Once again – where did the past month go? I almost refuse to
believe it’s December already. That means that there are only four weeks left
in the semester, I’m starting another round of traveling at the end of the
month, and this weekend marks three full months of living in Russia.
Prior
to about three weeks ago, my experience of ‘living in Russia’ had been limited.
I was learning the language, I had seen some of the touristy sights, was
starting to pick up on cultural differences, and was easing my way into
learning more about Russia and its history from reading and from my kids, but
my life was more focused on work and adjusting to a new lifestyle. Then,
through a lucky arrangement of covering some classes for another teacher who
then covered for me in return the following week, I found myself with a three
day weekend, and decided to spontaneously book a ticket to St. Petersburg. It
was the best thing I could have ever done to help deepen my understanding of Russia and start to really develop a connection with the country.
True to
my budget traveler self, the cheap tickets I had booked left at 6 am on Saturday
morning, so since the public transportation stopped running to the airport at
midnight, I packed up my bag and headed out to the airport Friday night via the
$5 airport train after celebrating a birthday with some friends, and slept
rather soundly on a bench at one of Moscow’s three airports. My iPod’s Celine
Dion Playlist is still my faithful travel companion thanks to its magical
ability to put me to sleep in even the strangest of sleeping locations. I woke
up at 5, zipped through security (an added bonus of odd flight times – no
lines!), got myself a large coffee, and spent most of the flight reading Lonely
Planet’s St. Petersburg PDF chapter to figure out what I wanted to see most.
I was
met at the airport by Tamara, who had informed me she would be wearing a red
beret. I told her she didn’t need to pick me up, but she insisted, saying that
otherwise she would worry too much. Who is this woman, you ask? Tamara is a
connection of mine from my former Russian history professor at UWGB, who had
lived in Russia for five years in the 1990s. While living there, she met
Tamara, a now-retired English teacher from St. Petersburg, and has stayed in
touch with her ever since. When I told my professor that I would be moving to
Russia, she told me I had to “go to St. Petersburg more than once or twice”
while I was there, and that I could stay with her friend Tamara. Actually, when
I booked last minute I was prepared to stay in a hostel, as it’s pretty rude to
invite yourself to stay at someone’s house only four days in advance, but I
took a chance and e-mailed Tamara, who replied that she would “host me with
pleasure.” I got lucky!
I didn’t even know how lucky meeting this
wonderful lady would turn out to be when I first met her, but I realized it
more and more as the weekend went on. She may have one of the most interesting
life stories I have ever encountered firsthand. First of all, she was born in
the 1940s during the German siege of St. Petersburg. She said that some of her
earliest memories were waking up in the middle of the night to bombs, which has
caused sleeping problems to this day. No one could get in or out, with the
exception of trucks trying to smuggle people out by driving across the ice to
Finland, but she said when the authorities tried to force all of the people
from her neighborhood into the trucks to escape, her mother refused to go because
there were so many stories of the trucks falling through thin ice. This
happened three times, and each time her mother refused to go with her two young
children. They later discovered that all of the people from their neighborhood
had perished in the icy cold water trying to cross to Finland. In Tamara’s
words, “there has always been someone guiding me through life.”
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| The first children's hospital in St. Petersburg, where Tamara was hospitalized after the war. |
She grew up in the heyday of Soviet communism,
proudly joining the Young Pioneers and “believing in everything,” simply
because she couldn’t imagine any alternative. After graduating from high school
she went straight to work, but a couple of years later she decided to take some
entrance exams to see if she could continue her studies. She passed the exams
and was able to enter the State Pedagogical School, to train in both English
and nursing. She became an English teacher once she completed her studies, and
spent many years teaching “as much as I knew,” which lacked proper exposure to
spoken English. She said they had occasional recordings to listen to, but most
of it was guesswork, since there were so few foreigners and Russians weren’t
allowed to travel abroad without special circumstances. Eventually, after the
fall of the Soviet Union she encountered many more foreigners and, in her
words, would “grab them and take them to my students at school” so that they
could gain valuable language experience. She was even able to travel to America
in the 1990s, where she said she learned much about and identified well with
American culture.
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| Tamara and I with the Hermitage in the background. |
The
first day Tamara and I simply went for a long walk, where she brought the
streets to life by telling me little tidbits about most of the buildings as we
passed them. We walked from one end of Vasilevsky Island – the first civilian settlement
in St. Petersburg - to the other, which culminated in the joining of the Neva
River and its tributaries to provide a beautiful panorama of old and new St.
Petersburg, spanning over three hundred years of history. Straight across the
water was the St. Peter and Paul Fortress, the first structure built by Peter
the Great in 1703, which contrasted heavily with the bright electric bridge and
the name “SAMSUNG” lit up just behind it to the right. Turning more to the left
provided a view of Petrogradskaya, a more modern area of the city, and turning
more to the right yielded the western side of the Hermitage Museum, formerly
the Winter Palace which had been stormed by the Bolsheviks nearly one hundred
years ago at the start of the Russian Revolution and changed Western history
forever. That’s a lot of history in one shot.
