Peter the Great's City

Sunday 23 May 1999 – Wednesday 26 May 1999        

We arrived in St. Petersburg on a Sunday morning with no hotel reservation and no Rubles (we did, however, have a guide book).  In no time at all, we were communicating with the locals with the help of our Russian phrase book (“Please?  Metro?”) although we quickly realised that without money we weren’t going to get anywhere!  While Pippa stayed to guard the backpacks, Eric wandered off to find somewhere where he could cash a traveller’s cheque and was back within the hour having managed to pose as a guest in some not-so-nearby hotel.

Having mastered Berlin’s underground system, one of Pippa’s major contributions to our travels was to become the navigator of any metro/tube/underground we were to encounter and St. Petersburg was no exception, once she learned Cyrillic.  We headed for a hotel a couple of miles out of town wary of the advice offered by the guidebooks:  St Petersburg had very little to offer on the accommodation front that fell anywhere between the 5-star deluxe and totally uninhabitable.  The benefit of the former (complete with 5-star price tag to match) is that they had their own hot water system and did not rely on the facilities offered by the local authorities which were invariably undergoing maintenance.  Sadly, our budget was not going to stretch to a $200+ a night room so we opted for a thoroughly depressing Soviet-style hotel aptly described in the guidebook as "a 1970’s eyesore".  Its one redeeming feature was the spectacular views it offered of the Neva river, particularly at night.

Checking into our first hotel in Russia was an experience in itself.  We were not surprised at the request to hand over our passports in order to be “registered” with the authorities but we were certainly intrigued by some of the other local customs:  seeing everything from room rates to the price of a beer at the bar being quoted in dollars; paying for our hotel bill up-front (not at the reception desk, mind, but at a separate cashier); and having to claim our room key (in exchange for paperwork, naturally) from some fearsome middle-aged woman who presided over our floor and carefully scrutinized all of our comings and goings lest she be required to account for our whereabouts at any given point in time.  

St. Petersburg impressed us as a unique city.  On almost every street corner there was a building or monument involved in the amazing history of this "Window on the West", founded on barren swampland by Peter the Great in 1703 and destined to be the capital of Russia for over 200 years.  The European influences were evident throughout, homage to the French, Swiss, Italian and Dutch architects and engineers who were brought over to Russia to help design and build the city from scratch.  It was a sad reality that many of its buildings, once as opulent and magnificent as anything you could see at Versailles, were now desperately in need of repair.  Indeed, one of our overwhelming images was of a city in decay:  crumbling façades and buildings in need of major renovations.

The major attraction undoubtedly was the Hermitage Museum, Russia’s equivalent of the Louvre in Paris and justly regarded as one of the world’s greatest cultural institutions.  Among the three million exhibits, 400 halls and 20 km (12 miles) of hallways are masterpieces by Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Gaugin and Matisse, not to mention three whole rooms of Picassos – about 40 in all!

It was a strange sensation to be walking through the corridors of this immense and magnificent building, seeing such an enormous collection of priceless artwork while knowing that outside, only steps away, the evidence of poverty and decay was overwhelming.  St. Petersburg provided an uncomfortable mix of old and new, rich and poor, east and west.  There were not many things that could not be bought (for a price), and the class of “new Russians” was in evidence everywhere, distinctly conspicuous in their Gucci shoes and tailored suits, decked in gold and carrying designer handbags … not to mention their mobile phones and personal bodyguards!  McDonald's and Pizza Hut were well-installed and frequented by the upper echelon of Russian society, partly as a display of their wealth (who else but the rich could spend so much money on such bad food?).

And so, after three days of sightseeing, new cultural experiences and a healthy stock of toilet paper, we once again boarded an overnight train, this time headed for Moscow.