St. Petersburg, Russia (Day 2)
Our morning tour was "Rivers and Canals of St. Petersburg with Peter and Paul Fortress." It was the only one where our tablemates happened to join us; we were glad that Janet and Tom were assigned to our boat.
St. Petersburg's early history in a wee tiny nutshell: Peter the Great decided Russia really needed access to the Baltic, so he built the Peter and Paul Fortress on the Neva River and *poof* city. He was really progressive and really western for his time (basically he was the first Russian leader to really get out and about in Europe, and subsequently realized Russia was living in a hole compared to its neighbors), and he wanted...well, Venice. Because who doesn't? So St. Petersburg is on 100 or so islands, with 300 or so canals, and it looks for all the world like Venice.
Our guide pointed out many sights along the canals, and we dutifully photographed them, and immediately forgot what they were. I remember Europe's Longest Facade (about a mile), Peter the Great's stables, and the Summer Palace. The Summer Palace is interesting because it's totally dwarfed by the Summer Garden. Tablemates Ann and Tim toured the palace, and mentioned how reasonable and low-key it was. Peter also really liked boats, so for years there were no bridges over the Neva. If it froze over, too bad.
We slowed as we passed the Aurora and the Hermitage, before docking near the Peter and Paul Fortress. The fortress was the first permanent building in town (1703), and was never attacked. Inside is a comparatively small but ornate cathedral with golden spires, where the czars from Peter the Great through Alexander III are buried. The crush of tourists was ridiculous inside the cathedral, and our tour group was divided on the way out: Greg veered left with the guide, and I veered right with the ship-assigned escort. Both groups waited for the other in place, mine giving up faster and returning to the bus. Fortunately Greg had the video camera, so when his group was treated to a carillon tune, he was able to record it. Meanwhile, I stood at the bus talking wedding planning with a couple from New Hampshire, while the escort and another guide called the tour office to try to get our guide's cell phone number. Greg (and Janet and Tom) call this period of time "while we were waiting for Sarah," but I refer to it as "the rift."
As our bus queued with dozens of others to drive the length of the port to our berth, two things happened: a trainload of containers stopped in the road, preventing all the busses from moving, and Greg's blood sugar crashed. The good thing about tending to be surrounded by retirees on these tours is that everyone knows someone with diabetes--the woman sitting in front of us had a daughter recovering from gestational diabetes, and when she heard our conversation, she leapt into action. The next thing we knew, our driver had gotten out to get some candy from the guide on another bus stopped nearby. Eventually the train cleared the road just enough to let a bus through, and we returned to the ship for lunch.
Our afternoon tour, "St. Petersburg Cathedrals," had a moderate amount of overlap with some of the tours we'd already taken, but we had spent close to a day going through all the possible combinations of tours, and this was the best we'd come up with. I was keen to get inside these churches, rather than blow past on a bus, and if that meant we got inside one of them twice, so be it.
The first stop was St. Isaac's Cathedral, built from 1818 to 1858, and like so many churches, never a place of worship--in fact it served as a state antireligious museum during the Soviet era. The dome is covered with 200 pounds of gold, but was painted gray during WWII so as not to make it a target (there are photos inside of the anti-aircraft guns guarding the cathedral, as well as the cabbage fields that surrounded it at the time). Inside, there's plenty more gilding, plus mosaics that were originally oil paintings; when the paintings started to deteriorate even before the building was completed because of the weather conditions, they developed a technique of reproducing them as mosaics. Also inside are models of the entire cathedral, cutaway models of the dome, and a model showing the groundbreaking technique used to raise the pillars.
We next returned to the Church on the Spilled Blood, where the tourists were just as horrid as they had been the day before, but I was able to get some better photos of the memorial to Alexander II. Unlike our earlier visit, this time we had a couple of gypsy children gently pawing at our pockets. To keep us alert, I guess.
From there, we bussed to the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, a complex of buildings including multiple churches and Tikhvin Cemetery, which is full of famous Russians. We stopped by Borodin, Dostoevsky, Glinka, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rubenstein, and Tchaikovsky; unfortunately we found out too late that it also rather inexplicably includes the tomb of Leonhard Euler. Here was the only cathedral actually in use, so we were cautioned not to take pictures (when a stupid American not only took a picture, not only with a flash, but with the red-eye pre-flash flashing, she was appropriately tackled by about six other less-stupid Americans, bless them). Women in head scarves sold candles, lit candles, moved candles around, cleaned up candle wax, and otherwise busied themselves with candle-related activities; a few prayed. It was dark, stifling, and rather intense.
On the way out of the monastery, I bought our only Russian souvenir: a small, colorful painting of more or less generic onion domes. The writing on the back probably says "Russian-Looking Skyline 1A; suitable for sale to tourists." I asked the woman selling them, "how much in dollars?" and she quoted what I believe to be the largest English number she could come up with at short notice: twelve. I opted not to haggle, as it's not really my nature, she put the painting in a shopping bag Greg later noticed said "Dixie" in Cyrillic, and we hustled back to the bus.
