Second Part of the St. Petersburg Diaries

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St. Pete - Part Two

August 26, 1999

Hello again,

The last diary took us through our Russian dinner. That was actually through the end of our second day in St. Petersburg so you must understand that I have skipped over a lot. Most of what I skipped were just the normal parts of good travel. Sipping beer at a riverside cafe. Learning which bus would allow us to preserve our feet for museums and palaces. Walking normal streets and wondering what history had passed here over the last 200+ years. Enjoying the romantic extended evenings at this far North latitude. Fighting off purse snatchers. Well, only one and he was definitely more afraid of me than I was of him.

Anyway, on Sunday we headed toward the Palace of Catherine the Great. This was the summer retreat for the Tsarist court as they escaped the warm and muggy summer weather in Petersburg. Back then, it was an eight-hour journey by carriage and boat. Today it's a 30 minute, 13 mile trip by train. We're not talking a bullet train. Picture #9 shows Marianne by the trusty locomotive. The cars themselves were also at least sixty years old and had carried people and produce steadily each of those years.

We were going to a town named "Pushkin" after the famous Russian writer who took up residence there for a number of years. The area of palaces is called Tsarskoe Selo - The Tsar's Retreat - although during Soviet times they had filled the buildings with orphans and renamed it Doetsky Selo - Children's Retreat. In World War II, the Germans occupied the buildings and destroyed or looted everything. Pictures from the post-war era show hardly any standing walls. Starting in the 1970's, the Soviet and later the Russian governments spent huge amounts to restore the area to how it looked in the mid-1800's.

There are five major palaces at Tsarskoe Selo but we went to only one - Catherine's. Picture #10 shows the front face of this building and up close it's even larger and grander than this picture indicates. It was intended to be larger and more opulent than the French king's Versailles. Some day we will make the comparison but Catherine's Palace was impressive in any event. Inside, the rooms have been mostly reconstructed and then furnished with pieces from the mid-1800's. Many of these pieces are reputedly original items hidden for decades from the Soviets and later from the Germans. True or not, they add color and a human sense to this Russian summer "dacha" of the Tsars.

On this palace grounds there are many gardens and lesser buildings. Two very picturesque ones were along the lake created for the palace. Picture #11 is a small bungalow -- or whatever the word is in Russian. A very beautiful setting as you can see. Picture #12 is the sauna building. There was also a large bathhouse which was on an island, reached by a cable-drawn ferry boat. The sauna and bathhouse were of course quite functional in it's day since none of the palace's 400 plus rooms was a bathroom. Maybe the good old days weren't so good after all.

After an uneventful return trip on the Pushkin express, we wanted to squeeze in a boat tour between rain showers. Petersburg was built in a river delta and the old part of the city is criss-crossed with canals. The Neva River itself divides into the greater Neva and the lesser Neva and each of those parts splits in two as well. Consequently, one required tourist activity is a boat ride. There is a wide range of craft available - everything from large hydrofoils that run out the Neva into the Gulf of Finland over to Helsinki to smaller river tours to even smaller boats that combine a bit of river with a bit of canal. We took a ride in a converted lifeboat with a noisy diesel engine and a droning Russian-speaking tour guide. Her speech was as continuous and as monotonous as the engine's chug-a-chug. Picture #13 shows where we started. The setting was pretty commercial with boats and bars competing for our money but the Resurrection church as a backdrop made it a lot better.

Speaking of the Resurrection Church, it must be the most photographed place in the entire city. Picture #14 gives an interesting double image and #15 is a nice shot of the colorful - and very Russian - "onion domes". The Tsar could arrive at the church by boat and stop at a gold-encrusted entry. Our boat just passed on by but we had already been inside. The church is even more colorful on the inside with 70,000 square feet of mosaic covering every wall and ceiling. But it's the outside pictures that turned out best.

The boat went past the church and the engine and guide droned on. On a scale of 1 to 10, the boat ride was turning out to be a 5. I took over a dozen pictures but none were memorable. We could understand a bit of the Russian history explanation but only a little. The rain stayed away but cold water splashed over the boat rails while we were out in the Neva. But would I recommend making such a boat tour part of a St. Petersburg visit - absolutely yes. It was just an unique experience and gave a completely different sense of how the city must have worked when the rivers and canals were the main transportation.

Speaking of transportation, we were nearing the time to be transported to the airport. One or two more rides on the trolley bus and one last hair-raising ride with Barney and Agent and we were at the airport. This time we had an hour to tour the "domestic" terminal. It was hard to remember this was the airport of 6 million people - the second largest city in Russia. Less than a dozen flights were scheduled between 4 p.m. and airport closing several hours later. San Jose has more flights in most hours than St. Petersburg has in a day. We've learned that, in the former Soviet Union, train travel is still much more popular than planes even though the distances mean train trips are generally over night -- or even a few days.

One last picture on the way out. We flew over a Leningrad "suburb". Picture #16 gives some feel for the size of these huge "planned communities" that are reportedly a feature of any sizeable Soviet city. On Monday, we had gone to one of these areas in search of a porcelain store - a factory outlet no less. Our on-the-ground impression of that community was surprisingly positive. The architecture was pretty boring but there was considerable open space and the people seemed very "regular", just like suburbanites back home. And maybe that's one of the important insights from a trip like this. No matter how different the place, and old St. Petersburg is really quite different from either Kiev or San Jose, there's a connection possible with the normal part of any place.

Now we look forward to other cities to find the "normal" in them as well as the postcard-perfect unusual.

Stay in touch.

John and Marianne

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Originally mailed August 26, 1999. Reformatted June 4, 2001.

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