Friday, April 11, 2008
Russia, in Picture form!!!
More of my travelogue later, for now go to my Picasa site for Russia pictures. I will finish my Russia story as well as write the tale of my trip to the Baltic states soon. And some stuff about Finland probably.
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Russia day 2
That post really turned out quite long. I realize its a lot to read, but you haven't had anything to read on this blog all year, so deal with it, theres more coming.
Day 2:
On Friday I woke up fairly early to catch the free breakfast at the hotel, but given my hangover (maybe I didn't sleep quite enough), I didn't have too much of an appetite. I then returned to my room for a quick nap before the city tour continued at 10. We got on the bus, this time I was with the girl, and were on our way. We drove through the city center for about on our way to Smolny Cathedral, which was quite beautiful, here we stopped for a while for pictures. The cathedral and convent were built so that Empress Elizabeth (daughter of Peter the Great) could become a nun in her old age after she passed on leadership of the country. She never did join the convent. Today the convent buildings are used by a university as educational buildings and a few are government buildings. The cathedral itself is used as a concert hall. Smolny means tar in Russian because the cathedral and convent were built on old tar yards.
We continued on our way across the Neva, past the prison, and a couple museums to the Peter and Paul Fortress, the original building in St. Petersburg. The city was formed around this fortress. Today all the tsars of Russia and the royal family are buried under the cathedral here. the fortress is built on a tiny island of its own: hare island. We walked around the fortress a bit and the went in the cathedral. They are currently renovating a large amount of the fortress and the entire square in front of the cathedral was being re-cobbled. Most of the fortress building are now parts of one museum or another. At one point some of the walls held prisoners of the state, generally politcal prisoners. Many famous Russian artists who opposed the tsars were held in these prisons. They were terrible living conditions, tiny rooms, no window, no human contact. Many people who were imprisoned here went crazy, according to our guide.
The cathedral was pretty, but they were also doing some restoration here as well. It was built in a European style which was very strange for the people at the time. Russian churches are generally dark (few windows and dark color schemes) with lots of icons. This church however is filled with light and has much fewer icons. We saw the tombs of many of the tsars of Russia, and their families and our guide told us a few stories about some of them, which I don't remember well enough to recount. A bit after noon we were on our way again. At noon they shoot a cannon at Peter and Paul fortress, an interesting custom. We continued back across the Neva past the columns to Palace square. palace square is the HUGE square in front of the Hermitage/Winter Palace. In it is the giant Alexander column. On the top of the column is a depiction of an angel killing a snake. The column was erected to commemorate the defeat of Napoleon at the hands of Alexander I, and it is said that the angel has the face of Alexander I and the snake, the face of Napoleon. Encircling the statue was an ice rink. It was actually being taken down for the summer while we were there, so we couldn't get to the base of the pillar.
After this we had free time until the Hermitage tour at 2 o'clock. We stopped by the tourist information office and grabbed maps then the Georgia, the Italian girl, the Spanish guy (whose name I have forgotten unfortunately), and Iqbal (a Singaporean) decided to go to St. Isaac's Cathedral which we had seen briefly the night before. The rest of the Singaporeans wanted to eat and ended up at a KFC, which is what prompted us to continue on our way. By the end of the trip most of the Singaporeans had visited almost all the fast food restaurants from the US (McDonalds, Subway, KFC, Pizza Hut,...not sure why they did this).
Anyways, we continued down to the cathedral which is quite beautiful and very large. It is the third largest in Europe and the largest in Russia (if I remember right). It is built on a square that also contains a statue of a horseman which is unique because it only has two points of support. The back end of the horse is solid and the top hollow so it stays standing. The emperor was unsure that this would work so the designer said that he would lay down under the front of the horse so that if the sculpture fell he would be the first to die. This show of bravery impressed the Emperor and he allowed the statue to be erected.
There is also a palace opposite the cathedral which was built for the daughter of one of the emperors. She never lived there however because when she looked out the windows towards the cathedral she saw the horses rear-end. The history of the royal family in Russia is filled with such stories. For example Elizabeth was a notorious spender. Our guide described her as very happy and fun-loving and said she liked to party a lot, as opposed to the practical Catherine who was of German descent. It is said she refused to wear the same dress twice and by the time of her death she owned over 15000 dresses and 5000 pairs of shoes. Our guide also told us that it was said that after her death only 3 rubles were left in the Royal family coffers, but St. Petersburg was filled with wonderful palaces and churches, (plus her extensive wardrobe).
We had a choice at the cathedral to either go up to the colonnade for a view of the city (100rubles) or to tour the museum inside (170rubles). We chose to go inside, though I would have liked to go see the view of the city as well we didn't have time. A camera fee was an additional 50rubles so I have no pictures of the interior. Part of the interior (the front of the church with the altar and the only stained glass window) was under restoration unfortunately so it was blocked off and we couldn't see any of it. However there were still plenty of interesting things to see. There were a whole series of paintings of different bible scenes on all the main support columns of the cathedral plus several really neat mosaics. The stone work on the floor was also pretty cool as was the painting on the ceiling. Also, the models of the support structure of the central part of the cathedral and the dome were interesting to see. Outside, the church has huge granite columns weighing many many tons. Each column is only one piece of stone which was quite impressive.
After we saw the cathedral we started back to the Palace square for our Hermitage tour. On the way we stopped at this delicious bakery with a huge selection of fresh breads and pastries. I got a couple croissants for lunch. We met our guide at the Winter Palace and after an unexplained delay outside we went in. We had to check our coats and bags and pay extra for the right to take pictures (I chose not to pay so I have no pictures inside the Hermitage). Just to put the size of the hermitage museum in perspective: the collection includes over 3 million items. It can only display about 20% at any given time and in the 4 or 5 hours I was there I saw maybe 10-15% of what was on display, thats about 2-3% of the total collection. And most of that I didn't see as thoroughly as I would have liked.
We began our tour in the main staircase of the Winter Palace and made our way upstairs to the main floor and through a series of great halls to the throne room. The palace was huge, and elaborately and expensively decorated. It was huge. I was amazed that one family could live in a place like this and justify the expense to build it. Not to mention the family only lived here for half of the year, in the summer they moved to a different palace. However I also realized the main purpose of palaces such as this was to impress visitors (foreigners and Russians alike). This was very important in those days. If you didn't live in a palace such as this people would assume you were weak or not very powerful, so the grander your palace the more you showed people how powerful and great both you, your family, and your country were.
In the throne room we say the throne, of course, and some symbols of Russia were explained. The double headed eagle symbolizes Russia but was originally a symbol of the Byzantine empire (one head was Rome the other Constantinople). It shows how Russia is looking both east and west. The floor in this room was made from dozens of woods and exactly mimics the intricate patterns painted on the ceiling. This mirror effect was very interesting and really impressive. Even more impressive however was learning that most of what we saw was all restorations. Before World War II, the director of the Hermitage museum took the precaution of packing up and storing all the art in hidden locations, shipping most of it to Siberia and eastern Russia to protect it. In fact some of the walls were even packed up and shipped off because they had paintings on them. St. Petersburg was bombed heavily during World War II but only a couple bombs fell on the Hermitage. However the Russian winter took its toll on the building due to the broken windows (from bombs) and the fact that the building wasn't heated. Everything has been restored at great expense.
