Vladimir - Moscow - Petersburg

First, a word of warning, this post will have a lot of pictures. I have put them in a small format, so you can click on them and get a bigger image if you want. It is also quite long...

Our vacation began on Saturday morning with an early train on the 2 1/2 hour trip to Moscow. We arrived and headed for Leningrad Station (yeah, it's St. Petersburg, but tons of stuff is still named after Leningrad.) We rode the metro and emerged in the Komsomolskaya stop to discover ourselves dodging the beginnings of a Russian ultra-nationalist rally in honor of the weekend's "Day of National Unity", which no longer officially commemorates the October Revolution. So we got to the station and found no tickets on day trains so we bought tickets for the night train to Petersburg. With that bit of success we set off with our backpacks to kill a day in Moscow (not so hard in a city of 15 million.) Our first stop was the Novodevichy (New Maidens') Convent.



The most interesting thing about this 16th century convent is the people who are buried there. Aside from seemingly thousands of Soviet generals and other dignitaries, there are famous writers, composers, and others. The picture at the top is me in front of Khrushchev's tomb. It is divided into two parts to symbolize the nature of his period in power, which broke with the Stalinist past but could not escape from it. The other three are of Gogol (rocking a mean bowl-cut), Bulgakov, and Chekhov. It was also the site of one of those bits of randomness that life sometimes throws at you. We were standing in the cemetery looking for Khrushchev's grave. I said to Eric, "Khrushchev's gotta be around here somewhere." Someone turned around and said, "Do you know where he is?" It was Wyatt, a guy from IU who is studying in Petersburg this semester. We had been in contact and I knew he was in Moscow with his study abroad group, but we had no prayer of arranging a meeting. Then, we met a couple of the other people in his group, one of whom was from the same liberal arts college in Massachusetts that Sara is from.

After that we headed for the New Tretyakov Gallery, which is housed in a hideously wonderful Soviet style building, but houses some cool collections of modern and contemporary Russian art, some of which was really cool and some of which I didn't really "get." After that we walked through a part full of old Soviet statues that had been taken down from other places and gathered there, grabbed some dinner, and headed for the train station.

The train was a pretty good experience, we met a couple of cool people, but it was late and we were tired. I went to bed and got a decent night's sleep. We got in to Peter at about 6 and, as you might imagine, it was freezing cold. We dropped our stuff off at the hostel and went out to wander the city until noon, when we could actually check in. We stopped in a cafe for a cup of tea and realized that everyone else who was on the street at 7 am had not been to bed yet. Because the days and nights are so imbalanced, Petersburg seems to run on a schedule of its own. That said, one of the most beautiful times of day is early in the morning in the snowy grey twilight of pre-dawn. It was at this time that we walked up through Palace Square and down to the Bronze Horseman, the statue of Peter the Great that is a symbol in the city.

When we made it back to the hostel we checked in and crashed out for a couple of hours. The hostel was really nice, inexpensive, and located on Liteyniy Prospect about five minutes walk from Nevskiy Prospect. There was also a good cheap place to get shaverma (think gyros-type Mediterranean food) and a Carl's Jr. (same as Hardee's for you in the Midwest and South) across the street. This place had all the makings of paradise. We went out later to a play based on Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, but we left at the intermission because it was incredibly long, and although it was easy to follow the plot due to our knowledge of the book, it was just strange. This disappointment was compounded when we discovered that the cheap Georgian restaurant across the street was still a Georgian restaurant, but no longer one to which you could apply the word "cheap." So, we ended up at KFC instead. I know its bad to go to American restaurants abroad, but it is cheap, dependable, and plus there are no fast food places in Vladimir at all, so it was a treat. You can see for yourself the result.

When we returned to the hostel on Sunday night, we found that we had some new friends: eight British students, mostly from Oxford, who are studying in Yaroslavl and were in Petersburg for the weekend, plus a cool Australian guy who was just traveling on his own. We ended up hanging out with them quite a bit in the evenings. We also met up with a few old friends of Sara and Eric along the way.




Monday we spent walking around the city. For the most part we walked until we got cold, then went into a cafe to drink tea, warm up, and read a little. With that complete, we moved on. We visited several churches and Sara and I spent some time exploring the Yusupovsky Palace, one of the most famous and lavish of the palaces in the city. In general it was pretty uneventful, but very relaxing. Pretty much the same went for Tuesday. We tried to get into the Hermitage but it was too full and the line was not moving, so instead we visited the crusier "Avrora," which holds a big place in the haigiography of the Octobor Revolution, the anniversary of which was Tuesday.
We also visited the museum for the 900 day Siege of Leningrad, which was very small but rather interesting and full of artifacts. Lastly, while Sara went and visited the director of her study-abroad program, Eric and I hopped on the metro and headed south for a stop at a different, outdoor memorial to the Siege and Defenders of Leningrad, which was very Soviet and grandiose as you might imagine. With that, we met up with Sara at the train station and caught our night train back to Vladimir via Moscow. We slept pretty well and shared the open car with a group of students from Tatarstan, who after a few moments of shyness began to ask us tons of questions about ourselves and America. One girl even tried to teach us some phrases in the Tatar language via Russian. Sara was her star pupil: all I remember is "salaam," which means "How are you?" (I think.)
We finally arrived back in the "Big V" this morning. I for one had a great time, but there was no small amount of culture shock in going back to Petersburg, a place I know pretty well and a place where there are actually things too do that don't involve teaching English or hanging out at the American Home. That said, I am a glad to be back home, a feeling which hit me when I arrived back to my apartment and Nina Petrovna whipped up a huge bowl of pelmeni for me.