Excursions, Excitement and Eccentricity - A Short List of Exciting Things

Another entry following so soon after the last? It must be another catch-up entry! And so it is, as I dedicated so much of my last entry to our viewing of Garry Potter, I feel duty-bound to let you know some of the other (fairly exciting) things which have been happening in St. Petersburg recently.

Exciting Thing No. 1: It has snowed!! Yes, that's right, real snow, snow that actually settled on the ground rather than hanging limply in the air for a few seconds before melting on the pavement. Alright, most of it had melted by the time I went for a walk in it mid-afternoon (although there was enough left in the Yusopov Gardens to admire the pretty bird footprints in the snow, and then destroy them with my huge UGG footprints - gotta make your mark!!) and alright it had melted by the next day, but it's a start. Although I may be speaking too soon, as Natasha reliably informs us that next Thursday it will be -6 to -10 degrees!!

Exciting Thing No. 2: Tom and I have been on a day trip. The destination: Pavlovsk. Vera was very pleased, as she's been nagging me to go there for a while, although her reaction when I told her that I was actually going was "It would have been better to go last week." Well, possibly so, the temperature would certainly have been more pleasant, but the fact is, we didn't! And, despite the lightly falling snow (which sounds poetic, but was actually just cold!), and the bare branches of the trees, we enjoyed a very pleasant walk around the gardens (which featured lots of circular things - circular halls, circular ponds, circles of birches - none of which were properly circular) before heading into the palace to warm up. Here we faced some confusion - the English student price was 300 roubles, the Russian student price was 100 roubles, yet when Tom tried to blag his way in, saying "Two hundred roubles, yes?" (obviously in Russian, it would have been overly convincing in English!) the woman shoved the tickets at us saying "Russian students. Free." I think she may have considered taking back the free tickets on seeing our confused faces, but she obviously decided to pity the stupid foreigners and so we were treated to the whole of Pavlovsk palace for free! The guidebooks tell you that Pavlovsk is less impressive than neighbouring Pushkin - they are wrong. The palace is less impressive from the outside than Tsarskoe Selo's blue and gold facade, but inside there is far more to see. Even better, as it was winter, we only had 2 or 3 tour parties to contend with, rather than the usual hundred! Very, very impressive. We then decided to relive our second-week Oranienbaum visit by eating in the station cafe but unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) the food here was of a slightly higher quality and the setting infinitely more impressive. It also had the added comedic value of tables directly below the train information boards, so we had dinner with an audience - luckily no-one decided to ask us a question!

Exciting Thing No. 3: Last Sunday, Tom and I attempted to do some more sightseeing. Heavy emphasis on the word 'attempted'. We had read in the guidebook (yet another reason not to trust the Lonely Planet!) that Kresty Prison, a working prison near Finland Station, gives guided tours every Saturday and Sunday, and so we went to investigate. After jaywalking (which is illegal in Russia) twice, in order to navigate around the roadworks on the main road (there was no pavement, nor was there a replacement walkway), we arrived outside the prison. Unfortunately, here we hit our stumbling block. There was no door. We walked around all four sides of the prison (a grim-looking red brick affair, with cracked glass in the windows - I would not like to be a prisoner there!) and saw absolutely no way of getting in that was not covered with warning signs. Slightly disillusioned, we trudged back to the Coffee House near Finland Station, where Tom attempted to cheer himself up with some nice hot soup. Again, emphasis on the word 'attempted', for it was not hot soup, it was cold soup (it did say this on the menu). It was also fizzy (it did not say this on the menu)! Luckily we were able to cheer ourselves up by seeing how much sugar you can put in fruit tea before it fails to dissolve. This experiment can be summed up in this quote from Tom: "Tea should not be crunchy!"

Exciting Thing No. 4: This is not so much an exciting thing as an insane thing which Vera did - last night I came out of my room in the early hours to find a curtain pulled over the entrance to the kitchen. I was ever so slightly confused by this, as that curtain has never before been there. However, I was enlightened this evening, when Vera decided to play the "Guess where I slept last night?" game. No prizes for guessing, it was the kitchen. Apparently she couldn't sleep because of a party the neighbours were having, although I couldn't hear anything so it can't have been a particularly loud party! She also said it was the best night's sleep she ever had, so I won't be too surprised if that curtain reappears....

Anyway, before this becomes a very long list of not so exciting things (ie. my recurring nightmare of being fed cold fish - no wait, that's actually happening!), I will sign off. Always quit while you're ahead!