We started off in the Italian collection with early (pre-renaissance) works, noting the lack of proper perspective or sizes and also depth. We then moved through then renaissance(seeing the rise of proper perspective and the third dimension). We saw works by many famous Italian artists (including Da Vinci). We moved passed the renaissance seeing a whole bunch more. Next we saw some Spanish art including one piece I found particularly interesting which used the law of thirds (or something like that, I don't remember the exact name) to give the painting even more perspective. There was a building on the right hand side of the painting that when viewed from the right side looked to take up almost half the painting while when viewed from the left it appeared to take up less than 1/4 of the frame. This gives the illusion of actually walking past the scene in real life (as if seeing it from a window). Other than that I found that very little of the art was interesting to me. The Hermitage collection of Italian is second only to Italy and its Spanish collection second only to Spain.
Next we visited a gallery with several Rembrandts from early in his career to the end of his life. Here our guide told us his life story (in brief of course) which further confirmed to me that Russians really enjoy tragic things. Many of the stories our guide had told were rife with tragedies (in the literary sense). Rembrandt started out as a very respected and popular artist, doing many portraits for nobles, royalty, and the like. He also painted bible scenes and scenes from literature. We saw his depiction of Zeus descending as a golden shower to Danaë. This painting was once in an exhibit of all the Danaë's in the Hermitage collection and was attacked by a crazy man who cut it with a knife and threw acid on it. He was opposed to nudity in paintings and later ended up in a mental institution. At the time people wanted photographic style paintings (photography didn't exist yet). However, Rembrandt grew bored of this and wanted to do something new, to constribute something new to art that hadn't been done. He painted a portrait of one company (companies would pay artists to make a portrait of all the people working there, much like the photos of the employees all posed together later in history) in a different, less realistic style. This was far from appreciated and marked the beginningn of his decline. He spent all his money and was living in the Jewish area of Amsterdam. People didn't like his new ideas and he wasn't really respected in the art community at all. He started painting his neighbors, we saw two paintings of elderly Jewish neighbors of his. His art was not appreciated at all. He outlived his wife and son as well as his daughters (who had died before his wife), and died alone, not respected and poor. It wasn't until some time after his death that people began to respect what he had done and now he is considered one of the best painters in all of history. The Hermitage also has the final painting he did of the story of the prodigal son. It shows the son returning and being hugged by his father. Our guides interpretation was that Rembrandt painted this as if to say "I know you have hated me, and don't respect me, but I forgive you, everything is OK, everything is good, life is beautiful". He was the father and the whole world was the son which he was forgiving.
I enjoyed the paintings of Rembrandt's elderly Jewish people, because they were actually different than the things most people painted in those days: rich people, bible scenes, and scenes from Greek/Roman mythology. However, despite his extraordinary technique and skill and even an original idea or two I still found his paintings still a bit boring. I feel like nothing terribly interesting happened in art until the 1800s and the impressionists. This is a bit of a harsh statement, I know, but it generally expresses my feelings. Despite the fact that there were many artists with great talent and even some really good paintings, there was very little that can keep my interest. There was one painting in the Italian collection, I believe, that was of a market. It showed a pig at the butchers, hanging, skinned, guts cut out, and ribs showing with the market area in the background. The pig was probably almost life size on the canvas. I don't know if this was a common sight at the time, a gutted pig hanging in a public street, but it may have been pretty revolutionary for art, that was not the sort of thing people painted in my experience.
Anyway, we then went to another region of the Hermitage museum, in the New Hermitage building I think. The museum has several connected buildings, The Hermitage (Winter Palace), the new Hermitage, the Little Hermitage(a small building connecting the New and Old Hermitage) and the Hermitage theater. Here we saw impressionists and post impressionists. We started out with Renoir, Monet, and Manet and learned a bit about their style and how it originated. It started when a group of artists wanted to do something new, introduce something different to the art world. They wanted to paint something other than perfectly accurate, realistic depictions of the world. Renoir actually came up with his style of small patches of color put together to make the picture because he was poor. He could not afford very much paint so he came up with this method of putting small amounts of paint on the canvas and dotting them around. We saw various examples of these impressionists work, who got their name from the art critics of the time who were trying to insult them. They were saying, "these people can only paint the idea of what is really there, they are not good enough to paint the actual scene, they are just impressionists", however the impressionists heard about this and thought"wow, impressionists! I sort of like that title" and began using it among themselves. We saw a variety of impressionist paintings including the famous "Waterloo Bridge in Fog" by Monet. There was a painting (I believe it was by Renoir) that was entirely made up of small squares of paint, like a fairly low resolution paint mosaic almost. It was very interesting, it took the impressionists small blotches of color and added the extra element of them all being aligned in a fairly similar fashion.
Next we moved on to the post impressionists, including a fantastic collection of Picasso's, plus some Matisse and Cézanne paintings. There were easily 20 - 30 Picasso paintings and eight to ten sculptures. I really enjoyed these, his ideas on form and decomposition, or in some cases recomposition of shapes and figures is very interesting. He drew inspiration from a variety of sources, including a previous artist who started to decompose complex objects into smaller more angular or well-defined shapes. He wanted to, and did, continue this process. Another inspiration was a small statuette (wooden carving I believe) that he got as a gift from a friend who had traveled to Africa. It was designed in a very angular sort of way and he wanted to explore this idea further. It just shows that, despite its advances in realistic interpretations of nature, and people and its gains in showing perspective and depth in a painting, the Western Art world generally ignored and frowned upon any sort of abstraction or variation from photographic style painting in art. Other cultures around the world, from the aboriginals of Australia, to the Native Americans, Aztecs, Incans, and Mayans, to the cultures of Africa and Asia were much better at and more accepting of abstraction in art. It was not necessarily as important that the eagle they painted/drew/carved look exactly like the eagle they saw flying in the sky, but that it represented what that eagle stood for in the culture or mythology.
This return, or maybe advance to more abstract art was a major turning point for Western art in general. It allowed people to express new ideas, new emotions that they were unable to express before. Some people may think these expressionists and post impressionists and especially contemporary painters today don't know how to paint. They think that explains why the the person just painted little blotches of color instead of trees and flowers and sky and grass and people. I remember a Seinfeld episode in fact where Jerry's father insists that all the impressionists were just near sighted. People think Picasso couldn't paint because he though a person looked like a bunch of cubes and triangles with eyes in their forheads and there bodies rearranged. People think that contemporary artists can't paint well and thats why they cover an entire canvas with one color except one small section, or just paint vertical stripes in different colors. While it may be true in some cases that the artists had no formal training that wasn't necessarily why they painted in that style. I know for a fact, there is proof in the form of early paintings, that Picasso and Monet were both very technically competent painters and were able to replicate the paintings of great masters of the past as well as compose their own paintings is more classical styles. They decided however to do something different. Matisse for example painted things such as "Danse"(owned by Hermitage but not on display) and "La Musique"(which was on display). These paintings may at first just look like a plain blue and green background with red figures. Not very complicated or skillful, however, the emotion they express is fantastic, "Danse" is pure joy and ecstasy at being alive, it captures motion in a still frame in a way that is rarely achieved in paintings. "La Musique" is a snapshot of emotions in one moment of time, it shows creation and warmth and sadness and comfort. Picasso had cubism and his use of color and form to express emotions is fantastic. The point is that this is really interesting art, not the work of talentless nobodies who people just like because someone else said they are good. There is a reason that people say they are good, this is expressive, emotional, original, and just plain good art. It does what art should do, it interprets our reality in a way that makes us rethink ourselves, or our world, it enlightens us to new ideas, makes us think in ways we never thought before.
