in my head, thought about the sadness and the death that this city had seen, civilian and otherwise. It's a country that has such a history of pain and brutality and yet the beauty of it still remains. It has an identity beyond what it can create for itself in the present. Every name the city has been called.
Find something flannel and wrap yourself in it. Watch Anastasia. Drink some beer. Contemplate getting an albino bat because they seem to have neurotic temperaments and a good sense of humour.
Things I learned in St. Petersburg:
After St. Petersburg, I stopped giving a shit if I could understand or speak Russian.
Emotional memories create life long obsessions.
Hostels are not always an exercise in bed bugs and transferrable foot fungus.
Quote from St. Petersburg:
Sasa (my sister-in-law): "You saw Russian Jewish gingers?! That's like a Gin-jew!"
Bohemian Recommends:
Loft Etagi for a great place to stay.
Café Green Room for delicious "slow food" and excellent beer.
New Holland for its art, food and green space. Killer place for a sunny afternoon.
Eliseyev Emporium for best baked goods and refined tastes.
The Hermitage Museum
Rolling into Glavny Station, the air was noticeably cooler, crisper. The station opens like a beach onto where St. Petersburg's most popular street, Nevsky Prospekt crosses with Ligovsky Prospekt, the street on which our hostel sat. It was our first and only hostel. We had found it on AirBnB where it was listed as a design project. An abandoned bread factory had been bought up and turned into an art exhibition space. With over 3500 square feet of exhibition, they decided to turn the remaining space into a hostel. The Loft Etagi Project boasts a lounge, a cafe and bar area as well as access to all of the exhibits. The whole idea that I could be in St. Petersburg in Autumn, sleeping in a renovated bread factory pretty much felt that the accommodation gods had designed something specifically for me. And in my mind, the Accommodation Gods look curiously like William Shatner in his Priceline commercials.
The listing read that the hostel was a mere ten minute walk from the Glavny station. Setting out, again with my arsenal of maps and directions from the host that would AGAIN prove to be next to worthless, we wandered along a street still bustling with activity at 1100pm. I was beginning to recognize the cyrillic alphabet better now. I didn't have to physically stop in my tracks and follow along with my finger -Sound it out…- anymore. I began to see the landmarks that I had marked down. I stared at the address. 74. Okay, that's good. Now where the hell is it? Peering into the door at our left, it led into a dark cubicle. Why not? Soldiering through, we were met with the glare of two stoic Russian women behind the shatterproof glass. I tried to figure out what to say, how to say it.
"Hi there, I paid someone on the internet. They said they'd give me disposable slippers and a pillow. Am I in the right place?"
A couple came through the door and pushed past us."Loft Etagi," they muttered.
"Yes," I gestured towards them, smiling as I could at the two ladies. "Loft Etagi. That's us. As well."
The light on the turnstile flicked on green. Pushing through, we stumbled into an empty construction site. "What the f***!?" I may have said.
What am I doing stepping over rubble and rebar at eleven at night?!
I had a niggling thought in my mind as I clambered over crumpled cardboard into the darkening light of a concrete staircase: "I may leave here in a body bag. But I'm going to KEEP ON GOING." Because that is the wisdom of North American invincibility.
Climbing the stairs, I began to see more signs with Loft Etagi on them. I also began to see pictures of women in burqas holding the limp body of a man and another photograph of a bare abdomen with the Chanel logo branded on to them. I later found out that these were each a part of a exhibition that was currently showing.
There are NO SIGNS. First we wandered into what we later found out was the hallway of rooms before we found the friggin reception to check the frig in. Frig.
I stood in front of what I assumed was the check in desk. A girl was sitting there, half asleep, and didn't make any immediate movements to greet us.
"Baby what is going on," Moozh whispered. What were we doing here? What were we doing in Russia? Why do my attempts to plan always seem to follow the form of outrageous and disastrous. I felt like a toddler holding a firework.
Eventually the girl at the desk roused herself. "Hello."
"Hi we would like to check in." I said it politely, I swear to god. I gave her our name.
"Do you have the printout of your reservation?"