Gamsters, Glass Floors, and Garry Potter - A Week of Hilarity

Reading the title, you might be forgiven for thinking I'm running out of ideas. But you would be sadly mistaken. Garry Potter is the literal Russian translation of Harry Potter, and gamsters? Well, that's just a joke at Tom's expense. You see, on Monday, Natasha (the culture teacher with whom I have a love-hate relationship) decided that we would play a little game. We each had to write three facts about ourselves, and then she would read them out and we would guess whose they were. It should have been easy, as there were only three of us in the class, but Tom was determined to make it difficult by denying all of his facts. That is, until we got to the third one. Natasha stared at the piece of paper incredulously and exclaimed "что такой гамстер?" - literally "What the hell is a gamster??". As Tom has spent most of one of our previous lessons trying to convince Helen that her Russian name was 'Gelen', it was fairly obvious (not to mention hilarious) that he had made the same mistake in translating 'hamster'. He will never live it down, not if we have anything to do with it anyway.

There were a few more translation faux-pas during our trip to the Ethnographical Museum on Wednesday, in which I was confused by a cabinet with a double key (i.e. two lots of numbers one to ten in the same cabinet!) and tried to tell Tom that a fishing rod was a ski pole (as it was about the length of my upper arm, I probably should have known better!) and that knitting needles were an ermine trap. Perhaps I'll reconsider that career as a tour guide then.... Among the highlights of the Ethnographical Museum were some terrifying masks, hundreds of wedding displays, and a raincoat made out of an unknown substance which I thought to be bladder but, upon consultation with the dictionary, turned out to be intestines! So Tom and I were walking around all day with 'intestines' written on our hands. Fabulous!

Also this week, as the new Harry Potter film was coming out, we decided to go and see it, in Russian of course. However, this meant dealing with Russian cinemas, and as usual, the obstacles were many. Firstly, we had to get to the cinema. It is located on the fourth floor of the mall in Sennaya Ploschad, and as the escalators there are confusing to say the least, we decided to take the lift. We got in, and (having been told it was on the top floor, I pushed the button for the fifth floor). This was incorrect, but for once it was a good mistake, as the lift which we were travelling in only went between the first and fifth floors (not that it tells you this on any of the other floors, so you look like a right idiot waiting for a lift that never shows up...). However, when we got out on the fifth flood, we had to cross a glass floor and go down some glass steps. For someone as deathly afraid of heights (or at least of walking on seemingly unsecured platforms at any height) as me, this was no mean feat. It was not helped by Tom deciding to see what would happen if he jumped.

Safely on the correct floor, we checked the screen, which informed us that Garry Potter 7 would be showing from Thursday onwards. We went to the Касса, and asked if we could pre-book tickets for Thursday. "Tomorrow," was the reply. The next day we returned. This time we were confronted will simply a sullen shake of the head. (Someone really has to teach the Russians the value of customer service). That night we searched on the Internet, which took us to the crux of the problem - there were no showings on Thursday. Why the cinema staff couldn't have told us that, I have no idea, but we had by now given up on the idea of buying tickets in advance. So on Friday, after lessons (in which Natasha taught us about 'holiday tables'. Yes, 'holiday tables'. Basically a normal table, which takes on magical powers in holiday season. When Tom asked what was on the holiday table, he received the reply: "What ISN'T on the holiday table?" Glad we cleared that one up then...) we returned to the cinema. No seats for the 4.30 showing. One seat for the 5.30 showing (well, we've asked for three tickets, so I don't think we want that one...). Two rows of seats for the 6.15 showing. Excellent, we'll take them all! Or just the three tickets we asked for in the first place (never use sarcasm in a foreign country, it can end up costing you!).

To kill time before the film, we went to the SPB (a chain of very cheap, very studenty bars) in Sennaya Ploschad, and attempted to drink our own body weight in strawberry beer (the waitress helped in this endeavour by giving me two beers when I'd ordered one, but never mind). Perhaps unwise, given that we were about to try and watch a film in Russian (not to mention sit down for two and a half hours with limited access to a toilet). In my slightly inebriated state, I ended up climbing over the front row rather than walking along the aisle, and then trying to leave through the wrong exit. Not that it mattered anyway, as the entire cinema was clearly game for a laugh, so much so that they giggled throughout the entire middle portion of the film, culminating in an outburst of hysterics and applause at the line "I open at the close." Perhaps there's some hidden innuendo in the Russian version. Perhaps the entire cinema was playing some drinking game that we weren't aware of. Perhaps they were just all stark raving mad. Who can say?