Anyways back to my narrative, (its my blog I am allowed to diverge on tangents at whatever length I want). Obviously, the impressionist and post impressionists had quite an impression on me (pun intended). Here our tour ended an we had free time in the museum. I went back slowly through this section on my own looking at every painting and generally enjoying this fine collection. I was growing tired at this point and wanted some fresh air as I had been in the museum for 4 or 5 hours so I started to make my way outside. This is significantly harder than it sounds due to the immense size of the museum. I eventually found my to the coat check, picked up my belongings and went out. I walked across Palace Square towards the Church of Our Savior on Spilled Blood, to get some pictures and walk around it in the daylight this time. The day had been fairly warm and we had been blessed with one of the rare sunny days (there were still plenty of clouds but every now and then the sun poked through (not sure if this counts as a "day of sun or not") in St. Petersburg, but by this point it was growing a little cooler as the day moved into evening. I walked the few blocks to the church along one of the waterways (not sure if it was a canal or river). I passed several interesting little bridges. Finally I arrived at the church. It is truly beautiful. I really enjoy the colorful onion shaped Russian domes. I walked along the river that the church is located on for a little ways, past numerous cafés and plenty of Russians going about their daily business. There was a neat little pedestrian bridge where a man was painting the cathedral, it looked quite good. I saw him again the next day starting over with a fresh canvas. I made my way along the canal to Nevsky Prospekt once my camera died (before I had time to finish taking pictures at the church). I told myself I would come back next time we had free time. The canal runs into Nevsky Prospekt right where another cathedral, the Kazan Cathedral, stands. I made my way a little ways up the Prospekt, a very busy road with cars, transit and tons of pedestrians, to the metro station.
Here I descended into the metro after paying the 14ruble(about 40eurocent) which is super cheap and it gets you into the underground. After you are in you can ride as many times as you want on as many different lines as you want. The St. Petersburg metro is the deepest in the world, it certainly was a lot deeper and larger than Helsinki's, and its about a 2-3 minute escalator ride to the bottom. The metro was crowded with a constant stream of people going in and out. You wait no more than 2 minutes for any given train at this time of day. St. Petersburg has 6 metro lines crisscrossing the center and extending under the Neva(which I think may be part of the reason for the great depth of the metro) to some of the suburbs. There were literally thousands of people at the station and yet everything moved efficiently and you didn't have to shove your way through crowds, you just walked with the flow of people. Initially I took the wrong line but in the righ5t general direction(everything was in the Cyrillic alphabet and was Russian so it was hard to figure out initially). I figured out my mistake at the next station and transferred to a different line(down another (shorter) escalator on a different level of the station) and made my way to the hotel. I came up from the metro to where the station exits on to the street directly next to my hotel. I went up to my room to recharge my battery and take a small siesta.
Once in my room I plugged my camera battery charger in and took a short nap, and woke up a little while later to get dinner. the singaporeans had already eaten and the Italian and Spaniard had gone to an optional Russian dinner which I had chosen to skip. It was a 3 course meal with drinks for 20euro at a restaurant reserved specially for the our. I went and got a beef sandwich with tomato and lettuce from a little kiosk that had a 24 hour beer stand/convenience shop and a small cafe along with a flower shop. I also picked up a different beer, this time a fairly standard lager (from the danish company Tuborg) it was decent, notthing extraordinary but not bad. The sandwich was pretty good and fairly cheap: 60 or 80 Rubles. I rejoined with the Singaporeans in my room and ate my sandwich and drank my beer. This night we were all fairly tired and so we stayed up talking for a while(maybe 12 or 1 local time) before hitting the sack.
Thats all for day 2 in Russia, stay tuned for days 3 and 4, and also my trip to Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius. I am leaving tomorrow morning. We have an easter holiday from Thursday Mar. 20-Wednesday Mar. 26. I am going with a roommate of Meya's, Alberto, from Spain as well as a friend of his Jordi (also from Spain) and Jordi's roommate Simon (from Hong Kong, his official name isn't Simon, but thats what he goes by). I met Jordi and Simon at our planning session last night, but I knew Alberto alright before hand. We are taking the ferry to Tallinn where we have a car reserved (Citroën C4 I believe) which we will drive to Riga(largest city in the Baltic states and capital of Latvia). We are staying in Riga 2 nights then driving to Vilnius(Capital of Lithuania). We will stay here for either 1 or 2 nights depending on if we go to Kaunas as well then will drive back to Tallinn to return our car and spend one more night, then take the ferry back the next evening . Should be a good trip, but it will postpone me getting pictures up since I would like to caption all my pictures before I upload them. I may try getting started tonight, we will see. Also it may delay my thrilling account of my trip to Russia, but when I return rest assured the saga will be completed and the next in the series "The Great Baltic States Tour" will begin. Oh yeah, and sooner or later I will get around to writing a thing or two about Helsinki.
Day 2:
On Friday I woke up fairly early to catch the free breakfast at the hotel, but given my hangover (maybe I didn't sleep quite enough), I didn't have too much of an appetite. I then returned to my room for a quick nap before the city tour continued at 10. We got on the bus, this time I was with the girl, and were on our way. We drove through the city center for about on our way to Smolny Cathedral, which was quite beautiful, here we stopped for a while for pictures. The cathedral and convent were built so that Empress Elizabeth (daughter of Peter the Great) could become a nun in her old age after she passed on leadership of the country. She never did join the convent. Today the convent buildings are used by a university as educational buildings and a few are government buildings. The cathedral itself is used as a concert hall. Smolny means tar in Russian because the cathedral and convent were built on old tar yards.
We continued on our way across the Neva, past the prison, and a couple museums to the Peter and Paul Fortress, the original building in St. Petersburg. The city was formed around this fortress. Today all the tsars of Russia and the royal family are buried under the cathedral here. the fortress is built on a tiny island of its own: hare island. We walked around the fortress a bit and the went in the cathedral. They are currently renovating a large amount of the fortress and the entire square in front of the cathedral was being re-cobbled. Most of the fortress building are now parts of one museum or another. At one point some of the walls held prisoners of the state, generally politcal prisoners. Many famous Russian artists who opposed the tsars were held in these prisons. They were terrible living conditions, tiny rooms, no window, no human contact. Many people who were imprisoned here went crazy, according to our guide.
The cathedral was pretty, but they were also doing some restoration here as well. It was built in a European style which was very strange for the people at the time. Russian churches are generally dark (few windows and dark color schemes) with lots of icons. This church however is filled with light and has much fewer icons. We saw the tombs of many of the tsars of Russia, and their families and our guide told us a few stories about some of them, which I don't remember well enough to recount. A bit after noon we were on our way again. At noon they shoot a cannon at Peter and Paul fortress, an interesting custom. We continued back across the Neva past the columns to Palace square. palace square is the HUGE square in front of the Hermitage/Winter Palace. In it is the giant Alexander column. On the top of the column is a depiction of an angel killing a snake. The column was erected to commemorate the defeat of Napoleon at the hands of Alexander I, and it is said that the angel has the face of Alexander I and the snake, the face of Napoleon. Encircling the statue was an ice rink. It was actually being taken down for the summer while we were there, so we couldn't get to the base of the pillar.
