At the Narva Gate

Privyet! I've just posted more photos from a recent walk in one of southern Saint Petersburg's industrial suburbs, starting at the bright green Narva Gate. It was a great deal more interesting there than I expected, plenty of Soviet monuments and constructivist architecture to keep me happy! It apparently isn't the best area and unsafe to visit after dark if I'm to believe Yuri, my enthusiastic and unasked-for Russian guide, told me. I made the mistake of giving him a ten rouble bill (~50 cents) when he asked for 1, which earned me not only his undying gratitude but an in-depth, 15-minute explanation of the Narva Gate, Petersburg history, Yuri's 43 years of life, and his extended family... argh how to get away?? Through a great deal of nodding and feigned comprehension I somehow endured and managed eventually to take my leave after four handshakes and all the best for my time in Petersburg until my return to Amerika (what I had to tell him since, judging by his uncompreheding stare, he'd never heard of Canada). What a character... a little drunk I think, but I'll have to take back what I said about all Petersburgers being rude I guess!

Well it looks like I am to be a prisoner in Russia a bit longer. Today I was supposed to be getting my passport back finally after a long month of waiting while they processed my visa extension to the end of February. An entire month to register, during which I don't have a passport and so can't go anywhere - unbelievable! But today when I was told to pick it up, the lady at the office didn't show for some reason, grrr..

I'll probably continue posting more on my photo page than on my blog while I still have a computer at home (ie. until I leave Russia to begin my grand tour of Europe at the end of February); I think photos and captions together work best to give you the most accurate idea of what it's really like over here in this wild Russian world!

Today's weather forecast: -10 to -18 by Tuesday!

Novgorod the Great - Part II

Luckily our disillusionment didn't last too long - just down the street I spotted our first medieval church of the day, unfortunately locked up tight and looking a little neglected and sad, but something interesting nonetheless! Despite its extra 700 or so years the church didn't actually look all that much more run-down from the outside than the surrounding 60s apartment buildings.

Further on we came to the monstrous Novgorod Duma (local government) building, its bombastic Stalinist facade painted in a supremely ugly colour scheme: off-beige and slime green, delicately set off with details in mud brown! Besides the name change and minus a few red flags, the place hadn’t changed in 15 years - Lenin still stood out front and a giant plaque of the Order of Lenin, the USSR’s most distinguished honour, hung proudly above the main doors. I love how so many government and education buildings here still maintain these giant colourful plaques of Soviet medals they received – the University’s Medical Institute still displays the Order of the Red Banner of Labour and even the Petersburg Metro has the Order of Lenin high on the wall at Gostinny Dvor Station.

Across the street from the Duma lay the Kremlin, its thick and ancient red brick walls and towers looking suitably impressive; Novgorod had after all been the real capital of medieval Russia, for nearly 500 years. Novgorod was home to most of Russia’s legendary medieval heroes such as Yaroslav the Wise and Alexander Nevsky, the great prince who defeated an invading Teutonic army on the banks of the Neva near modern Saint Petersburg (hence Nevsky Prospect). The independent Russian state of Novgorod was eventually defeated and annexed by Tsar Ivan III of rival Moscow, leading to centuries of declining importance, accelerated by Ivan the Terrible's destruction of the city after a failed rebellion (slaughtering 60,000 of its inhabitants - the guy wasn't called 'the Terrible' for nothing!) and the much later founding of nearby Saint Petersburg. Despite all it has suffered and lost over the centuries since its medieval greatness, it’s still an amazing place. Take a look at my photos here; they can explain better than I what Novgorod was like!

One of the things that amazed us nearly as much as the Kremlin and the multitude of medieval churches, was just how friendly the people in Novgorod were! Everyone we talked was so chatty, so eager to help, and smiley; so totally unlike Petersburg, such a pleasant and unexpected change! Aurelie kept saying, “I just want to stay in Novgorod! Everyone’s so nice here.” Even the waitress at the café was helpful and astoundingly, spoke English too – will wonders never cease! I’d almost forgotten that “customer service” still existed anywhere… I started to feel a little ashamed of my judgment of Russian people as unfriendly, indifferent, and downright rude. Like people who decide that all French people must be snooty and insufferably impudent because they went to Paris once and that’s how all the people there were, I think I made a similar faulty assumption about Russians because of my plethora of Petersburg experiences! It’s the big city effect at work - living in the big city seems to just make people short-tempered, inhospitable, and gruff, no matter what the country!