Ships, Sunshine and Smiling - Exploring Sweden and Finland

Russia celebrated some sort of holiday on Thursday - the day of people and nation, or something similarly generic. What it was for, I'm not sure, and any Russians who I asked didn't seem to be either! What's more important is what it meant for us - a five day weekend!! With our visas having recently been renewed and made multi-entry, Rachel and I decided to get out of Russia and into Europe (I know St. Petersburg is technically in European Russia, but sometimes it really doesn't feel like it!!).

Unfortunately this  meant an early start for us - looking out of my bedroom window at 5am I did think that maybe I could just stay at home and not risk getting raped on the metro. But I didn't spend over £200 on trains and ferries for nothing, so just after seven I was sitting on a train bound for Helsinki. Second panic - the conductor had taken our tickets....and our passports....and taken them off the train. But after some discussions with customs and border control (one Finnish, one Russian and both much more interested in the Russians trying to get out of the country than in us!) our passports were restored to us and we could feel a little smug.

Even smugger when we arrived in Helsinki two hours later to sunshine and blue skies - something distinctly lacking in St. Petersburg now that winter is setting in, we're considering some sort of points system to rate the greyness of the sky! Helsinki is small, and fairly nondescript (Vera says boring!), but unmistakably European, and because of this we loved it. Cars stop at pedestrian crossings, people smile in the street, shopkeepers greet you in English and ask if they can help you, they accept euros, I could go on.... It did take a couple of hours for Russia to relinquish its hold on me though, as I tried to converse with a market stall holder in Russian and read a bar name as 'Sorasavapa', before realising that of course it said 'Copacabana'!!

 We walked around for a while, enjoying the sunshine and gawping at the prices in the shops - they say that Scandinavia has some of the highest prices in the world and they're not lying! After a quick look inside the cathedral (we needn't have bothered, Russia definitely does cathedral interiors better!) and a bite to eat in the all-you-can-eat pizza buffet, it was time to board our ferry to Stockholm. I'm sorry, did I say ferry?  Because this was much more like a cruise ships, complete with multiple restaurants and bars, live music, a nightclub, and half a deck dedicated to duty free. Our cabin was small, but with bigger beds than the one I got in college in first year, a TV, and an en-suite. The TV never got switched on, although we did watch Sex and the City on my portable DVD player with a bottle of Cava and a bag of Maltesers. The alcohol was a little too effective after two months of light drinking, and I got just slightly over-excited by the 'strobe-lighting'  (i.e. dodgy bulb) in the bathroom.

Stockholm, where we arrived early the next morning, is lovely, the Scandinavian equivalent of Durham or York (i.e. with more water) . Apart from a short metro journey to and from the port, we spent the entire day in Gamla Stan, the Old Town, situated on an island in the middle of the city. There we went in the Royal Palace, which is still a working palace and is used, among other things, to host the Nobel Prize Winners' Banquet every year - so as I said at the time, I don't need to win one now, I've seen where the winners eat their dinner!! But my favourite room in the palace had to be the Carl XVI Gustav Jubilee Room, which was redesigned in 1998. The theme: a Swedish summer's day. The result: IKEA-central!! Not that it wasn't lovely, just slightly out of place among the grandeur of the rest of the palace! After some lunch in a cute little cafe (seriously I'd recommend it to anyone......only I can't as I don't know the name...) we looked in some cute little shops with not so cute little prices, before getting the metro back to the port.

That evening, we made the mistake of buying a bottle of very cheap wine (dare I say formal wine?) and washing it down with a couple of gin and tonics. Possibly a mistake - I remember very little of the evening, and it didn't exactly make the next day fun. However, we still managed to get out to the small fortress island of Suomenlinna, 15 minutes from Helsinki. We weren't really in the mood for sightseeing, but we made a concerted effort before giving up and going for breakfast. It was the most expensive breakfast ever, €5 for a cup of tea and a croissant, but the atmosphere was lovely and we made a friend! Alright, he wasn't exactly a friend, as we didn't actually find out his name, but we did get chatting to the American guy at the table next to us - very strange man, he told us that Chinese was an easy language to learn, and yet was refusing to learn Finnish despite living on the island.... That encounter over with, we spent a couple of hours looking for presents for our hosts (not easy, given that everything was shut - I think I've got too used to Russian opening hours!!) and buying paninis, which were meant to be for the train, but unsurprisingly didn't make it that far! In the station, I managed to buy an English magazine and newspaper (well, it was the Guardian, but it was the first English newspaper I've seen in 9 weeks!) and catch up with what's going on in the outside world. Anyone who thinks Durham is a bubble, let me tell you, it's got nothing on Russia!!