"Uuuuuuhhhhhh. No. I was told I didn't need to bring anything for check-in."
"No that's correct. We're just having computer problems."
It was too late at night at that point for that to seem legit. She tapped at the keyboard a few times before departing, without any mention to us, to the next room.
I cautioned a sideways glance to Moozh. He looked tired. He looked confused.
"I got this babe. No worries."
"Mm-hmm."
The girl returned at a leisurely pace with a guy in a Velvet Underground t-shirt and some disposable slippers like the ones we were promised. He gave us some paperwork to fill out. He found our booking. He understood when we were a little freaked out about handing our passports overnight so the sleepless-nutbar-drones of the night shift could register us.
Deus, his name was, took us to our room with our fresh laundry and showed us where everything was. He also promised to bring our passports back in fifteen minutes. Flopping into our room, we made our bed and grabbed our toothbrushes. A knock at the door. It was Deus with our passports in hand.
"Your team is the Oilers," he said, pointing at me. "And yours, the Flames." He pointed at Moozh.
We must have squinted at him for too long because he continued nervously."I love North American hockey. If I lived there, I would be a hockey fan. We have a team here but it is no good." He handed us our passports and disappeared around the corner, paper slippers flipping and scuffing along the concrete floor.
I was far more excited for St. Petersburg than I had been for Moscow. St. Petersburg had been where my love began. For my birthday every year, my grandpa would take me out for the day and do whatever I wanted. While all of my cousins did outrageous -and childlike- things like paintball and rollerskating, I think I chose lunch and a movie from the time I can remember. I was nothing if not placid as a child. For my eighth birthday, I wanted to see the movie Anastasia. I remember looking past even the catchy music and the heartwarming (and manufactured) ending, at the horrible story. I remember feeling saddened by something that was far beyond my understanding, something more complex than my eight year old life had grasped before. There's a piece of my memory of the movie, of where I learned to love Russia, that always makes me think of my grandpa, my dedushka. Later in life, I made him sit through the seemingly endless expanse of The Aviator and Memoirs of a Geisha. (I was on a Oscars kick). We would always talk on the way home about the movie. The further apart my grandpa and I grew on the political spectrum, the spectrum of spiritual philosophy, and generational framework, this never stopped. After Anastasia, I had asked him if it had actually happened, if all of that scary stuff had actually happened to her. I wanted to believe in the music, in a girl who found out she was a princess. He had answered that no, it was a movie and they can make stuff up if they wanted. But he said that there had been a Princess Anastasia. He didn't tell me that while maybe she wasn't pursued by a possessed monk and a bat that could talk, she was shot point blank by Bolsheviks soldiers and her remains likely burnt while her family was buried in a mass grave in the Siberian woods. My dedushka was a very diplomatic man.
We walked along Nevsky Prospekt, THE MOST popular street in St. Petersburg, where anybody who is anybody is. (Disclaimer: This is actually how I read Nevsky Prospekt described on a travel blog.) On the way to the Russian Museum, I did the stop in my tracks, slow motion back track. The Eliseyev Emporium is a patisserie and luxury goods shop on the Nevsky Prospect. Fine caviar and scotches, charcuterie and artisanal cheeses line the one wall. All of that was very interesting but I had seen it all. What I was shocked by was the pastry. Gorgeous laminated pastry, sablees, pate de fruit. Macarons of perfection, flecked with sesame seeds or flecks of coconut. And not just that. The whole thing is Art Nouveau, big prints of Alfonse Mucha lining the walls. There's also a giant pineapple in the centre of the room. I had zero expectations for Russian pastry. Zero. But I was pleasantly surprised by Kuptez Eliseyev. Moozh and I grabbed two sablees, and two macarons, a lime and a pineapple. We passed another statue of Pushkin -I wonder if posthumously, that guy knows how much fanfare he's getting- and snapped some pictures of the Russian Museum.