After this we had free time until the Hermitage tour at 2 o'clock. We stopped by the tourist information office and grabbed maps then the Georgia, the Italian girl, the Spanish guy (whose name I have forgotten unfortunately), and Iqbal (a Singaporean) decided to go to St. Isaac's Cathedral which we had seen briefly the night before. The rest of the Singaporeans wanted to eat and ended up at a KFC, which is what prompted us to continue on our way. By the end of the trip most of the Singaporeans had visited almost all the fast food restaurants from the US (McDonalds, Subway, KFC, Pizza Hut,...not sure why they did this).
Anyways, we continued down to the cathedral which is quite beautiful and very large. It is the third largest in Europe and the largest in Russia (if I remember right). It is built on a square that also contains a statue of a horseman which is unique because it only has two points of support. The back end of the horse is solid and the top hollow so it stays standing. The emperor was unsure that this would work so the designer said that he would lay down under the front of the horse so that if the sculpture fell he would be the first to die. This show of bravery impressed the Emperor and he allowed the statue to be erected.
There is also a palace opposite the cathedral which was built for the daughter of one of the emperors. She never lived there however because when she looked out the windows towards the cathedral she saw the horses rear-end. The history of the royal family in Russia is filled with such stories. For example Elizabeth was a notorious spender. Our guide described her as very happy and fun-loving and said she liked to party a lot, as opposed to the practical Catherine who was of German descent. It is said she refused to wear the same dress twice and by the time of her death she owned over 15000 dresses and 5000 pairs of shoes. Our guide also told us that it was said that after her death only 3 rubles were left in the Royal family coffers, but St. Petersburg was filled with wonderful palaces and churches, (plus her extensive wardrobe).
We had a choice at the cathedral to either go up to the colonnade for a view of the city (100rubles) or to tour the museum inside (170rubles). We chose to go inside, though I would have liked to go see the view of the city as well we didn't have time. A camera fee was an additional 50rubles so I have no pictures of the interior. Part of the interior (the front of the church with the altar and the only stained glass window) was under restoration unfortunately so it was blocked off and we couldn't see any of it. However there were still plenty of interesting things to see. There were a whole series of paintings of different bible scenes on all the main support columns of the cathedral plus several really neat mosaics. The stone work on the floor was also pretty cool as was the painting on the ceiling. Also, the models of the support structure of the central part of the cathedral and the dome were interesting to see. Outside, the church has huge granite columns weighing many many tons. Each column is only one piece of stone which was quite impressive.
After we saw the cathedral we started back to the Palace square for our Hermitage tour. On the way we stopped at this delicious bakery with a huge selection of fresh breads and pastries. I got a couple croissants for lunch. We met our guide at the Winter Palace and after an unexplained delay outside we went in. We had to check our coats and bags and pay extra for the right to take pictures (I chose not to pay so I have no pictures inside the Hermitage). Just to put the size of the hermitage museum in perspective: the collection includes over 3 million items. It can only display about 20% at any given time and in the 4 or 5 hours I was there I saw maybe 10-15% of what was on display, thats about 2-3% of the total collection. And most of that I didn't see as thoroughly as I would have liked.
We began our tour in the main staircase of the Winter Palace and made our way upstairs to the main floor and through a series of great halls to the throne room. The palace was huge, and elaborately and expensively decorated. It was huge. I was amazed that one family could live in a place like this and justify the expense to build it. Not to mention the family only lived here for half of the year, in the summer they moved to a different palace. However I also realized the main purpose of palaces such as this was to impress visitors (foreigners and Russians alike). This was very important in those days. If you didn't live in a palace such as this people would assume you were weak or not very powerful, so the grander your palace the more you showed people how powerful and great both you, your family, and your country were.
In the throne room we say the throne, of course, and some symbols of Russia were explained. The double headed eagle symbolizes Russia but was originally a symbol of the Byzantine empire (one head was Rome the other Constantinople). It shows how Russia is looking both east and west. The floor in this room was made from dozens of woods and exactly mimics the intricate patterns painted on the ceiling. This mirror effect was very interesting and really impressive. Even more impressive however was learning that most of what we saw was all restorations. Before World War II, the director of the Hermitage museum took the precaution of packing up and storing all the art in hidden locations, shipping most of it to Siberia and eastern Russia to protect it. In fact some of the walls were even packed up and shipped off because they had paintings on them. St. Petersburg was bombed heavily during World War II but only a couple bombs fell on the Hermitage. However the Russian winter took its toll on the building due to the broken windows (from bombs) and the fact that the building wasn't heated. Everything has been restored at great expense.
We started off in the Italian collection with early (pre-renaissance) works, noting the lack of proper perspective or sizes and also depth. We then moved through then renaissance(seeing the rise of proper perspective and the third dimension). We saw works by many famous Italian artists (including Da Vinci). We moved passed the renaissance seeing a whole bunch more. Next we saw some Spanish art including one piece I found particularly interesting which used the law of thirds (or something like that, I don't remember the exact name) to give the painting even more perspective. There was a building on the right hand side of the painting that when viewed from the right side looked to take up almost half the painting while when viewed from the left it appeared to take up less than 1/4 of the frame. This gives the illusion of actually walking past the scene in real life (as if seeing it from a window). Other than that I found that very little of the art was interesting to me. The Hermitage collection of Italian is second only to Italy and its Spanish collection second only to Spain.
Next we visited a gallery with several Rembrandts from early in his career to the end of his life. Here our guide told us his life story (in brief of course) which further confirmed to me that Russians really enjoy tragic things. Many of the stories our guide had told were rife with tragedies (in the literary sense). Rembrandt started out as a very respected and popular artist, doing many portraits for nobles, royalty, and the like. He also painted bible scenes and scenes from literature. We saw his depiction of Zeus descending as a golden shower to Danaë. This painting was once in an exhibit of all the Danaë's in the Hermitage collection and was attacked by a crazy man who cut it with a knife and threw acid on it. He was opposed to nudity in paintings and later ended up in a mental institution. At the time people wanted photographic style paintings (photography didn't exist yet). However, Rembrandt grew bored of this and wanted to do something new, to constribute something new to art that hadn't been done. He painted a portrait of one company (companies would pay artists to make a portrait of all the people working there, much like the photos of the employees all posed together later in history) in a different, less realistic style. This was far from appreciated and marked the beginningn of his decline. He spent all his money and was living in the Jewish area of Amsterdam. People didn't like his new ideas and he wasn't really respected in the art community at all. He started painting his neighbors, we saw two paintings of elderly Jewish neighbors of his. His art was not appreciated at all. He outlived his wife and son as well as his daughters (who had died before his wife), and died alone, not respected and poor. It wasn't until some time after his death that people began to respect what he had done and now he is considered one of the best painters in all of history. The Hermitage also has the final painting he did of the story of the prodigal son. It shows the son returning and being hugged by his father. Our guides interpretation was that Rembrandt painted this as if to say "I know you have hated me, and don't respect me, but I forgive you, everything is OK, everything is good, life is beautiful". He was the father and the whole world was the son which he was forgiving.
I enjoyed the paintings of Rembrandt's elderly Jewish people, because they were actually different than the things most people painted in those days: rich people, bible scenes, and scenes from Greek/Roman mythology. However, despite his extraordinary technique and skill and even an original idea or two I still found his paintings still a bit boring. I feel like nothing terribly interesting happened in art until the 1800s and the impressionists. This is a bit of a harsh statement, I know, but it generally expresses my feelings. Despite the fact that there were many artists with great talent and even some really good paintings, there was very little that can keep my interest. There was one painting in the Italian collection, I believe, that was of a market. It showed a pig at the butchers, hanging, skinned, guts cut out, and ribs showing with the market area in the background. The pig was probably almost life size on the canvas. I don't know if this was a common sight at the time, a gutted pig hanging in a public street, but it may have been pretty revolutionary for art, that was not the sort of thing people painted in my experience.