Late on Sunday night we returned to St. Petersburg to a flurry of snow. Winter is coming, but will we all make it out alive??

Pigeons, Parents and Pessimism - The Catch-Up Entry

The trouble with neglecting to do things is that they tend to catch up with you. And so, having neglected this blog for far too long, I now have three weeks of St. Petersburg fun to condense into one entry.

It began with a trip to the Zoological Museum or, to use Tom's more creative description, "the museum where the animals are, only the animals are dead." Whoever started this museum could surely rename himself the Noah of taxidermy as he seems to have taken it upon himself to collect at least one, if not the necessary pair, of every animal known to man. The highlight has to have been either the dogs or the pigeons, or perhaps the dung beetles... There were, of course, slightly larger and more exciting animals; lions, panthers, polar bears and an improbably large collection of mammoths, including a mummified baby, a stuffed adult with half a trunk, and numerous skeletons.

As if I hadn't had enough museums for one week, the day after our trip to the ballet (the details of which are in my article on the Bubble) I took a little trip to Vladimirskaya to visit the Dostoevsky Museum. Perhaps turning down the offer of an audio-guide to preserve my pennies (or should that be kopecks?) was a mistake, as explanatory signs in any language were distinctly lacking, but the pictures of St. Petersburg in Dostoevsky's time were very interesting. I have since done some research and discovered that in the corner of Sennaya Ploschad, where my local supermarket now stands, there used to be a huge church (the Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary), which was only knocked down in the 1980s. Dostoevsky's flat (fully restored in period style, though it was turned into a communal flat under Soviet rule), was also fascinating, especially the clock on his desk which stopped the day he died. While in Vladimirskaya, I also took the opportunity to go into the cathedral there, but left quickly when I realised that, it being Sunday, it was full of head-scarfed women bowing and kissing icons.

For the next week, I did very little, other than suffering from a nasty stomach bug, and doing lots of homework so that I didn't have anything to do while my family was in St. Petersburg. They came for ten days, and we spent that time seeing as much of St. Petersburg as possible and eating a lot of Italian food (after seven weeks of bland Russian cuisine, it was nice to eat something that actually tasted like food!). I have now been to the top of St. Isaac's Cathedral, visited the Yusupov Palace where Rasputin was murdered, seen the graves of Nicholas II and his family in the Peter and Paul Fortress (and of Dostoevsky and Tchaikovsky in the Tihkvin Cemetery), and marvelled at the blue mosaic interior of the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood. However, from this busy week of sightseeing, the anecdote I most want to share is from our visit to the Tihkvin Cemetery. As many of you will know, I am a cat lover, and so I was delighted to see a cat skulking outside the cemetery. When I bent to stroke it, however, I was interrupted by the woman on the gate. At first I thought that I was being discouraged from touching a stray, but then I realised that the woman was actually the cat's owner, and was showing me her two other cats, happily munching a fish dinner inside the cemetery. Pleased as I was to have some feline company, I was a little confused - who takes their cats to work with them? Especially when you work in a cemetery....

One thing that has been getting me down since the family left is Vera's constant pessimism. I honestly think that she enjoys being miserable!! Before my parents left, my dad fixed the shower curtain (the one which I pulled down in my first week here...) and it was with positive glee that she informed me last night that it had fallen down again. "I think it is bad," she told me, with a barely-concealed smirk, and then went on to lament my lack of white clothing - it apparently makes washing very difficult!! As I prefer a slightly more cheery outlook on life, I'm finding it rather difficult to avoid saying something snarky and potentially offensive in response. Or maybe she'd enjoy being offended...

Monuments, Metro Stations and a Single Mausoleum - 15 Hours in Moscow

And so another travel experience – this time with the parents. We took the overnight train to Moscow, travelling in third class on the way, and it was surprisingly comfortable, although why they decided to leave the lights on all night I will never know! The drunks running down the corridor and shouting at 4am were also not appreciated, but we did manage to snatch a few hours’ sleep before arriving in Moscow at 8am!

Miraculously, I managed to get the four of us into the centre of Moscow despite having no prior knowledge of the Metro there (a map might have been helpful, as it’s a lot bigger than the Metro in St. Petersburg, but the guidebook had not deemed it necessary to include one), and having to contend with the lack of signage in English. Reading Cyrillic characters is a lot harder under pressure, especially when your non-Russian-speaking relative (you know who you are!) insists on asking stupid questions like whether we want northbound or southbound – this is irrelevant on the Russian metro until you get to the platform! Once in sight of Red Square, we discovered that, much like St. Petersburg, nothing is open in Moscow before 10am – this is my kind of country!! So we passed some time in McDonalds (and to think this country used to be the enemy of capitalism!) and then went into the Kazan Cathedral. It was very different from its St. Petersburg equivalent, much smaller and more brightly-coloured, although not nearly as bright as Dorling Kindersley would like you to think!!

