23rd October: Petersburg Tales

It was a rush to get to the train on time on Thursday, but well worth putting in the effort as the class was brilliant. I decided to sign up; £26 a month is nothing when you consider you could go to every class, four times a week.

So, after a quick shower and last-minute check that I’d got everything, I made my way to Red Square to get a trolleybus to the station. My heart sank as I saw my trolleybus arriving on the other side of the square – there was no way I could run to the stop quick enough with my suitcase, handbag and huge bag of food. Reaching the bus stop, I looked anxiously at the sign and saw that after 9.30 the trolleybuses only came every twelve minutes. It was already 9.33 so there was no chance of me reaching the station by 9.50 as we’d agreed. The next trolleybus arrived at 9.45 on the dot, and at 9.53 I got a phone call from Ben, whose relaxed reaction managed to calm me down a bit, as I was getting quite stressed by now. At 10.05 I pulled up to the station and was relieved to see Alex on the pavement with all the bags, smiling reassuringly.

By the time the others had come back from the shop laden with beers and we had walked to the platform, our train was ready to leave, with only ten minutes until departure. Typically, our carriage was the last on the train and it felt like the walk down would never end, and the train would go without us. We made it nonetheless, and had enough time to find our beds, have our tickets checked and be given our sheets before the old train made a languorous metallic gurgle and slowly heaved itself into motion.

The train had the same layout as the train we’d taken to Moscow, with units of bunk beds in square blocks of four and a single row of bunk beds along the opposite wall. We’d been unlucky as our six beds were spread out in a single row, making it difficult to talk along the carriage, but we managed to perch on the end of two other beds for a while before everyone started going to bed. This didn't bother us too much, however, as we were all tired from the night before and the sudden absence of Beth, who’d been called home on a family emergency, had made us quieter than we might otherwise have been. I was grateful for the peace, as being the only girl amongst four lads, I didn't think I’d be getting much of it that weekend.

I managed to get a surprisingly good night’s sleep (once I’d put my iPod in to drown out the sound of thirty loud Russians snoring). At 8.15 the next morning I slowly came into consciousness with the recognition that the loud alarm I had been hearing in my sleep was in fact real and, worse, coming from my phone, which was buried somewhere in the depths of my suitcase. After conceding that it was never actually going to stop on its own I dug it out and went back to sleep for a couple of hours, by which time we were nearly arriving in St Petersburg.

At 11.30 we emerged onto the rainy St Petersburg platform with that amazing feeling: we’d made it! We took the metro to Vladimirskii and began to look for our hostel, with the help of my written directions and the guys’ map-reading skills. The hostel was almost impossible to find, being in a typically obscure location in a backstreet courtyard which didn't actually correspond to the written address. Eventually, after several phone conversations with various people from Sheffield who had already arrived and a lot of useless wandering around, we found it, barely signposted, on the second floor of a run-down and unimposing apartment building. After a long wait to be checked in we were finally ready to make our way into the city.

We’d already split up from Ben at the metro station as he was going to be staying at his friend’s hostel, who was living in Petersburg for the year. Alex and I knew the route we needed and somehow managed to get split up from Ed and Sean in the process, so made our way over to a restaurant where Alex’s friends from Sheffield were, next to the Hermitage. When Sean called me and said he and some others were going to look around the Hermitage, I made my excuses and left the restaurant, wanting to get the most out of my three days in the city, which I already knew would be nowhere near long enough.

Entrance to the Hermitage Museum (or Winter Palace, as it was formerly the winter residence of the Tsars) was free for students and twice the price for foreigners, in the typical Russian xenophobic way. I've heard that it would take a year to go around the entire gallery if you stopped to look at each exhibit for twenty seconds, and having been there for three hours I can confirm that this is probably true; the scale of the place is enormous.

By 4.30 some of us were ready to leave, so we split up into three groups, Sean and I going to see a few more sights before the day was over. We started by walking along the River Neva, where we not only got an amazing view of the city but also walked past the Russian Museum (the former Marble Palace, which was built in the 1760's and made of thirty-two different shades of marble). We also got a view of the Peter and Paul Fortress from across the river and strolled through the monumental park Марсово поле, where there is an eternal flame commemorating the victims of the Revolution in 1917-18. From there we got a glimpse of Храм Спаса на Крови (The Church of Our Saviour on Spilled Blood) and decided to go over and get a closer look. It was now approaching 6 o’clock so we were surprised when we were still allowed to go in – and on a free student ticket too. With its traditional red brick and colourful domes modelled on those of St Basil’s in Moscow, it is probably the most famous church in St Petersburg and was built between 1883 and 1907 on the spot where Emperor Alexander II was assassinated, hence its popular name (its official name is Собор Воскресения Христова (The Resurrection of Christ Church)). The entire church is breathtaking, decorated floor to ceiling with extravagantly coloured mosaics and completed by an enormous shrine on the exact site where the bomb was thrown at the Emperor’s carriage, making the event seem almost tangible and giving the church an eerie significance.