Anyway, we then went to another region of the Hermitage museum, in the New Hermitage building I think. The museum has several connected buildings, The Hermitage (Winter Palace), the new Hermitage, the Little Hermitage(a small building connecting the New and Old Hermitage) and the Hermitage theater. Here we saw impressionists and post impressionists. We started out with Renoir, Monet, and Manet and learned a bit about their style and how it originated. It started when a group of artists wanted to do something new, introduce something different to the art world. They wanted to paint something other than perfectly accurate, realistic depictions of the world. Renoir actually came up with his style of small patches of color put together to make the picture because he was poor. He could not afford very much paint so he came up with this method of putting small amounts of paint on the canvas and dotting them around. We saw various examples of these impressionists work, who got their name from the art critics of the time who were trying to insult them. They were saying, "these people can only paint the idea of what is really there, they are not good enough to paint the actual scene, they are just impressionists", however the impressionists heard about this and thought"wow, impressionists! I sort of like that title" and began using it among themselves. We saw a variety of impressionist paintings including the famous "Waterloo Bridge in Fog" by Monet. There was a painting (I believe it was by Renoir) that was entirely made up of small squares of paint, like a fairly low resolution paint mosaic almost. It was very interesting, it took the impressionists small blotches of color and added the extra element of them all being aligned in a fairly similar fashion.
Next we moved on to the post impressionists, including a fantastic collection of Picasso's, plus some Matisse and Cézanne paintings. There were easily 20 - 30 Picasso paintings and eight to ten sculptures. I really enjoyed these, his ideas on form and decomposition, or in some cases recomposition of shapes and figures is very interesting. He drew inspiration from a variety of sources, including a previous artist who started to decompose complex objects into smaller more angular or well-defined shapes. He wanted to, and did, continue this process. Another inspiration was a small statuette (wooden carving I believe) that he got as a gift from a friend who had traveled to Africa. It was designed in a very angular sort of way and he wanted to explore this idea further. It just shows that, despite its advances in realistic interpretations of nature, and people and its gains in showing perspective and depth in a painting, the Western Art world generally ignored and frowned upon any sort of abstraction or variation from photographic style painting in art. Other cultures around the world, from the aboriginals of Australia, to the Native Americans, Aztecs, Incans, and Mayans, to the cultures of Africa and Asia were much better at and more accepting of abstraction in art. It was not necessarily as important that the eagle they painted/drew/carved look exactly like the eagle they saw flying in the sky, but that it represented what that eagle stood for in the culture or mythology.
This return, or maybe advance to more abstract art was a major turning point for Western art in general. It allowed people to express new ideas, new emotions that they were unable to express before. Some people may think these expressionists and post impressionists and especially contemporary painters today don't know how to paint. They think that explains why the the person just painted little blotches of color instead of trees and flowers and sky and grass and people. I remember a Seinfeld episode in fact where Jerry's father insists that all the impressionists were just near sighted. People think Picasso couldn't paint because he though a person looked like a bunch of cubes and triangles with eyes in their forheads and there bodies rearranged. People think that contemporary artists can't paint well and thats why they cover an entire canvas with one color except one small section, or just paint vertical stripes in different colors. While it may be true in some cases that the artists had no formal training that wasn't necessarily why they painted in that style. I know for a fact, there is proof in the form of early paintings, that Picasso and Monet were both very technically competent painters and were able to replicate the paintings of great masters of the past as well as compose their own paintings is more classical styles. They decided however to do something different. Matisse for example painted things such as "Danse"(owned by Hermitage but not on display) and "La Musique"(which was on display). These paintings may at first just look like a plain blue and green background with red figures. Not very complicated or skillful, however, the emotion they express is fantastic, "Danse" is pure joy and ecstasy at being alive, it captures motion in a still frame in a way that is rarely achieved in paintings. "La Musique" is a snapshot of emotions in one moment of time, it shows creation and warmth and sadness and comfort. Picasso had cubism and his use of color and form to express emotions is fantastic. The point is that this is really interesting art, not the work of talentless nobodies who people just like because someone else said they are good. There is a reason that people say they are good, this is expressive, emotional, original, and just plain good art. It does what art should do, it interprets our reality in a way that makes us rethink ourselves, or our world, it enlightens us to new ideas, makes us think in ways we never thought before.
Anyways back to my narrative, (its my blog I am allowed to diverge on tangents at whatever length I want). Obviously, the impressionist and post impressionists had quite an impression on me (pun intended). Here our tour ended an we had free time in the museum. I went back slowly through this section on my own looking at every painting and generally enjoying this fine collection. I was growing tired at this point and wanted some fresh air as I had been in the museum for 4 or 5 hours so I started to make my way outside. This is significantly harder than it sounds due to the immense size of the museum. I eventually found my to the coat check, picked up my belongings and went out. I walked across Palace Square towards the Church of Our Savior on Spilled Blood, to get some pictures and walk around it in the daylight this time. The day had been fairly warm and we had been blessed with one of the rare sunny days (there were still plenty of clouds but every now and then the sun poked through (not sure if this counts as a "day of sun or not") in St. Petersburg, but by this point it was growing a little cooler as the day moved into evening. I walked the few blocks to the church along one of the waterways (not sure if it was a canal or river). I passed several interesting little bridges. Finally I arrived at the church. It is truly beautiful. I really enjoy the colorful onion shaped Russian domes. I walked along the river that the church is located on for a little ways, past numerous cafés and plenty of Russians going about their daily business. There was a neat little pedestrian bridge where a man was painting the cathedral, it looked quite good. I saw him again the next day starting over with a fresh canvas. I made my way along the canal to Nevsky Prospekt once my camera died (before I had time to finish taking pictures at the church). I told myself I would come back next time we had free time. The canal runs into Nevsky Prospekt right where another cathedral, the Kazan Cathedral, stands. I made my way a little ways up the Prospekt, a very busy road with cars, transit and tons of pedestrians, to the metro station.
Here I descended into the metro after paying the 14ruble(about 40eurocent) which is super cheap and it gets you into the underground. After you are in you can ride as many times as you want on as many different lines as you want. The St. Petersburg metro is the deepest in the world, it certainly was a lot deeper and larger than Helsinki's, and its about a 2-3 minute escalator ride to the bottom. The metro was crowded with a constant stream of people going in and out. You wait no more than 2 minutes for any given train at this time of day. St. Petersburg has 6 metro lines crisscrossing the center and extending under the Neva(which I think may be part of the reason for the great depth of the metro) to some of the suburbs. There were literally thousands of people at the station and yet everything moved efficiently and you didn't have to shove your way through crowds, you just walked with the flow of people. Initially I took the wrong line but in the righ5t general direction(everything was in the Cyrillic alphabet and was Russian so it was hard to figure out initially). I figured out my mistake at the next station and transferred to a different line(down another (shorter) escalator on a different level of the station) and made my way to the hotel. I came up from the metro to where the station exits on to the street directly next to my hotel. I went up to my room to recharge my battery and take a small siesta.