At 10 on the dot, we were in the queue (which had been forming for around an hour) for Lenin’s tomb, a red stone structure bearing a strange resemblance to the Olympic medal winners’ podium – and in fact the Russian leaders do stand on it on special occasions! The guards are very officious, insisting on all kinds of formalities, such as leaving cameras in the cloakroom, removing hats, and walking quickly past Lenin’s body. This apparent unwillingness to let you get too good of a look, along with Lenin’s waxy appearance (which the authorities insist is due to the chemicals used to embalm him) has led to rumours that the body is actually a waxwork. But, real or fake, Dead Lenin (as we respectfully nicknamed him) is an eerie sight to behold.

The rest of the day was spent sampling the delights of Moscow’s churches and department stores – the churches because we felt the need for some culture, as if we weren’t getting enough of it in St. Petersburg, and the department stores because it was so damned cold!! We also paid an extortionate sum (well, extortionate for Russia, where I’ve become accustomed to whacking out the student card and getting in безплатно) to get into the Kremlin twice. First we went into the Armoury, where I was wowed by the carriages, crowns, thrones (including a double throne for the two child kings who ruled at the same time, with a space behind for a tutor), and ambassadorial gifts, but Dad was disappointed by the lack of Faberge eggs and Andrew was downright bored! The second entrance ticket was for the Cathedral Square, and I’m sorry to say that my weekend in Novgorod has spoiled me! The cathedrals and churches were beautiful, with their onion domes and mosaic interiors, but I have to admit that they were just as beautiful in Novgorod, perhaps more so because the beauty was so unexpected.

However, Red Square as a whole is beautiful, with the red brick city walls surrounding the Kremlin set against the bright colours of St. Basil’s onion domes and the glittering Harrods-esque beauty of ГУМ. However, whoever thought that the city walls would be improved by adding glowing red stars (yes, they do light up at night) to the tops of the towers was very, very wrong. Tacky is the only word!

As for the department stores, we spent inordinate amounts of time in ГУМ (pronounced ‘goom’ if you’re Russian, and ‘gum’ if you’re my mother reading out of the guidebook), which is beautiful, inside and out. Much like Gostiny Dvor in St. Petersburg, it’s more like an exclusive shopping mall than a single store, encapsulating a confusing network of escalators, steps and balconies under a glass ceiling which lights up at night to resemble a sky full of stars. We also visited ЦУМ ('tsoom'), which was set up by Scottish entrepreneurs in 1857, so it’s a real department store with departments rather than separate shops. There we marvelled at the fur hats (most with the tails still attached – why???) and nearly fainted at the prices. But those of you who’ve been pestering me since I arrived to buy an ‘authentic’ Russian hat, the waiting is over!! It’s white rabbit fur (at least we think it’s real fur, it certainly stinks enough when it gets wet) and is of the traditional design, without the Soviet-style badges – for tourists and members of the military only – and at only 945 roubles (£20) I thought it quite bargainous!!

In the evening, we went on a mini tour of the metro, although the crowds of commuters kept us from straying too far. We did however make it to Mayakovskaya, which boasts beautiful mosaic panels in the ceiling by Deneika, depicting 'A Day in the Land of the Soviets', and Ploschad' Revolutsii, Stalin's favoutite station, full of bronze statues of the creators of the new socialist order, whose noses students rub for luck - I think we need one in Durham!! And then it was time to use the metro for a more practical purpose, to head back to Leningrad Station. The Russians are nice and helpful in naming their stations, for instance where do you think most trains from Finland Station in St. Petersburg might be headed? If you guessed Moscow, you'd be wrong - it's Finland, folks!! There's also a Moscow Station, a Baltic Station, and a Lagoda station, with trains serving the north and east of Russia (in the direction of Lake Lagoda). And so, Leningrad Station has trains to Leningrad (ie. St Petersburg). Simples!!

Second class, we discovered, is definitely more comfortable than third class, not least because we could choose whether we wanted the light to be on or off!! The journey could have been improved by not having to share our compartment with a noisy French tour party but, tired out by our long day, we didn't exactly struggle to sleep!!