Where are Ron and Ellen?
Russia, Summer 2007
Ron and Ellen at Petrodvorets, St. Petersburg, July 2007
St. Petersburg, Valaam, and Petrodvorets, 16-23 July 2007
To see photos of St. Petersburg, click on the thumbnail at the left.
To see photos of the Church of the Resurrection in St. Petersburg, click on the thumbnail at the left.
St. Petersburg Adventures
To see photos of the trip to Valaam, click on the thumbnail at the left.
21 July 2007
St. Petersburg, RussiaDear family and friends,
We arrived in St. Petersburg after a very comfortable 5.5 hour train ride from Moscow. We'd brought food for supper with us, but there are vendors that come through selling drinks and snacks and open-faced sandwiches. [Note added later: on the train from St. Petersburg back to Moscow there was actually a vendor selling books, something we've never seen anywhere before!] Russia is a huge country, but not heavily populated, and so, despite the bustling crowds in Moscow and St. Petersburg, when we were biking and on the train we saw large unpopulated areas between small towns and very small villages, both forests and open fields.
St. Petersburg is a wonderful city for walking, and we've done a huge amount of it. The city reminds us of a combination of Washington DC and Paris, with parks and river and canals and huge 18th century buildings.
We spent a good part of one day doing errands, always a fascination way to learn about a place: finding a bike store to buy new brake pads (the rough roads on the Golden Ring really wore ours down), finding a hardware story to buy a replacement bolt to hold the kickstand (the slot for the hex wrench on our existing one is almost completely stripped), locating the hotel we are moving to today because the hostel was booked after last night (and a good thing we checked, since they had the booking wrong, one night instead of three!), some food shopping, trying (unsuccessfully) to find a place to stitch the heavy strap on Ron's water bottle bag. This took us over a lot of non-tourist routes in the city, and was quite intersting.
We've visited the incredibly ornate Church of the Resurrection, filled from ceiling to floor, columns to walls, with mosaics, and we've walked miles through parks and along canals and the river. People watching is fascinating: many of the younger women are dressed to kill -- short-short skirts or shorts, lots of cleavage (front and back!), exposaed bellies, and stiletto heels. A reaction to the drabness and shortages of Soviet times?
Ron reports from his night walk on groups of bicyclists riding at high speed on the sidewalks, weaving among crowds of pedestrians, fastest roller-bladers he's seen on sidewalks, motorcycles and cars roaring at high speed along streets and through plazas. Ron's conclusion: another way of expressing freedom after a regimented society.
Yesterday we took a very long day trip by hydrofoil boat to Valaam, an island at the north end of Lake Ladoga (a huge lake -- almost 5 hours each way, including ~45 minutes along the river from St. Petersburg to the lake). The island has been home for centuries to a large monastery, and, although it was abandoned for some years during and after World War II (the monks all went to Finland, since the area is one that has passed back and forth several times between Finland and Russia), but in the last 10-12 years monks have returned and the many large and small churches and their icons have been beautifully restored. The island is beautiful and wooded, with several small glacial lakes, quite different from anything we've seen. We spent about 5 hours walking the island with an excellent English-speaking guide and one other American, and enjoyed every moment of it.
After our arrival back in St. Petersburg, we were jostled by a group of 5 in an unsuccessful pick-pocketing attempt at the foot of the Metro elevator. We arrived back at our hostel at midnight to discover that they had made an error in their records, and when a large group checked in, they thought we were supposed to have checked out and had packed up all our things and put them in the storage room. Luckily, though their computer records were wrong (we had our receipt to prove it), they were uncertain enough about those records that they had saved a space for us on a fold-out couch in one of their offices.
Now we are off to check into our new hotel -- and to see what further adventures await us.
We still need to visit the Hermitage Museum, and have several other things we'd like to do before we leave on Tuesday afternoon to return to Moscow.
Love to all,
Ellen and Ron
To see a few photos of fashions seen on the street, click on the thumbnail at the left.
St. Petersburg Palaces
To see photos of Petrodvorets, click on the thumbnail at the left.
