My arrival in St. Petersburg was not auspicious. Sweating across Europe, I promised myself that I would not complain if I shivered across Russia, but I didn't say anything about not complaining if it rained, and I arrived on a grey and gloomy day in a downpour. Leaving the depressing, grimy station, my first impression was of a sprawling city of dark buildings and darker skies, with heavy traffic - hardly the Venice of the north.
Matters were not improved by Sergei, who met me at the station. Russia's labyrinthine visa regulations were crafted during the Soviet era, and Russia's underpaid police are always on the lookout for an opportunity to fine a foreigner for a violation - even an imaginary violation. Getting a visa requires a letter of invitation from an accredited organization, for which you are supposed to have confirmed reservations for every night you will spend in Russia. Then, once there, you have 72 hours in which to register your visa with the authorities, and must re-register each time you spend more than three days somewhere. Hotels normally take care of registration for their guests, but I wanted to use homestays, so to make sure I had visa support I had Passport Travel in Australia make my Russian reservations. They subcontracted with G & R International for my first few stops, and so I met Sergei, their St. Petersburg representative.
Sergei seemed taken aback when I wanted to find an ATM before we left the station, but after muttering a little he tracked one down. My second question was about my visa registration - "no problem," he said. He then used the drive to my homestay to try to sell me extra services. Given that I was in a big city in a new country, with a new language and even a new alphabet, in a downpour, I decided that a two-hour car tour, albeit overpriced, probably made sense. But Tonya, the guide, seemed to be left over from Intourist - she produced a continuous stream of unmemorable facts and figures in a sharp, didactic voice. As I realized that St. Petersburg was not only big but relentlessly baroque, I began to wish I had stayed in Vilnius: small, walkable, charming.
I was even less happy when Sergei dropped me in the middle of town instead of back at my homestay, but at least Tonya explained the metro system and pointed out an Internet cafe. Matters improved temporarily when I visited the Church on Spilled Blood (built where Alexander II was assassinated in 1881), totally covered with beautifully restored mosaics, although I thought the foreigner's admission price extortionate. However, after an indifferent meal and the discovery that the ethnographic museum was closed for the day, I decided to retreat to my homestay - assuming I could find it again.
I didn't know it at the time, but my St. Petersburg homestay and Svetlana, my hostess, would prove to be the best I encountered in Russia. The main problem was that I had to trek a kilometer from the metro station to reach it. I know it was a kilometer because a sign at the halfway point proclaimed that it was 500 meters to McDonalds, next to the station. That 500 meters, by the way, was one long block, and not an easy walk as the pavement was in bad shape. All across Russia I would encounter crumbling sidewalks, making Russian women's current addiction to shoes with sharply pointed toes and stiletto heels all the stranger. This was also my first exposure to Russian drainpipes - very big around and ending abruptly anywhere from six inches to several feet above the pavement. Perhaps this works well for snow, but with rain it confronts the pedestrian with a succession of little rivers.
Unlike my other Russian hostesses, Svetlana was eager to talk with me and spoke good English. She wanted to know how to keep her 29 year-old daughter from marrying a 52 year-old Californian so that she could move to America and learn English - Svetlana thought this was a bad deal for the Californian. I could only suggest that she send her daughter over to the U.S. consulate to find out how difficult it is to enter the U.S. these days. Svetlana also taught me a lot about the difficulties of life after perestroika. While the new system may have benefited a few - the "New Russians" and the Mafia - and may benefit some of the young, it has been a disaster for many. Svetlana's husband, a thin, worried-looking man, used to be a naval captain. Stationed in Baku at the time of the breakup of the Soviet Union, they nearly starved when his salary went unpaid. Now he receives just $125/month pension. My impression is that people are wheeling and dealing to stay above water even more than they did before, only now they can talk about it. Gorbachev is no hero here.
The night train from Vilnius to St. Petersburg crosses a small piece of Latvia on the way, and so involves interruptions from four sets of border officials - leaving Lithuania, entering Latvia, leaving Latvia and finally entering Russia. The first three were minor events, but entering Russia required visits from at least five separate people, including the woman pushing medical insurance, and the custom's guy, who ignored my request for the "declaratsia" I believed I would need when I left. (The Trans-Siberian Handbook and even the Australian government's web site were quite emphatic about the financial dangers of trying to leave without one.) The best thing about this train was meeting Galina, a Russian who spoke English and had spent a week in a spa in Vilnius resting up from taking care of her invalid mother. She explained that the train was half-empty because Russians now had trouble getting visas for Lithuania - reminding me that I had recently read about protests from Russians living in Lithuania about new Lithuanian language requirements in schools. Galina invited me into her compartment for tea, and told me about her daughter, actually living in California with her American husband, whom she had met while he was an exchange student.
