The Munich to Moscow Meander - Part VII:

ENTRANCE TO THE EMPIRE

Санкт-Петербург

 (St. Petersburg)

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

My train left Helsinki and sped through the rainy Finnish forests for two hours. A short announcement on the speakers informed us that we had just entered Russia and would stop in Vyborg for passport control.

"DO NOT LEAVE YOUR SEATS WITHOUT PERMISSION FROM A CUSTOMS OFFICIAL" - they told us in a firm Finnish accent. The train came to a halt in Vyborg station and several officials boarded the train. I watched as two burly guards stood in the aisles blocking each exit from the coach where I was sitting while several female customs agents went up the aisle checking passports.

I had got my Russian visa some weeks before from the consulate in Munich. I noticed, however, that they had misspelled my name in the Cyrillic transcription of my name (leaving off the "d" in Winder). I was slightly nervous that they would catch it and refuse me entry, leaving me stuck on the Finnish frontier.

The customs woman came to my seat and asked for my passport. I handed it over and she took a moment to look through it. Something was taking longer than normal. Hesitating, she handed it back to me. Safe... except she turned back to me and asked to see it again. Oh no. But after a short moment she seemed to decide it was quite ok and handed it back to me.

The officials left the train and we were on our way again. I was now officially in the Russian Federation...

View Munich-St. Petersburg in a larger map

For me, being in Russia was something extraordinarily exciting. As a child of the 80's, the USSR was the great enemy. The Evil Empire. I remember watching Return of the Jedi when Luke pulls a dying Darth Vader to the shuttle bay and my brother Mike informing me that that would be like Ronald Reagan pulling Mikhail Gorbachev through the streets of Moscow. As kids we used to play a hiding and chasing game called "Russian," where the Russian had to seek and capture the others.

So in a way, coming to Russia was a bit like entering the Death Star.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not vilifying a whole nationality, I'm just pointing out the juxtaposition of feelings for the 31-year-old me against the 8-year-old me. Also, I would say that even at that time I could distinguish between the Russians as a people and the USSR as a government.

I disembarked in St. Petersburg at the Finlyandsky Station, where Lenin, returning from exile, spoke to the crowds in 1917 before starting the October Revolution.

I entered the crowded metro and traveled down and down the deep escalators to the beautifully ornate platforms.

St. Petersburg has some of the deepest and most ornate metro stations in the world, perhaps only rivaled by Moscow...

The Soviet hammer and sickle has always looked to me like two instruments of violence and lingers from the psyche of my youth as an antagonizing symbol as terrible as the Nazi swastika. I don't doubt that its designers intended it to look somewhat threatening, but really it was meant to represents the tools of the worker. As I saw throughout my trip, the Russians don't seem to mind it. The experiment with communism was a flawed part of their history, but not one that that they are necessarily ashamed of.

Frieze of early Bolshevik leaders, including Lenin and Stalin...

I rode the metro into the heart of the city and came out onto one of the great canals where my hostel was located...

The building that housed my hostel was an old communal apartment built in 1863 (as seen on the entrance floor tiles)...

The hostel itself is one of the nicest I've ever stayed in. It was only recently renovated and turned into a hostel. They tried to preserve as much of the old stuff as possible (even using the old window frames as mirror frames in the bathroom). I was in a room with six bunk bed (mine up top there on the end). Each bed had two plugs, a reading light and shelf, a lockable nook below, and those nice curtains...

They kitchen was quite well done. They even preserved some of the old tiling and the original wood-burning stove for decoration...





The chill-out room was more modern, with bean bags and three nice Macbooks free for guests to use...

After putting my stuff down at the hostel I set out to explore this great city.

As you can see from the map at the beginning of the post, St. Petersburg is situated upon the mouth of the Neva river and sprawls over several islands webbed with canals.

I first went out to the waterfront...

