From Russia with love....

Pick of the day: Carriage 7 WC, St. Petersburg – Moscow train 056.

This seemed a popular place on the train. Our beds being the closest to the loo we noticed that they were occupied for almost the whole 9hr journey.

Style: Western sit/basin/dog bowl combo

Atmosphere: damp

Extras: The lack of a movable seat in this one was a hindrance to those wishing to sit. For those of us comfortable with standing the motion of the train didn’t help the already damp feel of the loo and compartment. The addition of the drain in the floor is a nice touch, almost admitting that “yes you are going to miss and no, we don’t mind”.

Russia. For me personally (ben), being a bit of a coward, the thought of crossing the Former Soviet Union was/is something I have been a bit apprehensive about. With that in mind we decided to make our Russian introduction as stress free as possible with a day time bus from Tallinn, forgoing our usual overnighter.

Our first Russian encounter seems to have set a trend with the border guard’s main line of interrogation revolving around why Vi didn’t speak Russian. They didn’t even bother with me after that. Retrospectively this may have been less of a ‘how dare you disrespect my country by coming here without speaking the language’ kind of question and more of a ‘you don’t speak Russian? You are totally screwed’ kind of statement. He was right. So far we have found Russia and the Russians to resemble a small (welsh?) mining town struggling with the shackles of its glorious past while moving forward. They know they need to embrace the rest of the world and for the most part can be the most friendly people, but an undercurrent of xenophobia is evident within certain sectors of society. Not unlike home I guess, just interesting to be on the receiving end.

Arriving at the bus station we made for the metro, jumping on the escalator down to the platform. We found out late St. Petersburg’s metro is the world’s deepest, which explained the feeling of descending into a mine and why people got their books out to read once getting on the escalator.

Ok so we said that EastSeven hostel in Berlin was nice, perhaps the best we had stayed in? In St. Petersburg we stayed at Soul Kitchen Junior, which is the highest rated hostel on hostelworld.com and deservedly so. If it hadn’t been for me being kept awake by the Dutch guy with his Russian conquest in the next bed this hostel would have been the best thing about St. Petersburg. Built in an old soviet communal apartment, walking in you are greeted with what I can only describe as a hipsters New York ‘loft’. A big kitchen and the most helpful staff possible made our first Russian city stay very pleasant.

The church of the spilled blood, with a frozen canal

After a quick sit down we decided to have a wander around the city and see what there was to see. We began with Nevsky Prospect which is just about the most famous street in Russia which is lined with huge beautiful buildings that are now mostly department stores intermingled with enormous statues of Catherine the Great (Empress of Russia back in the day). We discovered early on that Russian streets are a deathtrap for all pedestrians and most motorists. You don’t dare cross unless the little man goes green (as cars generally travel at some multiple of the actual speed limit and are so massive that you wouldn’t be seen unless you were 7ft tall or spattered across the windscreen) and even then take your life in your hands as the lights will only be red for cars travelling in one direction. We had dinner in a great place called Zoom with served up delicious potato pancakes and smoked salmon which was only slightly marred by the fact that there is no smoking ban in Russia so all food is bound to taste a little of cigarette ash.

Caviar crisps. Yep, they also do crab flavor.

The next day we mooched further down Nevsky Prospect and then popped along to the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood (so called because Tsar Alexander II was mortally wounded there, apparently). From the outside its impressive enough with those asymmetrical brightly enamelled or gilded onion shaped domes but the inside is truly something else. The interior is completely covered in extremely intricate mosaic from floor to ceiling and then there are alters carved in the most amazing details from pink rhodonite and jasper. Its easily the most impressive thing Ben and I have seen in a fair few years- on a par with the Taj Mahal, I would say.

Inside the spilled blood church. No painting here. All mosaic baby.

Since it was pancake day we went to the supermarket to get pancake supplies. Easier said than done when you don’t know the Russian for flour or milk (thankfully eggs are fairly self-evident). We were terrified of accidentally buying sour milk and bought cat brand milk in the end which  we were seriously hoping was not actual cat milk (by this point, anything was possible). Pancakes turned out well and for lack of other meal ideas were served for breakfast and dinner for the next two days.

The next day we decided to spend the day at the Hermitage. Really the Hermitage (also known as the Tsar’s winter palace) needs more than just one day but we were short on time and did a super quick tour. It’s essentially the old imperial apartments, preserved in their original splendour and a load of other rooms which consist of a sort of museum-cum-art gallery. The imperial apartments were certainly impressive- as Ben said ‘I’m not surprised the peasants were pissed off if they saw their royal family living like this’. The winter palace makes Buckingham Palace look like some sort of quaint country cottage. Every room has intricately carved and inlaid wooden floor, every wall has gilt or silk paper, there are marble columns everywhere, multiple crystal chandeliers in every room and even the door handles are carved, gilded and inlaid with precious stones. The art collection is impressive to say the least. Not just one or two by famous artists but a couple of rooms (ie 10-15 paintings) of Picasso, Monet, Van Gogh, and just about every famous artist from the last couple of centuries you are to think of.