Around the corner, along a canal is the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood, which is the St. Petersburg version of St. Basil's. Colourful onion domes, gold leaf, Russian ikons. It was built as a memorial to the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, who died of a car bomb in front of his son and successor. It was ransacked during the Bolshevik Revolution and during the famine that occurred during the Siege of Leningrad in WWII, it served as a morgue for those who died. It seems like every remarkable building in Russia has some kind of remarkable connection to a dead body, doesn't it?
We criss-crossed some canals into the Field of Mars, originally known as the Pleasure Fields. Add a statue of a military leader dressed up as the God of War and suddenly a walking park with ornamental cabbage and flower baskets seems less 'pleasurable'. Rename it, you can even keep the flower baskets. As we wandered through the park, we were met by uniformed police standing along the peripheries of the path. Uniformed police soon became military personnel and once we had reached the eternal flame in the centre of the park, there were formations of SWAT in full on riot gear. Turns out they were preparing for a pro-Communist rally -we saw the police transport vans later- but at first, I'm not gonna lie, I thought Russia always has riot police hanging in parks.
The Summer Garden sits across a canal from the Field of Mars. They were established by Peter the Great, apparently not shortly after he established the city of St. Petersburg itself. It is a rambling plaid of greco-roman statues, fountains and sculpted friezes of grass patches. Our walk along the Neva River was peppered with over eager retellings of everything even remotely related to Russia I had ever heard. Thank goodness I went to Russia with someone who is forced to stay with me. Traveling with anyone else, I'm not so sure they would have tolerated the CEASELESS TALKING.
Grigori Rasputin, considered an enemy of the state -and of the sanctity of the Royal marriage- was poisoned by nobles, notably Prince Yusupov. Cyanide-laced cakes and red wine. This accomplished as much as to make Rasputin slightly sleepy and when the nobles approached him to make sure he was dead, assuming he would be, he -understandably so- lunged at them and tried to strangle them. Seems fittingly self-preserving. (But that sounds like I'm defending him when, to be certain, his death only adds to the gritty obsession I have with Russia.) Somewhat taken aback by his….fortitude, the nobles shot him numerous times, assuming maybe the cyanide hadn't taken effect yet. But when he failed to fall, they beat him into a coma and rolled him up in a carpet. Wrapped up so neatly enabled them to take Rasputin to the bank of the River Neva -in the middle of DECEMBER- and toss him over. When his body was discovered, the autopsy revealed water in his lungs -he had died of drowning. I guess, according to legend, we should be surprised that he died at all. It's a story of imagination, I can't even get over it. How much of it is true, we'll never completely know. But a story doesn't have to be true to be captivating, as we've learned from James Frey?
St. Issac's is an exercise in how dusty rose marble can be made masculine and truly intimidating. Gleaming marble, further polished by the sleeting rain, rises in monstrous pillars capped and laced with inky black slate. It's dome, once painted a drab grey during WWII as a camouflage tactic, now gleams gold against the grey sky. St. Isaac's with the Cnyiyi Bridge, aka "Blue Bridge". Behind it, the infamous Bronze Horseman. Peter the Great rises high above, astride his horse in regal pomp and circumstance. The statue was a gift from Catherine the Great, in her desperate plea to legimitize her claim to the Russian throne and endear herself to the Russian people.
"They loved Peter the Great," she thought. "If I love him too maybe they'll love me by proxy?"
When we got back, I had my first (albeit significantly delayed) realization that hostels can be amazing. Targeted towards budget travellers, like ourselves, if the accommodations are good, they are usually cheap and usually so is the food and beer. Unlike the $7 coffees of Moscow, I got a freakishly large, steaming bowl of borscht and a 600ml beer for $5.
600ml!
Fun Fact: It wasn't until 2011 that beer was considered an alcoholic beverage in Russia. Anything with less than 10% alcohol was considered a soft drink.
In that moment, I realized the only people who seem to enjoy an gluttonous mega-stein of beer more than Canadians would be the Germans, but the Russians would not be far behind. The borscht was unlike anything I had ever tasted before, chock full of shredded cabbage and huge chunks of beets and potatoes. We even got an authentically snobby, curt waitress just like I had been prepared for in Russian class. I couldn't muster a similar bilious attitude towards her but when her shift ended we got a really sweet waitress who chatted us up because we reminded her of her Swedish boyfriend. (My tan was obviously not that great.)