We met Ben outside the church, who recommended a visit to the nearby Казанский кафедральный собор (Kazan Cathedral), just a short walk up Nevsky Prospekt. The enormous Kazan Cathedral could easily be mistaken for a political building at first sight, consisting of one central dome (69 metres in length, 62 metres in height) fronted by tall stone pillars which form a semi-circle around the front courtyard. The inside, however, fully justifies its imposing exterior and shows its true purpose as a memorial to the Russian victory in the Patriotic War against Napoleon and as a fully-functioning place of worship. We were lucky enough to be visiting during the evening service, and the beautiful echoes of evensong filled the vast, sparsely furnished cathedral, creating a profound feeling of peace and tranquillity. We stayed for over half an hour, transfixed by the priest’s chant and the harmonic voices transcending from the choir stalls on the balcony.

Eventually we managed to tear ourselves away and met up with Ben and his friend Kev for dinner in the traditional Russian restaurant, Ёлки Палки, which we managed to find for Sean’s sake after an overly-prolonged search. It turned out that Ёлки Палки didn't live up to his high expectations, offering the same food as any other Russian place for double the price. It was only redeemed by its quirky Russian costumes and bizarre interior, which I can only describe as an attempt to recreate a Russian wooden dacha, with a fake tree as the central buffet island, whose branches spanned the ceiling. Another novelty was of course the spontaneous Russian dancing which two of the waitresses performed during our meal, which took us a little by surprise to say the least.

That evening we decided to go out with the group from Sheffield who Alex, Sean and Ed had come to see. After a very confusing episode in the off-license where I had to make two separate purchases in order to buy vodka and beer (as sales of vodka stop earlier in the evening), we went back to the hostel for pre-drinks, and at around midnight went with some locals to the bar street just off Nevsky. It was cold and rainy by this point, so we dived into the first bar that would let us in for free (girls first, of course). It was small and dingy, with graffiti all over the walls and some of the worst toilets I think I've ever seen. Whilst waiting for a toilet cubicle which didn't have a huge hole in the door, I was approached by a dodgy-looking guy from Armenia who claimed he’d spotted me from across the room, seen me go into the toilets (which were communal, by the way) and had to come and talk to me as I was such a красавица (beauty). Did I want to dance? No thanks, I think I’m all right.

Just when I thought I’d got away, he reappeared behind me at the bar as I was ordering in my vodka and lemonade, and asked me to dance again. I managed to escape back to the group and thought I was safe talking to Sean and Susanna (who was from Exeter but had happened to come up from Petrozavodsk with the Sheffield lot). Suddenly, someone was massaging my shoulders – and with all my friends sitting in front of me, there was only one person that could be. Sean tried to tell him I had a boyfriend and only when Alex got in on the act and pretended to get protective did the Armenian finally admit defeat (but not before asking Susanna if she had met his brother).

After an hour or so, Nikita, one of the Russians we were with, suggested moving on to a club, so we duly trudged after him. The club we ended up in was better than the last place and had a cool vibe to it; it was really narrow but four storeys high, with drum and bass music pumping out on every floor. We stayed and danced for a while but at 3am decided to call it a night as we had some heavy sight-seeing planned for the next day.

It was Sean’s alarm that woke me (and everyone else except for Sean) up the next day at 9.30. By just after 10.30, Sean, Susanna and I were out the hostel, having received a free breakfast and enjoyed impressively pleasant showers for the £8 a night we were paying. We met Ben and Kev at Площадь Ленина metro station and from there walked along the river and over the bridge to Петропавловская крепость (Peter and Paul Fortress). On the way, we came across a Stalin-era naval ship, the naval college and an impressive mosque.