St. Petersburg was built by Peter the Great after he took the land over from the Swedes in 1703. Peter was all about westernizing Russia and enriching her culturally and made his new city a model of the Enlightenment. Except for a few brief periods, it served as the Imperial capital all the way until the Soviet Revolution in 1917.

The city grew, and is today one of the largest cities in Europe.

An old ship on the river? Actually inside this ship is a fitness center...

This is the Winter Palace, where the Tsars and Tsarinas lived. Today it houses the Hermitage museum (more on that later)...

The Winter Palace and Neva riverfront...

Pretty much at any given moment in Russia there is a bride and a groom randomly dancing somewhere...

I walked further down the north embankment catching a glimpse of those iconic Russian onion domes...

At one bridge crossing some kids had set up a clever system to get money: A lucky rabbit onto which people throw coins. The kids then used a magnet tied to a string to retrieve the fallen money. Lucky indeed!

It got dark and as I started my way back up the embankment some random fireworks exploded...

The city lights went on...

The sun set...

I went by the opulently-lit Winter Palace...

There were people lighting Chinese lanterns and setting them free to float up into the night sky...

It was a beautiful evening topped off by a visit to an Armenian restaurant (and a glass of kvass)...

...

The next day I woke up feeling like I was coming down with something. I had scratchy throat and I was feeling fatigued. This was not good. I looked out the window and was almost relieved to see it raining outside, limiting my options of what I could do that day.

This is always one of the hazards of traveling, falling ill when there isn't time to be ill. Fortunately I still felt well enough to get out and go. So I did.

I decided, however, to take a more leisurely pace and stay indoors so I went to the Hermitage Museum at the Winter Palace...

(These exterior shots I took another day, by the way, on this day it was quite rainy.)

The square outside the palace was the scene of the Bloody Sunday massacre in 1905. St. Petersburg was in the midst of strikes and revolutionary movements due to major dissatisfaction with the Tsars and the ruling class. More than 3,000 workers and their families came to the Winter Palace to protest and, after several warning shots, were fired upon by the military killing and wounding several hundred. This helped precipitate the events that led to the 1917 Soviet Revolution...

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Catherine the Great, established the Hermitage Museum in 1764 with several famous works of art. The royal collection grew and in the 1850's it became a public museum. Today the Hermitage is one of the largest and most renowned museums in the world.

I enjoy art well enough but I'm not a huge buff. I thought that I could maybe breeze through the museum in two hours just to see the highlights... boy was I wrong!

It's not just a collection of paintings, the interior of the palace itself is worthy of some awe...

The famous Jordan staircase...

And stunning ceiling art...

The small throne room used for more intimate royal receptions...

A music room...

Strikingly ornate furniture...

A large study...

Rococo...




A fancy shmancy piano...

Sometimes the rooms were more interesting than the artifacts contained within...

Ornate parquet floors with no two rooms alike...

The main imperial throne room for more public receptions...

In the basement were ancient artifacts and works of art. Egyptian mummies...

Egyptian art is cool any way you slice it...

There was an extensive collection of art and artifacts from the ancient Near East. The museum has so many items in its collection, they have to continually rotate exhibits. It was like Indiana Jones in the basement...

One of the most fascinating of the ancient exhibits was that of the Pazyryk culture. This was an Iron Age people who lived in Siberia. Basically, one of the more obscure ancient civilizations.

I really dug the horse headdresses...

 And a mummy preserved 3,000 years in the permafrost... 

A helmet from the Mongol Horde ca. 13th century AD...

The art became more current as one ascended from floor to floor. Most of the museum is dedicated to paintings...




Do not high-five Voltaire!

Coquettes by Watteau (he was a better painter than pod-racer sponsor)...

An opulent collection of plates and silverware...

Ornate ceiling with the imperial seal: a double-headed eagle...

Archways...

Raphael's Loggia copied exactly from the original in the Vatican...

Chandeliers and ceiling frescoes...

Madonna and Child (Benois) by Leonardo da Vinci. I liked the frame..

 
Madonna and Child (Litta) by Leonardo da Vinci. I'll be honest, I'm not a big da Vinci fan, but probably because I know nothing about art.