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| St. Peter and Paul Fortress |
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| Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood |
Though Tamara went back to her flat
for the evening, I chose to stay out a little later and finish my walk across
the Neva to cross the bridge into the City Center. I walked through the
expansive Palace Square, in front of the entrance to the Winter Palace, then
continued onto what is perhaps Russia’s most famous street: Nevsky Prospect.
Nevsky is a delightful street lined with beautiful buildings, canals on either
side, fancy shops and restaurants, bookstores and cafes. It is a place to see
and be seen, and a delightful walk through history, as many of St. Petersburg’s
famous sites are located on or near Nevsky, such as the Church of the Savior on
Spilled Blood, so called due to it being built on the assassination location of
Tsar Alexander II in 1881. I returned to the flat for a delicious dinner that
Tamara prepared, elated at the sights of St. Petersburg I had seen that day and
excited to visit the world famous Hermitage Museum the next morning.
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| Rastrelli's Jordan Staircase, Hermitage Museum. |
After a much needed restful sleep,
I woke up on Sunday morning, shared coffee and breakfast with Tamara, made
plans to meet up with her in the afternoon, then took off for my morning at the
Hermitage. The beauty of the Hermitage is that not only is it an expansive
museum with an impressive collection of European, Russian, and world art, but
it is in the former Winter Palace of the Tsars, where the Russian royals lived not even one hundred years ago. Beginning with the Jordan staircase, designed by the famous Italian architect Rastrelli, each room through the Hermitage was a delight to walk through. It’s also a workout to walk through – the Hermitage Museum itself is about 15 miles worth of gallery to walk through. I knew I wouldn’t be able to see everything, so I planned to attack it in sections. But then, nature threw a wrench in my plans and decided to clear the cloudy skies to reveal the sun, not even one hours after I started at the museum. I decided that since I got in at a discounted rate, and that I would be back, I would rather spend time outside in the sun to walk around. So, I left the Hermitage much earlier than planned, but it was worth it to see the city through partly sunny skies. I met up with Tamara in the afternoon at the Pushkin statue (in front of the Russian Museum), and she walked me around some more of the Nevsky area, before we returned to the flat for dinner. She pointed out the various art, music, and ballet schools that still continue to train some of Russia's finest artists today. St. Petersburg has always been a city of culture, and as one walks down the fine streets lined with an impressive variety of European architecture, this impression remains.
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| Nevsky Prospect |
My last full day in St. Petersburg was spent, of course,
walking around and taking pictures. I started the morning at the Russian
Museum, set in another former palace for one of Russia’s richest families, where
I took in a morning full of purely Russian painters, sculptors, and designers.
I don’t know much about Russian art, and since many of Russia’s greats studied
abroad or under European tutelage, most of the art seems pretty standard
European. The earliest displays in the museum were Byzantine art, which focuses
more on icons (with the gold halos behind the heads of the saints) than typical
French or Italian religious art, but all of the religious art still came from
the Bible, therefore I was able to recognize some of the stories portrayed in
the paintings. Three hours later, I had managed to see the entire Russian
museum, and I had even recognized a modern Russian artist that I remembered
studying back in the fourth grade. Museum success.
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| Pushkin and the Russian Museum |
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| Sunset walk |
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| St. Issac's at sunset. |
The
rest of the afternoon was spent walking around with Tamara, after a coffee
break at an old Soviet café, which still keeps their Soviet prices ($2 for two
cups of coffee and two doughtnuts) and is hidden on a street off Nevsky –
somewhere I would have never found on my own. She took me to the other side of the city center, where we
could see famous sights such as the Mariinsky Theater and St. Issac’s
Cathedral. After she went bac, I spent the early hours of the evening wandering
alone and taking pictures, and already planning my return trip to St.
Petersburg. As I finished my walk and waited for the bus to take me back to the
apartment, where Tamara was planning a lovely dinner for us, I reflected on my
impressions of St. Petersburg. I remembered learning about how Peter the Great
had set up shop on a swampland over three hundred years ago, after traveling
abroad and seeing the great cities of Amsterdam (why St. Petersburg has so many
canals), Paris, and London, and everybody thought he was crazy for trying to
build a city in such an unfavorable setting. But, looking at his grand city
three hundred years later proves that he had a vision that he realized, and I’m
sure he would be proud to see what it has come to, with thousands of visitors
each year to see its splendors.
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| Sunset on the Neva |
For me, understanding and
appreciating both sides of Russia – the more traditional and Orthodox buildings
of Moscow, built centuries before the grand European style St. Petersburg, creates a more complete picture in my mind of Russia. Moscow appears to be the soul
of Russia, where St. Petersburg is a display of its beauty. But of course,
neither city takes into account the true heart of Russia, which lies in the
vast expanse of farmland, villages, and towns where Russia first began. This is
where I must visit next to continue to understand Russia and its people better,
but for now, I’m grateful for the opportunity I had to visit St. Petersburg and
be hosted by Tamara. It was a wonderful introduction to this stunning city
that I’m very much looking forward to going back to next year.
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| Goodbye St. Petersburg |
And today, as everyone back home
celebrates what they are thankful for with their friends and family, I feel
thankful to have these opportunities to continue exploring and learning about
the world. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