Once in my room I plugged my camera battery charger in and took a short nap, and woke up a little while later to get dinner. the singaporeans had already eaten and the Italian and Spaniard had gone to an optional Russian dinner which I had chosen to skip. It was a 3 course meal with drinks for 20euro at a restaurant reserved specially for the our. I went and got a beef sandwich with tomato and lettuce from a little kiosk that had a 24 hour beer stand/convenience shop and a small cafe along with a flower shop. I also picked up a different beer, this time a fairly standard lager (from the danish company Tuborg) it was decent, notthing extraordinary but not bad. The sandwich was pretty good and fairly cheap: 60 or 80 Rubles. I rejoined with the Singaporeans in my room and ate my sandwich and drank my beer. This night we were all fairly tired and so we stayed up talking for a while(maybe 12 or 1 local time) before hitting the sack.
Thats all for day 2 in Russia, stay tuned for days 3 and 4, and also my trip to Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius. I am leaving tomorrow morning. We have an easter holiday from Thursday Mar. 20-Wednesday Mar. 26. I am going with a roommate of Meya's, Alberto, from Spain as well as a friend of his Jordi (also from Spain) and Jordi's roommate Simon (from Hong Kong, his official name isn't Simon, but thats what he goes by). I met Jordi and Simon at our planning session last night, but I knew Alberto alright before hand. We are taking the ferry to Tallinn where we have a car reserved (Citroën C4 I believe) which we will drive to Riga(largest city in the Baltic states and capital of Latvia). We are staying in Riga 2 nights then driving to Vilnius(Capital of Lithuania). We will stay here for either 1 or 2 nights depending on if we go to Kaunas as well then will drive back to Tallinn to return our car and spend one more night, then take the ferry back the next evening . Should be a good trip, but it will postpone me getting pictures up since I would like to caption all my pictures before I upload them. I may try getting started tonight, we will see. Also it may delay my thrilling account of my trip to Russia, but when I return rest assured the saga will be completed and the next in the series "The Great Baltic States Tour" will begin. Oh yeah, and sooner or later I will get around to writing a thing or two about Helsinki.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
OK, so... Russia!!!!
I realize I haven't really posted anything on this blog like I had intended, so I am going to try to start posting at least semi-regularly now. To start I will give a short description of my recent trip to Russia. Please look at my photo account for pictures. I will post Russia ones soon, in the meantime get some idea of what I have been doing from the Finland ones (and their captions).
This past weekend I spent a long weekend in St. Petersburg. We left early Thursday morning and came back late Sunday night. The bus left to cloudy and slightly drizzly weather. We soon left the city and were driving through the Finnish country side. It was pretty, mostly forest and gentle hills and the rock outcroppings I have grown accustomed to here in southern Finland. The bedrock here is some of the highest in the world, and often pokes through the ground. Here and there there are breaks in the forest for small valleys containing small farms and fields. The fields were generally brown or covered with a thin layer of snow so they were kind of sad, but spring is coming soon enough. We drove for a couple hours through this sort of country side, I stayed alert for the most part but drifted in and out of that strange state between sleep and consciousness.
Eventually around 10:30 or so we neared the border and stopped for gas and a short break. Then we continued on to start the border formalities. We each filled out a small 'immigration card' for the Russian side of things, I don't know why they needed it as it had no information that we didn't already give them when applying for the visa. We passed through Finnish customs quickly and easily, there were 3 or 4 lines open so after a quick passport check and stamp we were on our way. We were now in the no-man's land. After a minute or so the bus had to stop so a Russian police man (or maybe military, I am not sure) could come on board and make sure everyone had a passport/visa/immigration card. We then proceeded to the customs point. It was slow and inefficient compared to the Finnish side. And the building was older, imposing and not definitely not welcoming. There was only one line so it took quite a while to get the entire bus load through (50+ people). After they took half the immigration card (there were two identical parts) and stamped or passports we continued on our way. One more boarding by a Russian official to make sure everyone had a stamped passport and we were finally in Russia.
The first thing I noticed was that the road seemed to be in much worse shape than the Finnish side. I told myself I was probably imagining it, but it turned out it was true. Several small gas stations and cafés alo)ng the sido of the road provided our first (after the customs check, of course) introduction to the Cyrillic alphabet. The road got worse when we turned off the highway to stop in the small town of Vyborg. We crossed a huge bridge over an inlet of the Gulf of Finland (itself a spur of the Baltic) where Vyborg is located. I saw some small houses across the water first and then a large castle built on an island. It was quite imposing, built strictly for defense but still oddly beautiful in its own way. we then entered the main part of the town and stopped for a quick lunch break. I wasn't too hungry so I didn't eat but walked around the little square in front of the railway station. Most of the buildings were in pretty bad shape but some looked like they may have been nice once. The main part of the town may be a little prettier in another season (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vyborg). But my impression of it was pretty negative, though not quite as bad a some peoples. We didn't really have time to explore anything though, so I didn't get a feel for anything other than the dingy gas station/convenience store/café where we had stopped. My impression may be a little biased, I would like to go back some time in the summer and see the town a little better, to give it a fair shot. We continued on a road out of town past decrepit soviet era buildings, abandoned places with broken windows and crumbling brick, and I could hear rumblings from some of the Europeans around me ("Even the worst places in the EU are better than this"). I think this was probably the worst part of the town and we didn't get to see any part that made the town worthwhile. The roads here were pretty bad with potholes and bumps everywhere. But after we got back on the main highway the roads improved significantly, especially as we neared St. Petersburg.
I am not sure when our tour guide got on the bus but at some point she did. As we entered St. Petersburg she introduced herself, went over the itinerary and pointed out a few places of interest along the way. She was the sister of the owner of our travel company (Bair from Bair Travels). She said her father was originally from eastern Russia near Mongolia and moved to St. Petersburg to study, where he met her mother ("A pure Russian, blond hair, blue eyes"). She told us this to explain her slightly Asian features. Whatever the reason, she was quite pretty. The travel company is a family affair for the most part. Her brother (the owner), her sister, and her all worked for it. She is studying to be a fashion designer like her other sister however. They grew up in St. Petersburg and you could tell she really loved her city even if she made a few jokes about it. She said that St. Petersburg gets only 30 days of sun a year (as much as I enjoy the rain and snow, that sounds really depressing for a Colorado native like me). We drove through traffic for a while(apparently its pretty bad in St. Petersburg) and eventually found ourselves driving along the Neva river, the main river that St. Petersburg is built on and the reason for its existence. St. Petersburg was built on a bunch of islands at the mouth of the Neva river as a trading area and port to serve the interior of Russia. The Neva is still an active river today and carries goods in and out of Russia during the summer. All the bridges over the Neva are draw bridges and in the summer (when the river is not frozen and impassable by boats) they all go up at night. So if you are in St. Petersburg in the summer you have to be careful not to get stuck somewhere at night as there is no connection between different islands separated by the Neva.
St. Petersburg is situated on some 40-something islands (if I remember correctly) but was originally (before some artificial raising of land and filling in of small tributaries and canals) on over 100 islands. As a result St. Petersburg is built around its bodies of water and has many bridges (many of which are quite beautiful). We made our way around the right bank of the Neva and the crossed the bridge to our hotel on the main island right near the city center.