The fortress itself, which comprises a large courtyard surrounded by six bastions, is on the tiny Заячий остров (Hare Island) and has to be reached via a wide stone footbridge over the River Neva. It was built by Peter the Great in 1703 at the height of the Northern War, in order to protect the city from Swedish counterattack. It never fulfilled this purpose, and from around 1720 served as a base for the city garrison and as a prison for high-ranking political prisoners, including many members of the Decembrist movement, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Mikhail Bakunin, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Leon Trotsky and Josip Broz Tito. We were able to visit an exhibit in the main prison block, the Trubetskoy bastion, where these prisoners were held and which contains cells preserved in their original state. We also went into the Peter and Paul Cathedral which, like the Адмиралтейство (Admiralty) in the centre of Petersburg, is currently under exterior restoration, but is still worth a visit as the burial place of all the Russian tsars from Peter I to Alexander III, with the exception of Peter II and Ivan VI. The cathedral was the first church in the city to be built of stone (between 1712 and ‘33) and a golden angel holding a cross tops the 404-foot golden spire making it the highest building in Petersburg.

When we had left the cathedral I stopped to take a photo of it from the outside, crouching on the ground in an attempt to include the entire spire in the frame. Suddenly I was being verbally assaulted by an ugly old Russian lady for stopping on the pavement, despite the fact the whole area was an over six-metre wide pedestrian zone, hardly a narrow space. I was hoping she understood the sarcasm in my “извините” when Sean stepped into my defence. She wasn't going to be convinced by anyone and only when Sean said “We don’t want to talk to you” using the offensive ты form in тобой, did she admit defeat and shrink away, accusing him of hating old people.

Negative experiences with old hags aside, it had been an interesting visit, and we decided to pop in to the traditional market recommended by Kev’s UCL friends, which turned out to be a disappointment. After that, we headed to the Dostoevsky flat and museum, where we bought an audio guide to share but unfortunately didn’t have time to finish the tour before closing time at 6. We did get to see where he had lived and worked, however, and found out a lot about his life and early career.

For dinner that night we went along the river and found a branch of a chain of restaurants selling Eurasian food and pizza, where I tried a delicious Uzbek soup with salmon and winter vegetables. After that we went our separate ways, Susanna and I deciding to walk to The Church of Our Saviour on Spilled Blood to see it lit up at night. Walking along the almost deserted river at dusk was idyllic and gave me that rush of life you sometimes get when realising you’re experiencing something beautiful. It struck me again how incredible it was that I was in Saint Petersburg, in Russia, that this was really my life. The cathedral itself was stunning and I had to stop a while, not worrying about getting the perfect photograph for a change, but actually just enjoying the moment.

The next day, with big plans ahead, Susanna and I got up even earlier to meet Ben at Исаакиевский Собор (St Isaac’s Cathedral), only to find that the guidebook had failed to mention that the cathedral didn't open until 11am in the winter months. Not to be deterred, we walked over to the Медный всадник (The Bronze Horseman) statue despite the biting cold and rain. A famous symbol of Petersburg, this statue of Peter the Great was commissioned by Catherine the Great and received its name due to the success and influence of the Pushkin poem of the same name, in which the statue plays a central role. The statue’s pedestal is the Thunder Stone, which in its original state weighed around 1500 tonnes and is claimed to be the largest stone ever moved by man.

Once we had taken a suitable amount of photos and had enough of the awful weather, we made our way to the cathedral, which is dedicated to Saint Isaac of Dalmatia, a patron saint of Peter the Great. It was commissioned by Tsar Alexander I, built between 1818 and 1858 and is the fourth church to stand on this site. Under communism, the cathedral was stripped of all its religious items and in 1931 it was turned into the Antireligious Museum. Interestingly, the grey dome as it is now is this colour due to the fact it was painted over during WWII to avoid attracting attention from enemy aircraft.

The relatively bare exterior belies the extravagance of the inside of the cathedral. You would think it would be easy to become indifferent to the beauty of the Russian churches after seeing so many, but even as an agnostic I have to admit that I’m yet to grow tired of them. They’re all based around the same ideas, of course, but each has different decoration and a different atmosphere. Once again, we’d stumbled on some sort of choir performance, which I stopped to listen to a while before browsing the exhibits that were on display. Apart from the left side, which is now used for worship, the rest of the building still serves as a museum, including scaled models of this church and others in Petersburg, photographs and explanations of how the cathedral was built, and descriptions of its history.

We had bought a ticket to the colonnade not knowing if it would be worthwhile, but even with the mist obscuring the view of the far distance, the cityscape was striking. From that height you could really get a sense of the vast scale of the city, which, built laterally rather than vertically, with few high-rise building, seems to extend infinitely into the distance.