I almost couldn't sleep that night. Visions of what I imagined the Hermitage to be like fluttered through my head, full of childhood inflations and romantic idealisms. I was positive that I would wander through and be able to slot in the various Romanov anecdotes I had obsessed over. I imagined all the fingerprints of life would still be there. Unkempt stacks of papers on desk, clattering tea sets uncleared from an afternoon, a dressing gown dangling from the corner of a privacy screen. The next day, the sun was ceaselessly bright, so much so anything white had to be merely glanced at or seen indirectly. We passed a Lada bedazzled in bumper stickers. Even the car I learned to drive in was Russian. The radio station would change every time you changed gears but her name as Stella and we loved her.
Walking Nevsky Prospekt, warmed with coffee -FREE coffee- from our hostel, my steps picked up discernibly as we rounded the corner in Palace Square.
"Russia is happy I am at The Hermitage today!" I remember screaming.
I also remember the impromptu judo session and handing out of glow stick bracelets that was going on in the background. Apparently, some kind of radio promotion. Any amount of panic I had felt over my expectations not being met by the Hermitage was quickly quelled. We bought our tickets. We picked up a map.
"Where do you want to go first?" Moozh asked.
I stared at the map.
"There's the Egyptian antiquities exhibit through there…"
I just stared.
"Babe?"
"I want to go where they lived. Where they slept."
Moozh opened his mouth to speak, graciously trying to give me what I had in my head I wanted, but then glanced back at the map. "That's kind of…" He looked up at me. "That's kind of the whole thing."
But that was before I realized some of the earliest bust of Augustus Caesar are in the Hermitage, as is Rembrandt's "Prodigal Son" and "The Sacrifice of Isaac". It was before I stood and gawked at the replica of Bernini's "Apollo and Daphne". Matching busts of Catherine the Great done up as a sphinx. Just as the Vatican museum and the Louvre before it, the Hermitage is as much a beautiful building as it is a house for beautiful things. The monarchy was all about glitz. I had heard about rooms done floor to ceiling in gold leaf. One room dripping with chandeliers and cut glass ornaments. Ornately lain hardwood flooring and grand marble staircases. Ballrooms, more than one, that could hold up to five hundred people. The royal portrait hall was my favourite, of course. The seemingly endless corridor stretches down the centre of the Winter Palace, everything from Peter the Great to Rasputin's assassin Prince Felix Yusupov. Ten foot tall portraits of Tsar's. Alexander II standing broad-shoudlered and barrel-chested in full uniform. Tsar Nicholas II looking sheepish and shy, painted from an odd distance. My favourite, a portrait size Tsarina Alexandra, with her characteristic sadness.
The Hermitage is just like any other international museum. The building that contains it is as much a draw as the artifacts within it but what is within it is nothing to balk at. Rich Japanese tapestries and the gleaming curve of samurai swords. Samurai swords Greco-Roman gold earrings and Edwardian cameos. Boxes of mummified remains and sarcophagus that stand eight feet tall. Equally at the caliber of the Louvre or the British Museum, and equally as endless. We were kicked out as the museum closed for the day, a full eight hours spent wandering.
The next day our first stop along the canals was Trinity Cathedral. The history of the cathedral is much like most of Russia: breathtaking, a glimpse into history and nearly lost. Once resplendent, it suffered from years of neglect and just as a group of people were getting around to restoring it, it nearly burnt to the ground in a freak fire. Four years later, in 2010, it was restored and reopened but there was still restoration work undergoing there when we visited. Built as the church for the Imperial Guards, but has been flooded, neglected and nearly burnt to the ground in the ensuing time. It is for all intensive purposes a brand new church now. The use of military symbols in the design is clever. Upended cannons stand to support lanterns and chevron up the side of the spire.