Galina volunteered to take me out to Pushkin to visit the Summer Palace, so when Saturday proved dry I called her and we arranged to meet at one of the metro stations. Just past the airport and the WWII memorial (remember 670,000 people died during the 900-day German siege of what was then Leningrad), our microbus stalled. The driver kept trying to start it long past the time the battery died and we were lucky to get a ride on another microbus - they usually only leave when full.
My main interest in the Summer Palace was the Amber Room (the rest, resolutely baroque and monotonously white and gold, was suitably impressive). The room was indeed completely paneled in intricately carved amber and is stunning. (No-one knows what happened to the 18th century original, which disappeared during WWII.) We walked back through town - lots of nice old wooden buildings in poor repair - to the station to catch the local commuter train, crowded with people who had been working in the gardens of their dachas. Not the luxurious rural retreats of the cadres, sometimes just sheds. Not because they necessarily enjoyed gardening, but because they needed the produce to eat - or sell. One old lady cradled a few magnificent stalks of gladioli - I saw her again outside the St. Petersburg station, offering them for sale.
While I was glad to see the Summer Palace, I was even happier to visit it with Galina, and took her to dinner by way of thanks. At the small cafe she chose I ate excellent mushroom soup, cauliflower cheese and soy protein "beef" stroganoff. This meal, for two, cost less than the Pizza Hut mini-pizza I had eaten for lunch (I was in a hurry and still struggling with Cyrillic).
The next day I visited Peterhof on my own, by fast boat. Of course, I loved the lavish fountains, spray sparkling in the sunshine, but I skipped the interior of the main palace - more white and gold baroque, and I still had the Hermitage to go. I did visit Mon Plaisir, Peter the Great's modest retreat, with human-sized rooms and lots of Dutch tiles, along with wonderful views over the water. Then I took the boat back and tackled the Hermitage.
I'm sorry, but not only did I not fall in love with St. Petersburg, I didn't like the Hermitage much, either. I had, after all, just spent four months looking at European art in European cities, and in Russia I wanted to look at Russian art. Aside from the state rooms, what few Russian rooms existed were mostly closed. So was the English room. Artifacts, as opposed to art, were mostly badly displayed, badly dusted and badly labeled, and even with a map and a plan the Hermitage is very big and requires lots of walking. But I loved the Rembrandts. The Van Goghs and the Monets and the Pisarros weren't bad either, not to mention the two El Grecos, but I visited the big room full of Rembrandts three times. The men and women in the portraits had character in every line of their faces, and reminded me that one reason I enjoy European and Asian cities is that people of all ages walk the streets.
Perhaps I would have liked St. Petersburg better if I had visited it the first time with a tour group, as it is big, spread out, and has minimal metro (having been built on a swamp). Add in the rain and visa problems and it was fighting an uphill battle. My visa - remember that I was paying for G&R International's services largely because I wanted to be sure my visa registration went smoothly? Remember Sergie said "no problem"? He lied. That was on Friday. On Saturday he said that "the boss" said my package didn't include registration. I made it quite clear that it did. Sunday, Svetlana assured me that someone would come by Monday morning to register my visa. Monday morning she said "the boss" said that I didn't need it registered until I reached Moscow. I believe that he lied. The Russian Embassy in London has detailed visa information on its web site, including a notice in red letters stating that "[a] visa must be registered within 3 working days of arrival in Russia." By the time I reached Moscow I would have been in the country for four working days.
There was no phone in my homestay as Svetlana hadn't paid the bill, and she hadn't brought her cell phone over (I was in the apartment alone, Svetlana lived elsewhere with her husband, daughter and grandson), so we went upstairs to a neighbor's apartment, where I spent 90 minutes on the phone. The head of the St. Petersburg office had recently had a baby and never answered her phone. Sergei was in the country for a long weekend and claimed that my visa registration was nothing to do with him. "The boss" in Moscow kept trying to convince me that I didn't need my visa registered in St. Petersburg, and that I didn't need it registered with the authorities, that a hotel stamp was enough.