St. Petersburg's early history in a wee tiny nutshell: Peter the Great decided Russia really needed access to the Baltic, so he built the Peter and Paul Fortress on the Neva River and *poof* city. He was really progressive and really western for his time (basically he was the first Russian leader to really get out and about in Europe, and subsequently realized Russia was living in a hole compared to its neighbors), and he wanted...well, Venice. Because who doesn't? So St. Petersburg is on 100 or so islands, with 300 or so canals, and it looks for all the world like Venice.
Our guide pointed out many sights along the canals, and we dutifully photographed them, and immediately forgot what they were. I remember Europe's Longest Facade (about a mile), Peter the Great's stables, and the Summer Palace. The Summer Palace is interesting because it's totally dwarfed by the Summer Garden. Tablemates Ann and Tim toured the palace, and mentioned how reasonable and low-key it was. Peter also really liked boats, so for years there were no bridges over the Neva. If it froze over, too bad.
We slowed as we passed the Aurora and the Hermitage, before docking near the Peter and Paul Fortress. The fortress was the first permanent building in town (1703), and was never attacked. Inside is a comparatively small but ornate cathedral with golden spires, where the czars from Peter the Great through Alexander III are buried. The crush of tourists was ridiculous inside the cathedral, and our tour group was divided on the way out: Greg veered left with the guide, and I veered right with the ship-assigned escort. Both groups waited for the other in place, mine giving up faster and returning to the bus. Fortunately Greg had the video camera, so when his group was treated to a carillon tune, he was able to record it. Meanwhile, I stood at the bus talking wedding planning with a couple from New Hampshire, while the escort and another guide called the tour office to try to get our guide's cell phone number. Greg (and Janet and Tom) call this period of time "while we were waiting for Sarah," but I refer to it as "the rift."
As our bus queued with dozens of others to drive the length of the port to our berth, two things happened: a trainload of containers stopped in the road, preventing all the busses from moving, and Greg's blood sugar crashed. The good thing about tending to be surrounded by retirees on these tours is that everyone knows someone with diabetes--the woman sitting in front of us had a daughter recovering from gestational diabetes, and when she heard our conversation, she leapt into action. The next thing we knew, our driver had gotten out to get some candy from the guide on another bus stopped nearby. Eventually the train cleared the road just enough to let a bus through, and we returned to the ship for lunch.
Our afternoon tour, "St. Petersburg Cathedrals," had a moderate amount of overlap with some of the tours we'd already taken, but we had spent close to a day going through all the possible combinations of tours, and this was the best we'd come up with. I was keen to get inside these churches, rather than blow past on a bus, and if that meant we got inside one of them twice, so be it.
The first stop was St. Isaac's Cathedral, built from 1818 to 1858, and like so many churches, never a place of worship--in fact it served as a state antireligious museum during the Soviet era. The dome is covered with 200 pounds of gold, but was painted gray during WWII so as not to make it a target (there are photos inside of the anti-aircraft guns guarding the cathedral, as well as the cabbage fields that surrounded it at the time). Inside, there's plenty more gilding, plus mosaics that were originally oil paintings; when the paintings started to deteriorate even before the building was completed because of the weather conditions, they developed a technique of reproducing them as mosaics. Also inside are models of the entire cathedral, cutaway models of the dome, and a model showing the groundbreaking technique used to raise the pillars.
We next returned to the Church on the Spilled Blood, where the tourists were just as horrid as they had been the day before, but I was able to get some better photos of the memorial to Alexander II. Unlike our earlier visit, this time we had a couple of gypsy children gently pawing at our pockets. To keep us alert, I guess.
From there, we bussed to the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, a complex of buildings including multiple churches and Tikhvin Cemetery, which is full of famous Russians. We stopped by Borodin, Dostoevsky, Glinka, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rubenstein, and Tchaikovsky; unfortunately we found out too late that it also rather inexplicably includes the tomb of Leonhard Euler. Here was the only cathedral actually in use, so we were cautioned not to take pictures (when a stupid American not only took a picture, not only with a flash, but with the red-eye pre-flash flashing, she was appropriately tackled by about six other less-stupid Americans, bless them). Women in head scarves sold candles, lit candles, moved candles around, cleaned up candle wax, and otherwise busied themselves with candle-related activities; a few prayed. It was dark, stifling, and rather intense.
On the way out of the monastery, I bought our only Russian souvenir: a small, colorful painting of more or less generic onion domes. The writing on the back probably says "Russian-Looking Skyline 1A; suitable for sale to tourists." I asked the woman selling them, "how much in dollars?" and she quoted what I believe to be the largest English number she could come up with at short notice: twelve. I opted not to haggle, as it's not really my nature, she put the painting in a shopping bag Greg later noticed said "Dixie" in Cyrillic, and we hustled back to the bus.
Labels: honeymoon
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