Our hotel (Hotel Moscow) was right next to the Neva river and at the end of Nevsky Prospekt, the main thoroughfare of the city center, which spans the main island. Our guide said that large streets in Russia are called Prospekt (from the word prospective) because of the way large strait streets appear to get smaller in the distance thus demonstrating the law of perspective. Our hotel is one of the so called "Soviet Giants", huge hotels made to hold hundreds of guests. Our hotel was 8 stories, 5 stories of which had rooms. Each floor had several hundred rooms (at least 200/floor) the ground floor had several restaurants, the main desk/lobby, a rental car place, and offices. The eighth floor was a restaurant.
Here we checked in and got our rooms. In Russia most hotels take your passports and immigration cards (the part we kept) and give you a temporary paper that would serve as proof that you are there legally for the duration of your stay. This is for the convenience of the traveler. If your passport got stolen or lost it would be a huge problem to sort out, so this way problems like this are avoided. I was sharing a room with Meya, a Singaporean going to TKK who is in my tutor group. We had free time until 8 that evening so we exchanged money (about 36 rubles/ euro) and went walking up and down Nevsky Prospekt a little ways to find a place for dinner. i went with Meya and several other Singaporeans(3 girls, 3 guys) plus an Italian girl and a Spanish guy we met on the bus.
My first impression was that the streets were fairly dirty, but I didn't really mind all that much. Additionally, signs were difficult to read as the were in the Cyrillic alphabet. Cyrillic is rather strange for someone used to the Roman characters because letters that look familiar produce a completely different sound. (More on this later, in the meantime for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_alphabet, scroll to the bottom for what sound each letter makes)I also noticed that much of their transit vehicles (buses/trams) were fairly old. There were often trams, electric buses and diesel buses on the same street, which I thought was kind of odd. We ended up at some Russian fast food place that served baked potatoes and sandwiches and soup. After a lot of pointing and gesturing we managed to order. I had a chicken sandwich, it was mediocre, but I wasn't expecting too much. The baked potato another guy got looked pretty good though, I should have ordered one of those instead.
Afterwards we made our way back to the hotel for a night tour of St. Petersburg by bus. We drove out, this time I was with a different tour guide (but he was very serious and we didn't enjoy him as much so for the rest of the trip we made sure to get in the tour group with Bair's sister (I seem to have forgotten her name). We drove along the Neva a little ways to see the skyline of St. Petersburg from the other side of the river. I'm not sure you can really call it a skyline as all the buildings are quite small. This is a result of a former law that stated that no building could be taller than the Winter Palace (the residence of the royal family). This law is not in effect anymore but the Soviets did not break it too much and even today there isn't a building taller than 10 or so stories in the center. Gazprom, the giant Russian gas company is soon going to change this despite protest from many people in St. Petersburg. They are building a huge skyscraper in the center (300m tall, despite a law prohibiting buildings taller than 48m). Other than a few Soviet era buildings every building in St. Petersburg is also built in an old style (18th century or so) because of a law prohibiting buildings built with modern facades.
We saw the Smolny cathedral, drove past numerous churches and museums and a railway station. We stopped at St. Isaac's cathedral where we could see an interesting statue with only two points of support and a palace. We stopped at Rostral columns. Here we took some pictures and were able to see a great view of the city center (Especially the Hermitage museum), and Peter and Paul Fortress. We also drove past a large prison (which is right near the city center but used to be at the edge of town, before the city grew around it, it is still in use as a jail today). We made our way to The Church of Our Savior on Spilled Blood, a beautiful Russian style church built on the site where Alexander II was killed(hence the name). And finally we stopped at the square of arts (right near the club district so people could go out if they wanted. We chose to carry on back to the hotel and make a party of our own in our room. Meya got some vodka, and I picked up a beer (a delicious Russian porter) and we headed back to our room. The Singaporeans and I all hung out in our room and played Kings Cup and poker. We played poker for drinks, since we had no chips, but we didn't really have the rules figured out to well on who should drink when and how betting should work, so we soon changed games. I taught everyone Kings Cup and we played that.
Thats it for Thurday in Russia. This post is already really long so I will stop there for now. Look for the rest of the days in the near future as well as posts about Finland. I will try to fill in some of my story from January until now. In the meantime you can get some idea by looking at the picasa account. Also look for my Russia photos to start appearing there as well. I will try to post some of them into this blog at appropriate places as well.
This past weekend I spent a long weekend in St. Petersburg. We left early Thursday morning and came back late Sunday night. The bus left to cloudy and slightly drizzly weather. We soon left the city and were driving through the Finnish country side. It was pretty, mostly forest and gentle hills and the rock outcroppings I have grown accustomed to here in southern Finland. The bedrock here is some of the highest in the world, and often pokes through the ground. Here and there there are breaks in the forest for small valleys containing small farms and fields. The fields were generally brown or covered with a thin layer of snow so they were kind of sad, but spring is coming soon enough. We drove for a couple hours through this sort of country side, I stayed alert for the most part but drifted in and out of that strange state between sleep and consciousness.
Eventually around 10:30 or so we neared the border and stopped for gas and a short break. Then we continued on to start the border formalities. We each filled out a small 'immigration card' for the Russian side of things, I don't know why they needed it as it had no information that we didn't already give them when applying for the visa. We passed through Finnish customs quickly and easily, there were 3 or 4 lines open so after a quick passport check and stamp we were on our way. We were now in the no-man's land. After a minute or so the bus had to stop so a Russian police man (or maybe military, I am not sure) could come on board and make sure everyone had a passport/visa/immigration card. We then proceeded to the customs point. It was slow and inefficient compared to the Finnish side. And the building was older, imposing and not definitely not welcoming. There was only one line so it took quite a while to get the entire bus load through (50+ people). After they took half the immigration card (there were two identical parts) and stamped or passports we continued on our way. One more boarding by a Russian official to make sure everyone had a stamped passport and we were finally in Russia.
The first thing I noticed was that the road seemed to be in much worse shape than the Finnish side. I told myself I was probably imagining it, but it turned out it was true. Several small gas stations and cafés alo)ng the sido of the road provided our first (after the customs check, of course) introduction to the Cyrillic alphabet. The road got worse when we turned off the highway to stop in the small town of Vyborg. We crossed a huge bridge over an inlet of the Gulf of Finland (itself a spur of the Baltic) where Vyborg is located. I saw some small houses across the water first and then a large castle built on an island. It was quite imposing, built strictly for defense but still oddly beautiful in its own way. we then entered the main part of the town and stopped for a quick lunch break. I wasn't too hungry so I didn't eat but walked around the little square in front of the railway station. Most of the buildings were in pretty bad shape but some looked like they may have been nice once. The main part of the town may be a little prettier in another season (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vyborg). But my impression of it was pretty negative, though not quite as bad a some peoples. We didn't really have time to explore anything though, so I didn't get a feel for anything other than the dingy gas station/convenience store/café where we had stopped. My impression may be a little biased, I would like to go back some time in the summer and see the town a little better, to give it a fair shot. We continued on a road out of town past decrepit soviet era buildings, abandoned places with broken windows and crumbling brick, and I could hear rumblings from some of the Europeans around me ("Even the worst places in the EU are better than this"). I think this was probably the worst part of the town and we didn't get to see any part that made the town worthwhile. The roads here were pretty bad with potholes and bumps everywhere. But after we got back on the main highway the roads improved significantly, especially as we neared St. Petersburg.