Eventually "the boss" arranged for a no-name hotel across town to register me and Svetlana and I set off in a private taxi (private taxi - any car that will stop) and I wound up with a hotel stamp, which I figured was better than nothing. But I was furious, and worried about the officials on the Mongolian border, a notoriously tough bunch, not to mention the police on Red Square, famous for claiming to have found a problem with a foreigner's visa. The recommended deterrent is a cell phone and a threat to call one's embassy, but this only works if the visa is in fact valid. I was not at all sure mine was. I sent Svetlana home in another private taxi and set off to visit the Peter and Paul fortress, but I was too upset to appreciate it.
That afternoon I boarded the train for Novgorod and the Hotel Volkhov, riding through swamps and lots of pine and aspen forests. Novgorod, a political and religious center for many centuries, could hardly have been a bigger contrast to St. Petersburg. Small, sleepy, medieval, with almost no tourists, it was much more my kind of town. The hotel was clean and comfortable, with good food at dinner, although breakfast was hot dogs and mashed potatoes. The Kremlin ("Kremlin" means fort), a walled compound above a big river, had a working church and an excellent small museum, which included interesting old embroidery and gospel covers. A curving pedestrian bridge across the river led to quiet, dusty streets and a number of other old churches.
After checking with the T.I. I took a bus out into the country to visit a riverside monastery (still being repaired) and a wonderful open-air museum with a collection of wooden buildings. Alas, my camera battery expired half-way round and I discovered that I hadn't recharged the spare. (One of the recurrent problems with my Minolta is insufficient notice that the battery is running down.)
Novgorod took my mind off my visa, but then I boarded the night train to Moscow to discover that I was sharing a compartment with a police lieutenant! He turned out to be a nice young man with a wife and new baby, although his English was hard to follow. Even with a university degree, he was making only $150/month - another person with nothing good to say about perestroika. He was quite open about police corruption: won't be fixed until the pay goes up, he said. He also warned me about walking the streets at night, because of drug addicts, while I had been surprised by the number of men I saw on the streets with beer bottles. Indeed, this train apparently was notorious for drunks, and carried armed guards to keep order.
Svetlana was in the middle of renovating the apartment in St. Petersburg, and the bathroom, although small, sparkled, and the kitchen was well-equipped, although my sofa-bed was short and uncomfortable. Before the conversion it had been a communal flat - three bedrooms, three families. It did not prepare me for my Moscow homestay, encrusted with the dirt of ages. No doubt my 72-year old hostess, Olga, did her best, but the place needed to be stripped back to the brick and rebuilt. While I think that any visit to Russia should include a couple of homestays, three weeks of homestays and night trains turned out to be overdoing it. Halfway across Siberia I wrote the following:
A typical homestay is in a Soviet-era apartment block in a concrete jungle of other apartment blocks. Since neither the building itself nor the steel door guarding its entrance are numbered, you must take careful note of any landmarks if you hope to find it again, bearing in mind that at night the street lights may be out. Behind the steel door and its combination lock (write down the numbers) is a dark and malodorous stairwell with crumbling steps. If you are lucky your hostess will not give you the keys to the apartment as the door locks (plural) are an IQ test you will probably fail. You will not get a key for your room, as even if there is a door it won't have a lock. The room will be small and the bed or sofa uncomfortable. Don't worry about unpacking - there will be nowhere to put, never mind hang, your clothes. The bathroom will also be small, with most of the floor space taken up by the washing machine, ensuring that only contortionists will be able to use the toilet in comfort. There will be hot water, but you may have to wake up your hostess to have it turned on. Any cultural exchange with your hostess (who may well speak no English at all) will be limited to the discovery that she considers 9:00 am unconscionably early for breakfast, and has no coffee in the house. You, on the other hand, may want breakfast well before 9:00 am so that you can get an early start on the trek into town, as there will be nothing of interest near the apartment. In Moscow this may take 45 minutes, meaning that if you want to cleanup and change before eating dinner, the round trip will take an hour and a half. Since all this is likely to cost at least as much as a reasonable hotel, you will appreciate why I will not be using homestays on any future trip to Russia.
My first priority in Moscow was to get my Mongolian visa, and with the help of Olga's street atlas I found the embassy quite easily. Much to my surprise, my visa was issued while I waited. I think that I was the day's only customer and the official was bored. Unlike St. Petersburg, Moscow has an extensive but deceptive metro system: it can easily take five minutes for the ride between stations, and any interchange is likely to involve a very long walk. It is not a place for people who don't like crowds, especially when a train-load of people head for the few escalators. I arrived in Moscow right after the subway bombings, and armed guards patrolled the station entrances, although I seldom saw them stop anyone.