Aurelie almost had her wish come true, as we found out there were no tickets left for the two buses back to Petersburg that night! Tired out, freezing cold, and now miserable, we were considering all sorts of thoroughly unsavoury options (like wandering the streets for the night, with a bottle of vodka to keep warm or paying the seedy-looking guys that were hanging around the empty ticket kassa offering rides to Petersburg for 1000 roubles or $40 each) when thank goodness the driver of the last bus of the day had 3 no-shows: Deliverance!

Novgorod the Great - Part I

Za Novgorod!
On Friday Aurelie, Charlotte, and I travel for the day to Novgorod, a city of 240,000 three and a half hours South of Piter by bus.

We decided to try for the first bus at 7:30 AM as the sooner we arrived the better because it gets dark so early here, by just after 4! So Charlotte and I dragged ourselves out of bed at 6 and grumpily took the early morning Metro to the bus station, Avtovokzal 2, where we were to meet Aurelie. The only problem was that she was very late because the obschezhitye, the student dorm where she lives, inexplicably changed its closed hours from 1-6 AM to 1-8 AM, during which no students are allowed into the building and apparently out as well as the security guard at the desk refused to let her out any earlier then 8! How ridiculous not to be able to leave your own house when you want to! It’s not like she could even have got out through an emergency exit if she resorted to that – I checked the fire exit door another day and found it secured with a big rusted padlock. Reassuring, especially when 40 women just died in a blaze at a Moscow drug rehab clinic for that very reason… Anyways, she ended up yelling her way through - the usual way to get things done in Russia when up against such inflexible and illogical stupidity (either that or a bribe) - but alas, arrived 6 minutes too late so we had to wait another hour for the next bus! Not an auspicious start to the day.

I can’t say much about the drive itself as I was asleep for most of it! The few times I did wake up long enough to glance out the window the landscape made me shudder – alongside the highway dreary lines of little wooden houses sagging into final dilapidation against a backdrop of winter-brown fields and the green-black forest of firs, under a tedious grey sky. Time to go back to sleep! Charlotte sat beside a slight, androgynous girl our age who spent the whole trip reading magazines dedicated to the Kalashnikov assault rifle – I get the feeling Russia has a bit of a gun fetish like the Americans. Back in October when I went with Andreas to the Artillery Museum we walked through a creepy exhibit dedicated to the 60th anniversary of the AK-47 that verged on the shrine-like; a beaming portrait of the benevolent Mikhail Kalshnikov, Russian genius and patriot, surrounded by display cases full of his wondrous works, gleaming assault rifles stacked up under the spotlights. A far cry indeed from the portrayal of the AK-47 in the West, poster child of small arms proliferation (an estimated 100 million in circulation now) and weapon of choice for militants and child soldiers in troubled parts across the globe.

Arriving on the outskirts of Novgorod just after noon, our hearts sunk as we walked towards the city centre down muddy Prospekt Karla Marksa. In the space of five minutes I felt that all I had heard about the grim condition of the Russian provinces had been confirmed one hundred percent; a more cheerless, God-forsaken place than this scene of rattletrap Ladas, stained concrete housing, and inescapable mud I could scarcely imagine! I think running on five hours of sleep and having missed breakfast added to our general gloom – I could tell we were all thinking, why did we come here??

To be continued soon...

