A Petersburg Adventure

Sorry to have fallen off the face of the earth, dear friends/family/readers. I’ve actually had a lot of work lately. It’s hard to believe that just a week ago I was in the middle of my 42 hours in St. Petersburg.

At 9 p.m. we left the dorm for the train station. We waited there for a little while before our overnight sleeper train departed around 10:30 p.m. After dropping our backpacks in the teeny-tiny rooms, we proceeded to celebrate my acting classmate Chris’s birthday. Between this, the hot and stuffy nature of our car, and how my mattress continually slid off (thus taking me with it), I think I maybe got 3 hours of sleep total before arriving at the St. Petersburg train station at 6:45 a.m.

We got off the train and I was suddenly filled with love for Mother Russia. Perhaps this was because patriotic music was blasting throughout the station. We made our way to a Coffee House (it’s a chain here phonetically spelled out in Cyrillic) where we had breakfast and waited around in our various zombie/slap-happy states for our bus tour at 9 a.m.

The bus tour was great, largely thanks to our wonderful guide Olga. In addition to near-perfect English, she knew a lot of interesting facts about the history and architecture of the city. For four hours we drove around the city, visiting convents, cathedrals, churches, and other scenic lookouts. The city’s architecture is beautiful, and with all of its canals St. Petersburg gets many comparisons to cities like Venice or Amsterdam.

After dropping our bags at the hostel, we had about an hour for lunch before we met for our guided tour of the Winter Palace, which houses the Hermitage museum. Once again we had a great English-speaking guide who took us around for about two hours. The Hermitage is immense and incredible, containing artists from Da Vinci to Picasso. I found it kind of overwhelming, because in addition to the works themselves the building is a work of art, with gold encrusted rooms and galleries filled with intricate designs. At 5 p.m. when the tour wrapped up I was tempted to go back to the hostel and shower since I was so exhausted. Luckily Laura wanted to stick around and explore more, and I’m glad I did too, because when will I get the chance to be in the Hermitage again? We wound up finding a great area with a collection of 19th century décor.

Despite my exhaustion, I was determined to get some more out of the day. After showering, I set off with Joe, Rachel, Laura, and actor classmate Faith to see the nearby Church on Spilled Blood, which looks similar to St. Basil’s. After taking photos we wandered the nearby market, which was closing. We then met up with our leaders Tanya, Nastia, Polina, and acting classmate Ed for dinner at a Georgian restaurant (I think I’ve successfully managed to have Georgian food at least every two weeks here). I passed out around midnight back at our hostel, which was thankfully near the main area of the city.

After breakfast at 8 a.m. the next day, we boarded a bus for Pushkin town, which is technically part of St. Petersburg but on the outskirts. There we visited Tsarkoe Selo, Catherine the Great’s Summer Palace. With Olga as our guide once more, we followed her through rooms covered in gold, the famous amber room (walls are made of mosaics of amber, it’s really incredible but no photos were allowed in that room), and much more. We also walked the grounds a bit—luckily it was sunny despite being chilly enough for a hat and gloves, even though it was April. We also walked around the grounds of Pavlosk, Catherine’s son Paul’s palace.

The bus dropped us off in front of the Alexandrinsky Theater around 2:15 p.m., where we would meet again to see the Alexandrinsky’s theatre museum and show at 5:45 p.m. Laura and I got off the bus and booked it to the Russian Museum. When we arrived there was a line of people at the gate and a sign saying that the museum was full, and they would let in more people when the coat checkrooms had more room. We were torn: we had limited time and other sights we wanted to see, but the Russian Museum was at the top of my list. Thankfully good things come to those who wait, and after just five minutes they let people into the museum. Although we had to go through this museum at a rather fast pace, we managed to see all but the folk art section in 90 minutes AND visit the gift shop (I got a deck of cards with pictures from the museum for us to play during our epically long travel plans to India and Greece). This was probably the highlight of the trip for me. I’ve really loved our Russian Art History course, and seeing them in reality was exciting. Laura and I kept pointing out the works we’d studied and snapping photos, discovering some new faves in the process. When I showed one to our prof Anna on Monday (Ilya Repin’s Sadko), and asked her what she knew about it, she told me that I have “progressive taste.” I hope this is a good thing. We also wound up seeing a bunch of artists we learned about the next day, which was cool. This was also the place where I saw my new favorite sculpture that I have lovingly nicknamed Zombie Baby, since it looks like a zombie baby and is really ridiculous for a piece of 19th century sculpture.

At 4 p.m. Laura and I were finally starting to get really hungry, but we still wanted to climb to the top of St. Isaac’s. So en route we stopped in a Teremok, got ham and cheese blinis to go and ate them as we walked (this is not exactly the easiest thing to eat and walk with at the same time). We were concerned that it was going to close before we got there, but we made it with a half hour to spare. After climbing the 211 stairs, we found our friend and acting classmate Erikka at the top. Once we had enjoyed the view, the three of us made our way back down and walked along the canals back to the Alexandrinsky theatre. We were quite proud of ourselves for cramming so much into our free time. We had amazing seats at the show that night, Brecht’s Man=Man, and it was one of my favorite productions thus far. I’m going to write an article about how well it exemplified Brechtian staging.

After the show got out 10 p.m., we had an hour to eat before we got our bags and walked to the train station for our train departing at 12:40 a.m. Thankfully the cars were a bit more spacious, not hot, and my bed didn’t fall off this time. I’m sad we didn’t have more time in St. Petersburg, but grateful for the experience. The city is so different from Moscow: fewer cars, less busy streets, cleaner, more beautiful. Although I do think that if Moscow took down half of its blaring signs and lights it could look similar. Also if cars stopped parking on the sidewalks.

In many ways the trip felt like a culmination of everything we’ve been learning. I felt like I was able to appreciate every detail so much more because we had learned about it. I feel so lucky to be able to immerse myself in another culture and its history. As our Russian film history prof Galina said, “You can’t boil in your own soup; you need to learn more about other cultures to enrich yourself.”