After we’d descended the many stone steps, Ben led the way along the River Moika to the Дворец Юсуповых на Мойке (The Moika Palace or Yusupov Palace), which was once the primary residence in Saint Petersburg, and also the site of Grigori Rasputin’s murder in 1916. It was because of this, and because I remember enjoying the tour when I came in Year 10, that I decided to go again. However, we got there only to discover that there was a only a limited-place Rasputin tour conducted all in Russian, which took place in two hours, or a general tour which cost 380r (£7.60) even for students – which, considering almost all the other sites had provided free student tickets, seemed outrageous. As Ben would be studying in Petersburg the next semester, he decided to go elsewhere while Susanna and I took the general tour. The tour turned out to be relatively interesting but by no means worth the money, especially since our audio guides broke four times and I ended up dipping in and out of the German version and the live Russian tour that was happening at the same time. There was no mention of Rasputin either, so, disappointed at having wasted my money, when it came to hand in the audio guides I complained about them. This turned into a huge rigmarole as various members of staff came to deal with the problem, and I ended up arguing with two angry Russian women and didn’t get any money back anyway. On the plus side, although my concluding point had been that I was going to make an official complaint – very English – my Russian skills had managed to hold their own.

After the whole audio guide debacle and the tour taking much longer than intended, we had only a couple of hours left before I needed to get to the train station, so we made our way over to the souvenir market outside The Church of Our Saviour on Spilled Blood. I finally managed to buy a couple of presents to take back with me before we made our way to the bookstore, where I bumped into Alex. He went with me back to the hostel and we made our way to the station together (so much less stressful that way). There was just time to grab a quick snack before boarding the train.

This time we were in a block of four, with Alex just on the other side of the dividing wall (which worked out well as he’d only had two hours sleep and needed a bit of peace and quiet). The others decided to go and check out the refreshments carriage and disappeared until 2am, having met a mysterious and strange-sounding guy called Knyaz who kept buying them cognac. I was exhausted by this time and was glad of the time to myself, unable to take any more lad talk, fun as it is in small doses.

When my alarm went off at 5am, it felt like I hadn't slept at all, which was strange considering how exhausted I’d been. I could not remember having drifted into sleep at all, but felt oddly awake as though the previous day had never ended. Waking up the guys was an interesting experience, with Ed taking at least five minutes to realise who I was and Ben continually shouting nonsense such as ‘Dick King Smith’ and cracking up for reasons that are beyond my comprehension. They were not going to be feeling good later. Somehow I managed to get them up and dressed and we made it off the train when it pulled in at 5.30. We took the trolleybus back to our flats, and although I tried to be as quiet as I could, Lyudmila came to greet me and to ask me about my trip and my plans for the day. She’s no longer shocked when I say I’m still going to classes after an exhausting night, and didn't even bat an eyelid when I said I’d be going to my exercise class that day; I think she’s got used to the fact I’m a bit of an obsessive.

I shuffled into my room to find it immaculate, with two books on Kiev left on the table for me and fresh sheets and clean towels laid out on the bed – bliss. After a two-hour nap I felt almost ready to face the day and managed to make it through class before dropping off my boots to the repair shop and coming back to the flat to unpack and catch up on work and emails. The exercise class that night was strength-based, which was just what I needed to make me feel better.

Today has been equally quiet. We went out for lunch and then I came back to try and tackle my University of Murcia application form again (which still isn't accepting my photo despite the fact I've performed the miracle of shrinking it to 10kb). I've spent the rest of the afternoon working and updating this blog, as well as having another enlightening conversation with my babushka. We started off with the pleasantries, as we always do when she comes in and I go out to greet her. We’d talked about Petersburg the afternoon before and today she was asking about my potential trip to the Ukraine, which led us to the issue of visas. My friends are still waiting for news on their multi-entry visas as the man in charge of sorting them out at the head office has been arrested. The worst thing is, I’m not even surprised. This is Russia.

Then we got onto the topic of immigration and, like all old people, she is not keen. They come to Yaroslavl from all over: Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Vietnam… Lyudmila thinks it might be because Yaroslavl is so close to Moscow. Russia has a huge problem with illegal immigrants (we learnt about it in class) because they come over here without qualifications and work for wages so small the Russians can’t compete. We did however agree that they’re ok as long as they work hard and contribute to society. Some of them are just awful though, she said, like the Armenian women, who she claims are always fat and ugly. Apparently – she just dropped this in – the ‘hotel’ in the neighbouring building is not in fact a hotel, but a brothel run by one such fat Armenian women. They used to sneak young girls into the building and there were sounds of screaming all the time until the police finally intervened. I said that this was awful and frightening but Lyudmila just shrugged and said they've quietened down now and work hard to keep up the pretence of being a hotel, even though everyone knows what really goes on there. After going to Petersburg I’d got a taste of normality and forgotten what this place is really like. Oh, Russia.