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   St. Petersburg Canals
Saturday, July 27 2019

location: Room 5115, cruise ship Vasco da Gama in the port of St. Petersburg, Russia

Overnight, we'd arrived at the Russian port of St. Petersburg, formerly known as Leningrad and Petrograd. As you might imagine, particularly given the political climate between Russia and the United States (what with the ongoing sanctions and credible accusations of Russian meddling in foreign elections), it's not easy for American hoping to do the tourist thing in Russia. Doing so normally requires a visa, which is a headache to obtain. Fortunately for us, it's possible for an American to tour Russia without a visa so long as they are part of an organized tour group. Gretchen's father had arranged for us all to go on St. Petersburg tours, and Gretchen had (to my chagrin) picked the most jam-packed tour of all: the two-day comprehensive. As you know, I can usually only handle a few hours of tourism at a time before wanting to withdraw from society. But Gretchen's attitude was that this was a rare chance that we were unlikely to ever get again.
This morning as we tried to exit the boat, we found the stairway jammed for several floors above the disembarkation deck (number three). We'd docked and were supposedly cleared to leave the ship, but there was some sort of holdup. In the course of all this, we got to talking with an overly-friendly gentleman whom we hadn't previously met and he wanted to know what tour we were on. When Gretchen showed him our receipt, he said that wasn't what we needed, that we needed a real ticket. But of course, this being the Vasco da Gama, nobody had actually gotten the ticket to our room or told us that we needed one (indeed, our room stewart had recently asked Gretchen how many people are staying in our room, something that should have been obvious given the arrangement of the bed, the two different kinds of clothes, and the fact that we often enter and exit the room together in front of him). The advice someone had was that Gretchen should try to get the tickets at the events desk near reception. But of course, that desk was closed when she went there. The only option we had was to try to talk our way through Russian port-side immigration. That might've seemed impossible, but as we waited in line, we could see that the people in Russian immigration weren't interested in seeing anybody's tour tickets. All they wanted to deal with was passports. This allowed us to get through Russian immigration without difficulty. On the other side of that was the woman who'd been missing from the Vasco da Gama events desk. She found our lack of tickets to be a huge aggravation and made a big fuss, but it turned out that fixing our problem was easy; all she had to do was fill out a blank ticket by hand, and she happened to have a stack of those.
Our tour bus was more of a van, with a capacity to hold only a couple more than the 14 tourists, tour guide (Irena), and driver (Sergei) assigned to it. In our group was a charming (and tall) Australian couple, a British woman with a large gap between her teeth and her insulin-pump-having teenage daughter, a couple old wiry Americans, and a Columbian-Mexican family based in Texas whose young son Joseph had started romancing Kelly & Brian's daughter Nancy. It would prove to be about as good as such groups can be, with nobody being "that one annoying person" (though, as I pointed out to Gretchen later, if there is nobody annoying in your group, it's possible the annoying person is you). Our guide was Irena, a pleasant woman of somewhat indeterminate age in a sensible dress, with sensible hair, and a reflexive laugh that she used as a form of punctuation. She was a much better guide than our Gdansk guide had been, though she did something that is probably a requirement of her job: she tended to propagandize about things like living conditions, the state of modern Russia, the city of St. Petersburg, and most especially about Vladimir Putin. She has to live there, after all. Irena's stamina was her most impressive attribute. Hours into our tour, when all I wanted was a cold beer and a nap, she was still cranking away with her informative patter. This was helped enormously by a little bluetooth microphone she used to broadcast her spoken voice to headsets provided to each of us. This allowed her to communicate without having to shout across ocassionally vast distances, though indoors as we went down long corridors, it wouldn't take more than a thick wall of masonry to block the signal entirely. We were all urged to stick together, but in case we got separated from the group, we'd all been given little paper slips featuring text in Cyrillic writing to show to the nearest Russian we could find. Aside from getting lost, the greatest danger was pickpockets. We were told that pickpockets even buy tickets to get into the Hermitage so that they can ply their trade among tourists too enraptured by art to notice.
After driving past miles of identically ugly, run-down apartment blocks, we came to the beautiful part of St. Petersburg. Though it has its occasional onion domes, St. Petersburg looks decidedly European, with plenty of French-influenced rococo architecture, much of it painted in yellow, pastel greens, and pastel blues. Our first stop was the Hermitage, the world-famous art gallery originally created for the personal amusement of Catherine the Great (whose personal amusements would, apocryphally, later get the best of her). Being part of a tour group, we bypassed all the people standing in line even before the museum had been completely opened. "That's what 300 euros will do," Gretchen observed. The Hermitage really is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to art. It's full of familiar masterpieces and has so many Rembrandts that partial walls had to be installed in one of the galleries to hang them all. There are also two Leonardo da Vincis, though only one was on display today. It was a Madonna holding a curly-haired Jesus. I'd skipped a visit to the Louvre when Gretchen took me to Paris back in 2002, so I'd never actually seen a da Vinci that wasn't a reproduction before. The painting was so charged with life that it looked like it would start moving.
There were also plenty of marble sculptures, many featuring weird motiffs. And there was a whole gallery of impossibly-old Egyptian artifacts, including an intact (and apparently shelf-stable) mummy.