A room in the Hermitage. The most ornate museum in the world.

One of many stair cases.

As there was a couple of upcoming birthdays (you know who you are) we decided to brave the central post office to attempt to post some presents home. Big fail. To get near a clerk you need a ticket obtained from the touch-screen machine which is entirely in Russian. Having bypassed this via a security guard we were given 6 copies of the same form and told to fill them all out identically. Having achieved hand cramp the form was actually looked at, laughed at, passed around the office and then the vodka I had attempted to post removed from the box with a firm ‘nyet’. The box was finally posted but we are yet to discover if the contents have been ‘nyet’ed without our knowledge.

On our last day in ‘Peter’ we decided to go to the Peter and Paul fortress which is across the river of ice on a sort of peninsula all of its own. It’s an outdoor excursion and was bloody freezing that day so we didn’t really spend that long having a look round, sorry to say. However as we took a little tour round the battlements we found a little outdoor swimming pool carved out of the ice and, to our horror, three middle aged men came wandering along, stripped off and went for a butt-naked swim (having used a stick to scoop the ice away from the steps first of course). Russian people are mental!

The local swimming pool. This bloke is about to get his willy out.

Looking across the frozen river with the Peter and Paul fortress on the right, Hermitage off to the left.

We took an overnight train from St Petersburg, having got the hostel to book our tickets. First task, convert our E-ticket to a paper ticket. Not being able to decipher the machines we went to the counter, where the irritable woman was once again pissed off that we didn’t speak Russian.

The train ride passed largely without incident and we arrived in Moscow in time for morning rush hour. Seeing as we were staying a short walk from Red square, in the district of Kitay Gorod, we spent the morning napping, before heading out for a wander and the collection of our other train tickets.

Britains first embassy in Moscow, c.middle ages

Moscow was a big change from the very European feeling St. Petersburg. Suddenly things felt more like the Asian cities we have been to with the driving shifting more in that direction too. What initially appear to be 10 lane roads are actually a single very wide lane where anything goes! Day 2 in Moscow and we hit Red Square, a wander round the Kremlin and St Basils Cathedral. You’ll pay a foreign tourist price for most exhibits/sights in Russia which is not something I am against in principal, but without even a translation of information inside you get decidedly less than the locals from the visit. This once again reinforced the idea that Russia doesn’t like outsiders! Red square is indeed massive and red, although the effect is spoiled slightly by the enormous ice rink set up in the middle of it. Lenin’s embalmed body is apparently normally on show there but it seems when we popped by he was being re-pickled or whatever so we lost out. St Basil’s Cathedral is actually called something entirely different in Russian but being british we somehow converted ‘Vasily’ to ‘Basil’. Its pretty cool from the outside and inside is a warren of little rooms with saintly paintings and carving all kept at a balmy -2C. Pretty interesting nevertheless. Our day in red square was topped off with a MacDonald’s from the Red Square outlet out of desperation for calories that didn’t cost the earth. This as expected of the international standard ‘restaurant’ was crap, but we loved the irony of it.

The team in red square

The walls of the Kremlin

The following day was taken up with a return to the Kremlin to see the state collection in the Armoury followed by a visit to the Pushkin collection of Russian art and European sculpture, capping off what has been a significant number of museums and galleries in the last few weeks. The armoury does contain armour but more impressively also the imperial crown jewels from times long ago and heavily decorated religious artefacts. They have bibles decorated with emeralds and rubies as big as your eyeball. They also have several thrones- one made entirely of carved ivory and another decorated with 4000 diamonds. They seem pretty blasé about the whole thing. That night was an attempt at cooking dauphinoise potatoes (given that potatoes were the cheapest and best quality vegetable we could find), which proved tricky when we were told back at the hostel at instead of milk and cream we had purchased soured milk and soured cream! Not the best meal.

St Basils/Vasily's Cathedral

In truth we were not at all enamoured with Moscow in the way that we were with St Petersburg. We had met a number of lovely, friendly people in Moscow despite a couple of fairly antisocial dorm-mates. One Belarusian who it seems had come on holiday to Russia to play games 14hrs a day on the communal computer a foot away from our bed (weird), and a Russian who decided that the best time to pop the lights on and do his ironing was midnight. Our final day in the capital was spent venturing out on the metro to a souvenir market, which was deathly quiet, thus proving winter is not tourist season! Couple of bargains achieved tho.

Vi loving mudda russia

An evening train to Nizhny Novgorod later that day brought us to the start of our 4 day stint in Russia’s third most populated city. That has been an ‘interesting’ stay and will probably get an entry all of its own…….