I am not sure when our tour guide got on the bus but at some point she did. As we entered St. Petersburg she introduced herself, went over the itinerary and pointed out a few places of interest along the way. She was the sister of the owner of our travel company (Bair from Bair Travels). She said her father was originally from eastern Russia near Mongolia and moved to St. Petersburg to study, where he met her mother ("A pure Russian, blond hair, blue eyes"). She told us this to explain her slightly Asian features. Whatever the reason, she was quite pretty. The travel company is a family affair for the most part. Her brother (the owner), her sister, and her all worked for it. She is studying to be a fashion designer like her other sister however. They grew up in St. Petersburg and you could tell she really loved her city even if she made a few jokes about it. She said that St. Petersburg gets only 30 days of sun a year (as much as I enjoy the rain and snow, that sounds really depressing for a Colorado native like me). We drove through traffic for a while(apparently its pretty bad in St. Petersburg) and eventually found ourselves driving along the Neva river, the main river that St. Petersburg is built on and the reason for its existence. St. Petersburg was built on a bunch of islands at the mouth of the Neva river as a trading area and port to serve the interior of Russia. The Neva is still an active river today and carries goods in and out of Russia during the summer. All the bridges over the Neva are draw bridges and in the summer (when the river is not frozen and impassable by boats) they all go up at night. So if you are in St. Petersburg in the summer you have to be careful not to get stuck somewhere at night as there is no connection between different islands separated by the Neva.
St. Petersburg is situated on some 40-something islands (if I remember correctly) but was originally (before some artificial raising of land and filling in of small tributaries and canals) on over 100 islands. As a result St. Petersburg is built around its bodies of water and has many bridges (many of which are quite beautiful). We made our way around the right bank of the Neva and the crossed the bridge to our hotel on the main island right near the city center.
Our hotel (Hotel Moscow) was right next to the Neva river and at the end of Nevsky Prospekt, the main thoroughfare of the city center, which spans the main island. Our guide said that large streets in Russia are called Prospekt (from the word prospective) because of the way large strait streets appear to get smaller in the distance thus demonstrating the law of perspective. Our hotel is one of the so called "Soviet Giants", huge hotels made to hold hundreds of guests. Our hotel was 8 stories, 5 stories of which had rooms. Each floor had several hundred rooms (at least 200/floor) the ground floor had several restaurants, the main desk/lobby, a rental car place, and offices. The eighth floor was a restaurant.
Here we checked in and got our rooms. In Russia most hotels take your passports and immigration cards (the part we kept) and give you a temporary paper that would serve as proof that you are there legally for the duration of your stay. This is for the convenience of the traveler. If your passport got stolen or lost it would be a huge problem to sort out, so this way problems like this are avoided. I was sharing a room with Meya, a Singaporean going to TKK who is in my tutor group. We had free time until 8 that evening so we exchanged money (about 36 rubles/ euro) and went walking up and down Nevsky Prospekt a little ways to find a place for dinner. i went with Meya and several other Singaporeans(3 girls, 3 guys) plus an Italian girl and a Spanish guy we met on the bus.
My first impression was that the streets were fairly dirty, but I didn't really mind all that much. Additionally, signs were difficult to read as the were in the Cyrillic alphabet. Cyrillic is rather strange for someone used to the Roman characters because letters that look familiar produce a completely different sound. (More on this later, in the meantime for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_alphabet, scroll to the bottom for what sound each letter makes)I also noticed that much of their transit vehicles (buses/trams) were fairly old. There were often trams, electric buses and diesel buses on the same street, which I thought was kind of odd. We ended up at some Russian fast food place that served baked potatoes and sandwiches and soup. After a lot of pointing and gesturing we managed to order. I had a chicken sandwich, it was mediocre, but I wasn't expecting too much. The baked potato another guy got looked pretty good though, I should have ordered one of those instead.
Afterwards we made our way back to the hotel for a night tour of St. Petersburg by bus. We drove out, this time I was with a different tour guide (but he was very serious and we didn't enjoy him as much so for the rest of the trip we made sure to get in the tour group with Bair's sister (I seem to have forgotten her name). We drove along the Neva a little ways to see the skyline of St. Petersburg from the other side of the river. I'm not sure you can really call it a skyline as all the buildings are quite small. This is a result of a former law that stated that no building could be taller than the Winter Palace (the residence of the royal family). This law is not in effect anymore but the Soviets did not break it too much and even today there isn't a building taller than 10 or so stories in the center. Gazprom, the giant Russian gas company is soon going to change this despite protest from many people in St. Petersburg. They are building a huge skyscraper in the center (300m tall, despite a law prohibiting buildings taller than 48m). Other than a few Soviet era buildings every building in St. Petersburg is also built in an old style (18th century or so) because of a law prohibiting buildings built with modern facades.
We saw the Smolny cathedral, drove past numerous churches and museums and a railway station. We stopped at St. Isaac's cathedral where we could see an interesting statue with only two points of support and a palace. We stopped at Rostral columns. Here we took some pictures and were able to see a great view of the city center (Especially the Hermitage museum), and Peter and Paul Fortress. We also drove past a large prison (which is right near the city center but used to be at the edge of town, before the city grew around it, it is still in use as a jail today). We made our way to The Church of Our Savior on Spilled Blood, a beautiful Russian style church built on the site where Alexander II was killed(hence the name). And finally we stopped at the square of arts (right near the club district so people could go out if they wanted. We chose to carry on back to the hotel and make a party of our own in our room. Meya got some vodka, and I picked up a beer (a delicious Russian porter) and we headed back to our room. The Singaporeans and I all hung out in our room and played Kings Cup and poker. We played poker for drinks, since we had no chips, but we didn't really have the rules figured out to well on who should drink when and how betting should work, so we soon changed games. I taught everyone Kings Cup and we played that.
Thats it for Thurday in Russia. This post is already really long so I will stop there for now. Look for the rest of the days in the near future as well as posts about Finland. I will try to fill in some of my story from January until now. In the meantime you can get some idea by looking at the picasa account. Also look for my Russia photos to start appearing there as well. I will try to post some of them into this blog at appropriate places as well.
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Comments...
It has been brought to my attention that a user profile was required to post a comment on the blog. This has been changed. Anyone should be able to comment now.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Thursday, January 10, 2008
welcome...
hello dear readers and welcome to mike in finland, the home of my travels and adventures on the internet. I plan to post semi-periodic updates on my life abroad. For those who don't know or would just like a refresher. I am in Finland on a 5-1/2 month adventure. I will be studying at Helsinki University of Technology in Espoo, Finland until mid-May and then will be traveling around europe until June 11 at which point I will return to the states.
Now I know you may be wondering: "Hey, how do I get a hold of mike while he is in Finland?" or "Wait a minute, where the heck is Finland/Helsinki/Espoo?". Well this blog will be your answer. I will post contact info as soon as I know it, and in this post I have posted a link to a map that shows Helsinki, the location of the school and the approximate location of my apartment. At the moment I am planning on using Google's photo service, Picasa to create web albums for my pictures which I will also link to from this blog. The address for that site is http://picasaweb.google.com/mlukacov. Until next time...
/mike
Now I know you may be wondering: "Hey, how do I get a hold of mike while he is in Finland?" or "Wait a minute, where the heck is Finland/Helsinki/Espoo?". Well this blog will be your answer. I will post contact info as soon as I know it, and in this post I have posted a link to a map that shows Helsinki, the location of the school and the approximate location of my apartment. At the moment I am planning on using Google's photo service, Picasa to create web albums for my pictures which I will also link to from this blog. The address for that site is http://picasaweb.google.com/mlukacov. Until next time...
/mike
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