The Kunstkammer

A few days ago I went with Aurelie and Charlotte to the Kunstkammer, about 10 minutes walk from my apartment. Housed in a striking green and white building on the Neva embankment, with a large central tower topped with a bronze model of the solar system (I'll try to take a photo to post), this was the first museum in Russia and was founded by Peter the Great himself in 1710. Today it's home to three museums: the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, Lomonosov Museum, and finally the original Kunstkammer (German for "art chamber" although it is most certainly not that!); this most interesting section holds Peter the Great's personal collection of preserved 'monsters' - misshapen babies in jars, two-headed cows, and other examples of nature gone frightfully wrong. We'd heard a great deal about this unique Petersburg display and were eager to get there, so we blitzed through the Anthropology Museum part and soon arrived at the darkened hall that used to be the old anatomy theatre.

There they were, row after row of illuminated glass jars containing preserved human fetii and stillborn infants displaying a wide range of shocking abnormalities: missing or extra limbs, harelip, bloated skulls, cyclopsism, severely conjoined twins, a child born completely covered in long hair. Their natural colours totally drained by nearly three hundred years in embalming fluids, they were an almost translucent albino white, like cave creatures. Others had been injected with chemicals to recreate the original colour of the skin and tissues (I remember one of those babies had a bright blue staring eye). The whole display was really quite ghastly, especially as even those with the most hideously disfiguring birth defects were still unmistakeably human.

Despite knowing exactly what we were in for at the Kunstkammer, it was still shocking. Charlotte had left quite quickly and I felt a little ill myself, but at the same time I found myself strangely fascinated by the stunning range of abnormalities. There was also a lot of explanatory signage (in English for once!) explaining about birth defects and the study of biological deformities, called teratology (from the Greek word teratos meaning monster). I felt like I actually learned something, which was appropriate because education was the primary objective of Peter the Great when he decided to open the museum. By putting his collection of abnormalities on display for the general public, Peter hoped to dispel the widely-believed superstitions that such deformities were caused by black magic or the evil eye (this was a time when science and modern medicine had just recently been imported into Russia from the West). Of course, getting people to willingly come view such a gruesome display proved a problem, so Peter decreed that free vodka and wine be given out to visitors of the museum as encouragement! Unfortunately they haven't kept up that particular tradition...

Also on display in the Kunstkammer was an interesting collection of Peter the Great's personal things. He was a truly remarkable man, a giant (as his oversized clothes on display showed, he was nearly 7 feet tall!) full of restless energy and always on the move. He was extremely curious of all things, an enthusiastic learner in a mind-boggling array of subjects in which he always took a very hands-on approach, apparent by the variety of personal objects on display: ship-building tools, ordinary (though gigantic) working clothes, an iron bar he forged with his own hands, cartographical equipment, medical instruments, and a large box of teeth that he extracted himself! Apparently Peter's nobles had to be very quiet at court if they ever had a toothache, in case the Tsar got wind of it and enthusiastically volunteered his services, which no-one could politely refuse!

Although it was interesting, it was sure a relief to leave that chamber of horrors behind. It must have made quite an impression on me because I had awful Kunstkammer-inspired nightmares two days later! Ugh...

S Novem Godom!

...or as they say back home, Happy New Year!

Last night I went to a party at the apartment of my Austrian friend Riki to celebrate New Year's Eve. It was a change from the francophone group I spent Christmas with, in that here nearly everyone was German! Luckily for me, they of course all spoke english well and were a very friendly and interesting crowd, confirming my earlier favourable impression of Germans! We hung out at that cozy flat on the Moyka Canal until just before 12, when we all trooped over to Dvortsaya Ploschad to celebrate the New Year with the crowds.

Wow, that sure was the strangest New Year's I've ever experienced - loud, happy, drunken Russians everywhere, a carpet of empty or broken "Sovietskoye" champagne bottles, riot police milling around unfestively in black armour and shielded helmets, and all manner of impromptu fireworks displays going off in every direction for HOURS - even the police were firing them off! It was the most chaotic, unorganized, very Russian holiday event I've ever seen - what a fantastic, festive mess! Everyone was having lots of fun, plus the snow was really coming down just as the New Year dawned, which made the lit-up square and Winter Palace that much more magical. I dont think I'll ever have another New Year's quite like it!

I've posted photos from New Year's, Christmas, and a bunch of random Petersburg shots on my Picassa photosite - take a look! (the link "My Petersburg Photos" on the right will take you right there!)