One of my favorite movies when I was in elementary school, and still remains to this day, is Fiddler on the Roof. I did, early on, have a thing for tragedies. And I believe that movie to the genesis of some of the things I find the most fascinating in this world: Jewish people and culture, Russia and gingers. I felt like Lilo in her gallery of obese beach goers. A quirky obsession, "Aren't they beautiful?" It wasn't until St. Petersburg that they all collided. Snaking along the cross-hatching canals, a large slate blue dome rose above the rooftops, perched atop blocks of wheat and terracotta brick. A large Star of David hung above the door done in ornate iron work. It was the only synagogue I had seen since we'd been in Russia. The Grand Choral Synagogue is one of the oldest in Europe, built during the liberal reign of Alexander II. Just as I was commenting on the curling, filigree iron work fence, two kids -couldn't have been ten between the two of them, scurried past. The girl had her prayer shawl bunched up in her fist and the boy held his yarmulke on as they ran through the gates and ran quickly turned the corner. Unabashed red hair, somewhere between the very tip of a flame and the slightly burnished tone of terracotta, capped both of their heads. As they scurried past me I felt like I'd just seen a fairy.
"Babe did you see that?!"
"Why are you yelling?"
"You obviously didn't see it because then you would know why I'm yelling."
"Umm, yes."
"I just saw a four leaf clover."
From there, we were bound for New Holland, a previously abandoned man-made island corralled by canals. Peter the Great, who founded the city, visited Holland and was inspired by their canals and naval organization. When he returned he built New Holland, as a home for the future Russian Admiralty. It served as a base for the navy in various ways, military barracks and warehouses for shipbuilding, during the autocracy until, as many things did, it fell into neglect after the Revolution. It has recently been re-gentrified into a green space -similar to the reinvention of Gorky Park- with a cafe, community garden, children's play area and a large court destined for dusky summertime games of badminton, bocce ball and croquet. What remains after the fusion of the two, is a womb of green grass and glass-flat water encircled by walls of exposed brick and industrial iron.
Just as the sun was dipping low and setting the Neva ablaze, we made our way over to the Peter and Paul Fortress. Peter the Great, began to build a fortress fearing Swedish invasion -which I could only picture the Swedish Chef in the lookout coop and the members of ABBA steering, clad in psychedelic spandex and feathered hair. But the Swedish must have been a real threat if Peter the Great hopped to it as quick as he apparently did because the Russians seem somewhat hard to scare. But the fortress never got its day in the sun. Before it could be completely, the Russians wiped the floor with the Swedes -according to popular myth- and the fortress was utilized as a prison. Dostoyevsky was imprisoned at the fortress, which only makes him more badass in my mind.
And then we passed a man swimming in THE NEVA, in the MIDDLE OF SEPTEMBER in A SPEEDO. And not a single fuck was given. That is Soviet resiliency.
We headed back through Palace Square just as the sky had dimmed enough for the lights. They flickered on, like fluorescents in a classroom, but soon the entire square was light from the backlit statues that capped the buildings to the orb lights embedded in the cobblestones. I stood for a moment, in the chill of the air, to remind myself where I was, how long I had wanted to come here. I danced a little, hummed snippets from Anastasia in my head, thought about the sadness and the death that this city had seen, civilian and otherwise. It's a country that has such a history of pain and brutality and yet the beauty of it still remains. It has an identity beyond what it can create for itself in the present. Every name the city has been called.
Find something flannel and wrap yourself in it. Watch Anastasia. Drink some beer. Contemplate getting an albino bat because they seem to have neurotic temperaments and a good sense of humour.
Things I learned in St. Petersburg:
After St. Petersburg, I stopped giving a shit if I could understand or speak Russian.
Emotional memories create life long obsessions.
Hostels are not always an exercise in bed bugs and transferrable foot fungus.
Quote from St. Petersburg:
Sasa (my sister-in-law): "You saw Russian Jewish gingers?! That's like a Gin-jew!"
Bohemian Recommends:
Loft Etagi for a great place to stay.
Café Green Room for delicious "slow food" and excellent beer.
New Holland for its art, food and green space. Killer place for a sunny afternoon.
Eliseyev Emporium for best baked goods and refined tastes.
The Hermitage Museum