Page 7 of 10
Saint Petersburg, Russia
Drowning deep inside your water, drowning deep inside your sound
On the Gulf of Finland at the very eastern end of the Baltic Sea, Saint Petersburg is a city that's all about the water. Gracious rings of interconnected canals circle the Palace Square as the wide Neva River cuts right down its middle. This is that wide waterside view from halfway across the Troitsky Bridge, with the silhouette of the Saint Peter and Paul Fortress on the right and the rest of the city everywhere else.
Removed from the downtown attractions that cluster around Palace Square, Smolny Cathedral is still near the water but at the far western edge of the city. One of the charms of Saint Petersburg is that the buildings, even the background ones, are usually quite beautiful. Smolny Cathedral is no exception, with its unforgettable sky blue totally baroque facade topped by just enough of those required and unavoidable onion domes you've already by now come to expect.
As opposed to most places you could visit, Russian guidebooks are not their destination's best friend. All contain alarmist warnings of horrible things that might happen to you during your trip, with one of them being the declaration that Russian police are bad. More than one of the books specifically warn you to avoid all contact with law enforcement officials, that their corruption has gotten so widespread that it is better to avoid them at all reasonable cost. The logic is based on a law that (unlike the US- at least so far) requires all citizens (not just tourists) to carry with them their passport at all times. The police supposedly take advantage of this law by looking at your passport and then not returning it until they get a bribe. Failure to pay whatever bribe is demanded starts to make the situation get even uglier, getting deeper involved with the Russian justice system is not something anyone would want to ever do.
With such Soviet era paranoia seeded deep inside my thoughts, I carefully navigated Saint Petersburg careful not to draw the attention of all those sneaky groups of gypsies, thieves, mafia and police that the guidebooks write about. Even outside the General Staff Building (with its fine arch) on the center of Palace Square, I found myself carefully, slowly, inconspicuously drifting away from groups of otherwise trusted police officers, hoping beyond hope I didn't end up like the rest of them, alone and lost with no passport in the dark hell of a hopeless Russian prison.
One of the better uses and displays of bright yellow brick marks a small, riverside entrance to the Admiralty building, an entrance that remains blocked by its possibly overdesigned but anchor appropriate gate.
On the Griboedova Canal, the Church of the Spilled Blood (built atop the site of a Tsar assassination by "terrorists" in the 1880s) looks eerily similar to Saint Basil's Cathedral in Moscow (see Page 8). The rather young city (it was founded in the early 1700s and is actually younger than New York) certainly has seen its fair share of historical action. It was built by Peter the Great to be Russia's great European capital- Peter had visited France and liked it so much he even had the Russian flag's colors changed to white, blue and red. It survived most of the next few centuries intact, with both the notable exception of that well publicized Red October storming of the Winter Palace, followed (of course) by an attack in the 1940s by the Nazis that placed the city under an especially ugly siege. For almost three full years German troops had (just about) surrounded Saint Petersburg and tried to starve its citizens out. Life inside the city went from horrible to unimaginable, with little or no power and food rations that got smaller and smaller as the siege went on. Over a million people died inside the city, something that not even all those pretty buildings and canals can ever really wipe away from memory.
I was in Saint Petersburg for three days, but the first day and a half ended up getting burned off on basic procedural matters. First of all, that first night as I checked in to my unnecessarily expensive (though certainly nice) hotel on Nevsky Prospekt, I needed to surrender my passport and get it registered, a process that was supposed to take an hour ended up taking closer to four (something that I would come to later expect as typical of current Russian customs).
The other piece of business I need to take care of involved my overnight rail ticket to Moscow. In order to avoid the supposedly hellish waiting in line experience at the rail station, I purchased my ticket in advance online through a local Saint Petersburg travel agency. I needed to physically visit the office to pick up my ticket, something which sounded easy but in retrospect wasn't (something that I would come to later expect as typical of current Russian life). The office was located at 6b 5th Soveyetska, which of course meant nothing to me and turned out to be a bitch to find. After some circling I was fairly certain I had found it, only to end up at a locked gate with some directions in Cyrillic. I decided to then do the logical thing and try to use a Russian pay phone- something which took a while but something I was able to eventually figure out. I called the number and attempted to talk, only to find out that the phone number was a fax number, something which did not make me feel all that comfortable. I then returned to my overpriced hotel and used their overpriced internet service to write a threatening e-mail, complete with a high priority explanation mark and return receipts. A half hour later I got a message at my hotel with more directions and the numeric key to get into the gate (one that didn't work by the way), eventually banging on a glass window until the nice enough (though confused) woman let me in to give me my ticket without incident. In retrospect I probably should have just taken my chances with that supposedly hellish waiting in line experience at the rail station. I mean how bad could it really have been.
Anyway, with half a day and another half a day wasted, I finally started exploring the city as best I could, wandering its scenic streets and canals, all the time still careful not to draw the attention of all those sneaky groups of gypsies, thieves, mafia and police that the guidebooks write about.
I found myself going slowly crazy (or perhaps slowly crazier) by the lack of darkness that Saint Petersburg experiences during summer hours. It didn't get dark (or reasonably dark) until after 1AM most mornings, something which sounds better than reality. It turns out that I need darkness or it feels like the day never actually ends.
An advantage to this was felt on my last, long day in Saint Petersburg. I had a ticket on one of the overnight express trains to Moscow that left at midnight with a long evening of good weather and light to catch up on all that wandering I was hoping to do earlier in the trip. The picture below shows the still good light conditions at the Fontanaka Canal and Nevsky Prospekt at a still healthy 11PM.
As for the train, well if you thought the guidebooks made you paranoid about the police, you should start reading about the overnight trains. The guidebooks practically and universally guaranteed I would face some trouble, either petty thieves or organized ones who like to gas the train cars and then take everything they can. With such fear I decided to get a first class cabin, barricade the door and hope for the best. The experience was actually quite pleasant and my plan worked without incident- in the end I felt much more danger from the possibly maintenance starved train and tracks than from the well guarded (and appointed) coaches.