24 July 2007
St. Petersburg, RussiaDear Family and Friends,
When we sent our last message, we were on the way from our first hotel in St. Petersburg to our second. We arrived at the second hotel, and discovered we had a small apartment, bedroom, bath, and a large room with table and chairs, refrigerator, electric tea kettle, dishes, pots and pans, cutlery and utensils, and a small washing machine! We went out and found a grocery store (and a bakery with wonderful breads and pastries), then came back with our purchases and spent the rest of the afternoon and evening lounging about, drinking tea, eating pastries, eating dinner, and doing laundry. A day off from being tourists in our own small palace was exactly what we needed!
There is a very high demand for a limited number of hotel rooms (true everywhere we went). Reservations are not always reliable, as witness our being moved out of our room at the hostel. Vladimir, the bike tour leader, spent a lot of time on his cell phone checking on reservations, not only for the couple of times we stayed in hotels, but also for the various museums and tours we did. He told us that one time, with the second bike tour of the summer (which stays always in hotels instead of camping as we did) they arrived somewhere and the hotel told them, "We don't have places for you until tomorrow." This despite the fact that he had talked to them the day before to confirm! We didn't find out how he solved the problem.
On Sunday we had to go to the Hermitage, since it is closed on Mondays. Everything we'd heard, as well as the description in the guide book, said there are long lines for admission, so we went with our books, prepared for a wait. Much to our surprise, the line was short, and we were inside with tickets in hand within about 10 minutes. The museum is immense, composed of three connected palaces, one of them huge and the other two slightly less so, all of them three floors with room after room of art from every period. Also filled with people, many tour groups, as well as individuals like us. In some rooms (like the rooms of French Impressionists) the tour groups made it hard to move! We lasted about three hours before being overtaken by "museum fatigue." We agreed that it was generally the buildings themselves that we were more fascinated by than the art work. Ornate rooms, painted and gilded ceilings, beautiful walls and floors -- room after room after room. The other exhibit we particularly enjoyed was a temporary one of European artifacts and jewelry from ~400-900 A.D., mainly from what is now Russia, Scandinavia, and Germany.
Sunday evening we went to the ballet, in a beautiful, gilt-encrusted 18th century (?) theater, to see a wonderful production of Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, quite different from both the classic Tchaikovsky and Bernstein's West Side Story.
Yesterday, Monday, we headed out of town on a local bus for Petrodvorets, a "country palace" built by Peter the Great on the shores of the Gulf of Finland, now in one of the outer suburbs of St. Petersburg. The attraction here is not so much the palace, although the buildings were again huge and spectacular (we didn't go inside), but the extensive gardens, with some 140 gravity-powered fountains, many with gilded statues spouting water. We spent several hours wandering the gardens and watching the fountains before taking a boat back across to downtown St. Petersburg.
After viewing all these ornate and lavish palaces, we can understand why there was a Revolution!
Further on fashion: most of the short skirts and cleavage we described earlier are on women under 30. But most of the women of all ages dress very elegantly, far more so than most women you would see walking down the street in the U.S. The men are much more casually dressed, jeans and t-shirts accompanying high-fashion women. Although we did see men in slacks and dress shirts, a man wearing a tie was unusual, and a man in a suit and tie was extremely unusual. One of my retired astronomy librarian friends, commenting on the fashion sense of Russian women, noted that even when she and her family were in Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1987, Soviet times, "we also commented on how beautifully dressed and made-up the young women were. Sometimes it would just be a very colorful scarf worn very imaginatively around the shoulders, but the effect was stunning and one had to comment on how beautiful they were. So, even in those days, they were trying to express themselves in drab times. And maybe lipstick and eye makeup were always available?"
Last night we had an excellent dinner in an Uzbek restaurant. Our friend Bob, with whom we have been staying in Moscow, will begin a two year tour in the American embassy in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in April 2008. Will we go visit?
Late this afternoon we will take the train back to Moscow; we have a day in Moscow together tomorrow, and Ellen flies home on Thursday. Bob's computer will be packed up when we get back (he is finishing his tour and leaves Russia on Saturday), so this will be the last message until I'm home. Ron leaves Moscow on Saturday also, headed for Lake Baikal, 3.5 days by train, arriving at 2 a.m. on Wednesday morning. Why is he doing this train trip? Ellen isn't sure, and is not sure Ron knows either! At least he is taking a plane back a few weeks later, several hours instead of several days.
Love to all,
Ellen and Ron
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Last updated: 6 August 2007
