Team Petersburg

About a week before departure I remembered to tell my host mom about our plans for visiting Saint Petersburg the following weekend. “Jane,” she said emphatically, “St. Petersburg is NOT Moscow.”

When I came back I told her she was right. While this may have led her to believe I aligned myself with her as an unfaltering member of Team Moscow, a fact that is not a fact at all, I never actually said anything that was untrue. My host mom was completely right; the two cities, while only a ten-hour (3 hours if you’re rich!) train ride away from each other, feel as though they are located worlds apart. Moscow, as the massive capital city, is the political hub of the country, and essentially marks where the nation’s history began (back in the good ol’ 10^th century). St. Petersburg, on the other hand, was the creation of Peter the Great, who at the beginning of the 18^th century set out to build a new, modernized capital for the country, which was to reflect the culture of the West. So not only is Saint Petersburg a much younger city, it has also been influenced by a completely different set of cultural values than the classical Russian Moscow.

PrettyCity.

I love rambling on about the history of St. Petersburg, but I will stop so I can tell you about the most exciting interesting fantastic thing ever: TRAINS! In Russia, trains are basically the shit. In fact, Russia has the second largest rail network in the world. So memorize that for trivia. Yeah. Trains are by far the best way to get from city to city as they are surprisingly punctual and are about a million times safer than any Russian airline. Which is not really saying anything considering that in Russia they have a saying about their planes, which I don’t actually remember right now, but its something about how they don’t fly. Regardless of the saying, though, would you really trust an airline called “AeroFLOT”? I know I wouldn’t.

So trains are actually really exciting. There are four classes of seats, but the most widely used ones are kupe (2^nd class) and platskart (3^rd class). These each consist of four “shelves” (I called them beds in class and my teacher just laughed and said “what a fantasy!”).. but these are set up like bunk beds with a table in between. The difference between kupe and platskart is that kupe has a locking door for extra security and privacy. Platskart does not provide this luxury and even has additional seats along the aisle. Each passenger is provided with a mattress pad, sheets, a pillow, and a towel (which became my first souvenir of the trip, thank you train).

If only this image truly captured
 what we went through that night..

Our train ride to Petersburg was a breeze. As the cheaper option, we of course went with platskart seating, which worked perfectly for our group of four. We left Moscow at 2am, drank a bottle of wine out of “cups” made out of water bottles we cut in half, ate candy and hleb, chatted, and were easily lulled to sleep by the sounds of the train moving (at the speedy pace of maybe 45 mph) on the tracks beneath us. When we woke up eight hours later, we felt refreshed and ready for our adventure to begin.

The train ride home is a whole other story. I’m not exaggerating when I say we got the absolute worst seats on the train. Whoever designed this section deserves to be shot. Or maybe just stabbed a few times. We ended up in the very last seats in the vagon on the aisle, which was also conveniently located next to the door to both the bathroom and the smoking room. Hooray. Aisle seats are awkward enough, because whoever walks by you can see errything or just like pick you up and throw you off the train if they feel so inclined. Who knows. It’s especially unpleasant when the door takes up half of your bed space and then bangs open and closed constantly. Good times.

Some other train ride highlights: little Sarah getting stuck in her top bunk and having Random Burly Russian Man pick her up and get her down, kid next to me murmuring “mama” demonically all night, and oh yeah, waking up to a Russian man with a pack of cigarettes in one hand and a canned gin&tonic in the other standing beside my bed watching me sleep. That was a unique experience.. We also had a little bit of trouble folding Kasey’s bed down so a nice gospodin helped us with that. And then enthusiastically continued to tuck in our sheets and make our beds for us. Russians, I have noticed, are expert bed makers.

Back on track, or more like off the track (Train tracks! Get it?!), we arrived in Petersburg at about noon on Friday, and met up with our friend Aaron, who is studying there this summer. We got lunch, changed out of our stinky train clothes, and dropped everything off at our hostel, which, I don’t know if I just had really low standards, was actually really nice. Aaron then gave us a walking tour of the main attractions located in the historic center of the city: Kazan Cathedral, The Hermitage and Winter Palace, Singer Building, Nevsky Prospect, the eternal flame, the Summer Gardens, and of course, the ever majestic Church of the Savior on Spilt Blood.

Outside the Winter Palace

As responsible tourists we felt it as our duty to experience as many aspects of life in Petersburg as we could in one weekend. Which explains how that night we found ourselves out dancing at clubs until four am. And some of this dancing may or may not have taken place on a stripper pole. These are minor details though, really. The more interesting part is that throughout all of this clubbing, the Petersburgian sun never fully disappeared from the sky. Summers in Petersburg are renowned for this phenomenon, which is quite logically called “White Nights.” Essentially, Peter is located so far north that it never actually gets dark during the summer months. While I used to think this would be quite irritating, it is one of the simplest, most beautiful things I think I’ve ever experienced. There is just something so magical about sitting in the back of a taxi, double fisting chicken mcnuggets, and witnessing the typically busy, crowded city in an unusually peaceful, soft state. Suffice it to say, I was happier than a beet in a pot o borsht. Which I’m assuming is pretty darn happy. Since it’s a part of something beautiful.

The next day we had planned to start early, but since we ended early, this posed a bit of a challenge. Eventually we made it up and out and spent another day exploring the city. Aaron posed as our tour guide once again, feeding us historical fun facts along the way. We saw the Unity Bears, a collection of painted bears to represent every country, ventured inside Kunstkamera, a museum full of creepy dead fetuses in jars and other ethnographic type things, and took a break on the lawn facing St. Isaac’s Cathedral. Our wise guide explained that during WWII and the Siege of Leningrad (Petersburg), the domes of this cathedral were painted black so as not to be an obvious bombing target. Nevertheless, it was heavily bombarded, and the damage from this is still visible in the solid marble columns. It was also here that Aaron pointed out to us the pine tree under which Peter the Great “lost his virginity.” From here on out I began to take his historical fun facts with a grain of salt.

Peter the Great, riding towards Russia's future.
Forever mounted on "The Thunder Rock"

After this we saw one of the main things I wanted to see during our trip: the Bronze Horseman Statue. I don’t think anyone else really cares too much about this, but I love it. There’s a poem by Pushkin based off of it that I’ve read about five thousand times and wrote a paper on last year. So it was really cool to see it in person. And pretend to be the main character of the poem, Evgenii, the quintessential “little man” of literature, who loses his mind and envisions the statue coming alive and chasing him through the city. 

A city, which is indeed NOT Moscow. And I couldn't have loved it more for it))