The Lute Player (1595) by Caravaggio, one of my favorite Renaissance painters because of how gosh darn lifelike he could paint...

Reception of the French Ambassador in Venice (1720's) by Canaletto. I like his paintings because they are usually everyday cityscapes. He paints like I try to photograph...

Thumbs up for Valasquez's Luncheon (1617). Seriously, I thought the thumbs up was a much later invention...

One of the museum's most exquisite works is The Return of the Prodigal Son (1665) by Rembrandt von Rijn. The softness and the lighting of the scene are especially remarkable...

Another of my favorite painters is the German Romantic, Caspar David Friederich. This painting, Sunset (Brothers) (1830) is on the cover of one of my scores of Beethoven sonatas...

Another from Caspar David Friedrich, The Dreamer (1840), the scene is the ruins of Oybin Monastery, where I visited my first year in Germany...

Large Italian skylights...

On the top floor was 20th Century and modern art.

Dans le Jardin (1885) Auguste Renoir. The colors, the dreaminess of it all just cries FRENCH!

Plac de la Concorde (1876) Edgar Degas. I think a lot of animators have been inspired by Degas...

Le Grande Quay au Havre (1874) Claude Monet. You can capture a scene with realism, but can you capture the emotions you felt when you saw the scene with your own eyes? That's where Impressionism comes in...

Jeune fille au piano, L'ouverture de Tannhäuser (1869) Paul Cézanne. I'm not sure how I feel, but I like Wagner...

A sensuous Rodin sculpture...

View of Fort Samson (1885) Georges Seurat. This is the kind of painting with all the little points that make up the whole...

Thatched Cottages (1890) Vincent van Gogh. Van Gogh is just so gosh darn original...



Taperaa Mahana (Late Afternoon) (1892), Paul Gaugin. Gaugin painted a lot of naked Indians, so this is a nice change...

Danse (1910), Henri Matisse. This famous painting is on the cover of my score for Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. It's actually huge...

Absinthe Drinker (1901) Pablo Picasso. This painting just exudes loneliness. I love that right arm...

Violin et Guitare (1913) Pablo Picasso. This painting is in 3D with thick dabs of paint in certain places...

Tiger Attacking a Bull (In a Tropical Forest) (1909) Henri Rousseau. Rousseau is interesting because he never studied art formally and he never visited the jungle but he painted a lot of very interesting jungle scenes. Maybe his deficiencies are what made his art so original...

Composition IV (1913) Vasily Kandinsky. Kandinsky lived and worked for a time in Munich not far from where I work today. His art is often quite abstract, but I still dig it...

There was a fine view of the palace square from the upper rooms of the palace...

So my planned two hours in the museum turned into over four.  I was so fascinated by all I saw I had forgotten about my illness and fatigue.

For lunch I went to a restaurant themed like a Russian home in the Soviet era. There was nostalgic memorabilia all over, Dominoes on the table, old Soviet movies from the 80's playing on a TV and the waitresses were rude. The food was tasty too....

You really don't have to go far in St. Petersburg to find evidence of the Soviet era. During that time the city was known as Leningrad. They voted to change it back to St. Petersburg in 1991. A street post box...

I went back to the hostel for a nap. It did me good.

Later in the afternoon I visited the Church of Our Savior Built on Spilled Blood...

Some blue sky came out and it made for some nice light on this very Russian-looking church...

I love the conflict of symmetry and asymmetry in these old churches....

The Savior...

I'll have to tell you more about this fascinating church in my next post...

Evening light on the canals...

Evening on the square of the Winter Palace...

Moonrise...

Night on the Winter Palace...

That evening I went to a recommended restaurant for some dinner. I ordered a crepe with caviar for dinner. I had fruit compote to drink and the waitress gave me a gazpacho on the house!

For the main course: Beef stroganoff with buckwheat....

I went to bed early enough hoping that I would feel better in the morning. We'll see...

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