I found Moscow more interesting than St. Petersburg because of the greater variety of architectural styles, even though many buildings seemed to be in poor shape, as were the sidewalks. The GUM building on Red Square is now an upmarket shopping mall, but the young Muscovites seemed to prefer the three-story underground mall nearby, with a food court and cheaper brands. The young women there were smart and sexy, slim and sleek and confident. But unsmiling. I was struck by how rare it was to see a smile on a Russian face. After a morning looking at icons in the Andrey Rubilov Museum in the quiet Andronikov Monastery and an afternoon of Russian art in the excellent Tretyakov Gallery, I realized that I hadn't seen any painted smiles either - no beaming Madonnas here. So I don't think that we can blame the Communists for the dour expressions - the long, cold winters or dark, northern forests, perhaps?
The Tretyakov Gallery was everything the Hermitage was not - nothing but Russian art. While initially all art here was religious, there was a gratifying absence of martyrs, although the icons were as stylized as Theravada Buddhas (for whom there is a set series of approved poses). The long bodies and small, bent heads of the 16th century gave way to more realistic figures in the 17th century. Initial attempts to imitate the Western art made fashionable by Peter the Great were stiff and unconvincing, but I particularly admired a collection of portrait busts by Shubin that were full of character, and browsed happily through a room full of pictures of Central Asia.
The next day I set off to join a Kremlin tour in another downpour. I found the Armory (more accurately the treasury), the most interesting, although the Faberge eggs were surprisingly unimpressive. The rest of the immense collection left me wondering why the Revolution took so long. I lunched in the underground mall with a man from the World Bank whom I met on the tour. His parents were from Bangalore and I think he was the only dark-skinned person I saw in the whole of Russia - I felt that we attracted considerably more attention than I had done on my own. In the afternoon I took the bus tour of the city run by the same company, but the weather was so bad that it was hard to see much. I had more fun talking to my seat mate, a Swedish artist, than looking out of the windows.
I had arranged to spend my second weekend in Russia touring Golden Ring towns, and a car and driver collected me early Saturday morning. These towns predate Moscow's rise to power and retain some of the oldest religious buildings in the country, most recently restored or undergoing restoration. At Sergiev Posad I met up briefly with four Australians also using Passport Travel, but they were sensibly staying in hotels. I was surprised to learn that my tour included guides, and the one here was excellent. I found the Russian Orthodox faith to be a little like looking at Roman Catholicism through a distorting mirror - same basis but different emphasis. For one thing, there are many more saints - Samson is a saint, for example. For another, you don't sit during a service, or even leave, except at certain points. The altar screen becomes the iconostasis, a wall of up to five tiers of icons with a door in the middle. The main altar is behind the door, which only priests may enter. Women are still expected to cover their heads, and in the more conservative churches to wear skirts. The buildings, usually cruciform, are dark, making it difficult to appreciate the art.
Instead of the instructional stained glass windows found in medieval cathedrals in Europe, in Russian churches the walls are covered with paintings. At Rostov-Veliky my guide explained that while fresco painting had worked well in Italy, it didn't stand up to the Russian climate. Apparently nails are used to hold the plaster to the wall, and in Russia they expand and contract as the weather changes, eventually leaving holes that require extensive and expensive repairs. The buildings in Rostov weren't as well cared for as those at Sergiev, where the body of St. Sergius, patron saint of Russia, is enshrined. (St. Sergius blessed the first Russian army to beat the Tartars, a.k.a. Mongols, in 1380).
Rostov-Veliky, with 40,000 people, seemed to be doing rather badly itself, with wide, empty streets and decaying buildings. Originally known for its icon painters, after icons were banned by the Communists the artists turned to painting on enamel, but now the local factory is failing. Yaroslavl, my overnight stop, with 680,000 people, appeared more prosperous. I especially enjoyed driving through the countryside: the road was frequently lined with wooden houses, many with painted carving around their windows. In many places buckets of apples were for sale, signifying the arrival of autumn.
Back in Moscow I moved into the Rossiya Hotel instead of returning to my homestay. The guidebooks made the Rossiya sound like a dump, but I had met someone staying there who recommended it, and indeed, it was quite comfortable and marvelously located. My room overlooked the river and the south wall of the Kremlin, and I splurged on dinner in the second floor restaurant so I could gaze directly at St. Basil's cathedral while I ate. While the church isn't much inside, the outside is just as fantastic as the photos suggest and I loved it. Coffee, Cointreau and St. Basil's - a great finish to my last night in Moscow. The next day I went grocery shopping in preparation for my first real Trans-Siberian train ride.
Originally sent from Hoi An, Vietnam, November 19, 2004
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