On Monday I told you all about my visit to Russia in 2002 – specifically the Moscow half of the trip. When we left the story, we were on the overnight train to St Petersburg.
And now it’s very early in the morning and we’ve arrived in Russia’s second city. No one’s really slept much, because we’ve spent the night on a train in a state of mild terror but we’re all ok. We’re all going to sleep on the coach later on today and tomorrow.
So our first stop is the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood. No one’s heard of it, even the teachers and we’re struggling to make sense of the guide’s accent. Speel-blod? What is he trying to say? It’s a very pretty church – a bit like St Basil’s on acid – and one of the most memorable moments of St Petersburg.
St Petersburg is where we’re sent off on our own for a while, for some shopping and lunch and to give the teachers an hour or two off. Looking back, setting a load of fifteen-to-eighteen-year-olds off on their own in Russia, even for an hour or two, is madness but we’re all reasonably sensible and my group in particular was a good responsible group – those reasonably sensible and responsible teenagers turned into two teachers, a university physics lecturer and a travel blogger. We bought some cheap CDs, I bought a skeleton dragon t-shirt and we went for pizza. I still have the receipt – one margherita pizza, one pasta carbonara, one garlic bread, one salami pizza (which I should have been able to figure out without Google Translate – look at me, I read most of a 17-year-old receipt in Russian all by myself!), one Coca-Cola, one peach juice (thanks Google again) and one “yellow juice”, whatever that is.
Then there was the battleship Aurora. I dropped history, I looked blankly at the exchange between Martyn and the history teacher – “Sir, is this the battleship Aurora? And is that the gun?” As far as I understand, this was the ship that fired the first shots that basically launched the Russian Revolution. I mean, a battleship is always interesting to explore but maybe more interesting with historical context.
The big cultural thing we did in St Petersburg was the Hermitage and Winter Palace, which is a very impressive building. I appreciate that this is one of the most important museums and galleries on the planet but it’s not my thing. We saw Faberge eggs and that amount of sparkle is always going to appeal but the great and important art did nothing for me. One of the churches did – it looks like marble but is actually fake and just painted to look like that. Which sounds fake, but ok. This was the home of the Russian tsars until 1917, surely they didn’t need to fake marble? Add that to the collection of stuff to check up on… two weeks ago. I’m in Perm right now in real life, at the beginning of the month I was in St Petersburg.
And last – the best thing we did in Russia by far – was the folk show. This was an exhibition of music and dancing and it was great. All done in traditional costume, very colourful, very fun, far more suited to a group of teenagers than the classical piano concert we endured in Moscow. Someone played a saw, played it like a violin with a bow. And one of the dances looked like a chicken. We laughed so much, it was a really good night and I highly recommend it. So highly that it’s on my itinerary for two weeks ago. When I get round to the blogs of the current trip you’ll find out if I did it.
The next morning we came home. We finished up an entire box of Weetos between us so that no one had to carry them home and that meant the plane trip did not go so prettily for me. Memorable moments that you don’t want to tell the entire internet about.
I wish I’d been old enough and interested enough to do some research, to have any kind of context for anything I was seeing. I’ve been thinking about it for seventeen years and that’s why I’m back there right now, because I wanted to do it properly as an adult. By the time the next blog is published, I’ll be home, but the rest of September is really busy so the scheduled posts will continue for a few more weeks. I’ll see you live on October 7th.