Next stop was a restaurant ("PECTOPAH") featuring an amazingly-large dining hall. Arrangements had been made for those of us from the Vasco da Gama to get a "vegetarian" meal. It was, in fact, mostly vegan, but it there was actual butter served with the bread. The food was mostly cucumbers and eggplant, neither of which Gretchen can eat, but I found it very good. Everyone (including the teenagers) were given shots of vodka with their meals, and I ended up drinking all of mine and half of Gretchen's. It was the smoothest, coldest vodka I'd ever had. All our servers looked to be teenagers in black pants and smart white shirts. They all spoke fairly good English, though they didn't do a whole lot of smiling. Lunch was the first opportunity for us to talk with others on our tour, and Gretchen spent most of it talking to the tall Australians.

After lunch, we were taken on a boat tour of the city, starting in the wide Neva river and then circling back to where we'd started via a series of canals, passing beneath numerous low bridges. We happened to be in St. Petersburg during its yearly Naval Weekend, and there were plenty of mid-sized slate-grey Russian warships anchored in the Neva. They were flying multiple festive flags, particularly the St. Andrew's Cross, the official flag of the Russian Navy. It was a pretty inclusive display of flags, but it's important to note that there wasn't a single Pride Flag in sight. These ships were all taller than the bridges and could only be there due to the fact that the bridges crossing the Neva are all drawbridges. I looked at these bridges and tried to figure out what is done with the trolley powerlines when the bridges are raised, but I couldn't figure it out. As we tooled around, Irena kept up her banter, this time using the boat's PA system, but it was almost completely drowned out by the sound of the boat's motors. There were two Asian women on the boat who kept standing up so that friends, family, or followers (it was hard to say which) could snap glamor shots of them, presumably for posting on social media. A couple times they had to be told to take their seats because we were about to pass beneath a low bridge. By the end of the ride, I'd become pretty sleepy and felt like I might be on some sort of drug. This could've been due to carbon monoxide inhalation. I'd also gotten a bit too much sun, which seems laughable at a latitude of nearly 60 degrees North. With temperatures in the mid-70s and cloudless conditions, this was, we were told, an unusually warm summer day in St. Petersburg.

After the boat ride, Irena took us on a overly-long tour of Yusupov's Palace. Without context or knowledge of the Yusupovs, I kept thinking Irena was saying "usurper" instead of "Yusupov." The Yusupovs were a fabulously wealthy Russian family with origins in Muslim central Asia. That said, it takes a lot of gall to build a fancy palace in a country suffering from rampant starvation. The Yusupovs Palace is huge, though surprisingly tasteful, and was once filled with art, much of which is now in the Hermitage. The palace featured its own theatre (with balconies!), which is what a palace had to have back in the days before television. At the end of the tour, we were shown the rooms where Rasputin was murdered (over the course of at least three attempts), since that is one of the things that happened at Yusupov's Palace. These rooms now contain wax figures representing most of the players in the drama (though, strangely, not Rasputin himself). Gretchen got the impression that Russians are a lot more obsessed with Rasputin than any outsider could ever be, and that he might even have some admirers. Both she and I found the Rasputin material mostly a bore.


Our final destination of the day was St. Isaac's Cathedral, a huge neoclassical structure featuring numerous tall granite columns. It was completed in the mid-19th Century, and so there was a lot of material available about how it had been constructed, particularly the erection of the enormous columns. Similar to the US Capitol (which was built around the same time), its dome structure is comprised mostly of cast-iron pieces, a technique that Irena claimed as a uniquely-Russian invention. The interior had been lavishly decorated with both paintings and mosaics. From any distance, the mosaics also looked like paintings, partly due to the extreme variety of colors used in their individual tiles. According to Irena, during World War II, St. Isaacs largely survived the siege of Leningrad intact, mostly because the Nazis used it as targeting aid. The Russians soon figured this out and began using its basment as a place to store valuables.
Irena had been hurrying us into and out of the various museums without ever stopping at their gift shops. But at the end of today's tour, she took us to a particular gift shop partly so we could use the restrooms provided. Strangely, free tastes of vodka and liquor were available in the gift shop. Gretchen tried some of the liquor and declared that it taste like cough syrup. Neither she nor I had any interest in the matryoshka dolls, amber jewelry, or faberge eggs (all spanning a range of styles). The insects trapped in amber were interesting to me, though, particularly if the amber really dated back to the Eocene (40 million years ago). The insects looked exactly like species alive today.
On the drive back to the boat, Irena gave us the most transparently propagandistic schpiel of the tour. She talked about how Vladamir Putin had come from Leningrad and was fluent in German, something he'd learned as part of being a "diplomat." But it's not hard to learn that Putin was never actually a diplomat; he was, however, a member of the KGB.


Crazy floor detail made with inlays in the Hermitage. These floors must be constantly redone due to the wear of millions of feet.


Girl with a Goat at the Hermitage.


The beautiful da Vinci. Click to enlarge.


A Rembrandt in the Hermitage. Click to enlarge.


Girl with a skull in the Hermitage.


A beautiful Egyptian bas relief in the Hermitage. Click to enlarge.


A Russian warship on the Neva. Click to enlarge.


A weird marble statue of a harpy in the Yusupov Palace.


A two-headed eagle, a symbol of Russia. Donald Trump was recently photographed in front of a fake seal of the USA that featured a two-headed eagle.


A painting-like mosaic in St. Isaac's Cathedral.


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http://asecular.com/blog.php?190727

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