If you were the Baltic Sea and I were a cup.

Okay. I might have been just the slightest bit wrong about Petersburg. I will review the evidence, and you can judge for yourself.

Exhibit A. My friend Charlie is working there for the summer. This means that we got to hang out a bunch, and the following took place:

a. an interview with a drunken Russia at a little market. Charlie, whose version of the evening's events you can read here, doesn't give credit where it's due. Mostly to his own patience. He must've talked to this man for 10 minutes, in the course of which d.r. asked six times, "Do you know Russian?" (Answer: Obviously.)

Not only was this accompanied by hand gestures, but the man grabbed Charlie by the shoulders and shirt, gave him a lecture about his beer choices, then proceeded to get out his ratty notebook and write down Charlie's information. D.R. also lectured him about a city tour and some other b.s. I couldn’t hear because it was a man-only, confidential chat. Charlie is completely right that I got a kick out of it. I made no effort to help him; instead I documented events for you (and for YOU, readers of Charlie's blog who never get to see him in action):

b b . b. an evening at the Irish pub where they played a lot of western music, in the course of which I realized I’m not the only one who really digs this:

c. viewing of St. Petersburg's bridges at night. The bridges are illuminated when it gets dark, and then a bit later, around 1 am, portions of them are raised for big boats to pass underneath. It was pretty spectacular. Look here:

and here:

Charlie illustrating how the bridge mechanism works:

And here's what I would have done if Charlie weren’t so common sensical (“uh, sure, if you want to fall in the Neva”).

But Lizachka, you’re saying. Charlie is not a permanent fixture of Petersburg. That doesn’t really count. That's not very nice of you, but point taken:

2. Peterhof. Yes, it's true: this is one of the most beautiful places I've been. And I almost didn’t go. Thank you to those of you who expressed in no uncertain terms what a life-altering experience it could be (that would be Olya and Olya) and no thanks to everyone else.

So Peterhof is Peter the Great’s summer estate, which has been greatly expanded since he designed it. It was wrecked during the war but there’s been extensive renovation. If I lived in St. Petersburg, I would be a regular visitor. Also, I would get married there, preferably to an oligarch who would buy me a piece of the property before fleeing the country.

Let’s discuss at great length.

So when you get off the boat

you see in front of you a long boulevard with a canal. At the end of it are huge fountains and the palace at the top of a hill.

Wow, you think. How wonderful. Well, Moscow-jaded veebs says that. You would more likely gasp in awe and start making plans to move here. But wait! On the grounds there are both wooded areas

and more than one nice beach.

Here’s one of the brides.

This is a landscaped terrace on the outside of the one of the smaller palaces.

There are a series of gardens around the palaces, and this one

included a fountain that was suspiciously similar to the one in Millennium Park (open mouth spouting water, unpredictable timing, low water level and all). I suspect whichever jerk designed it ripped this one off.

This fountain, without any machinery, rotates.

Here's the view from the steps of the palace looking out towards the Gulf of Finland. We did a tour inside the palace but a. you’re not allowed to take pictures there this year and b. those kinds of overly ornate baroque/classical rainbow rooms leave me kind of cold. My favorite part of the tour was actually going underneath the palace to see the fountains' internal workings.

From the spot in the picture above, I walked down a short set of stairs and then back underneath the black and white floor to get into the stone passageways. After you go through the pipes, you come out to stand at the level of the fountain itself, a place that is not only covered in water but constantly getting hit with the spray from other fountains. It was like Louis XIV's version of a water park.

[Don't look too closely -- I'm frowning for some reason. I really don't know.]

Not sure yet how you feel?

How bout now? Are you ready to come visit?

Exhibit C/Begrudging Admission: The people in St. Petersburg are much nicer than Muscovites. Maybe they’re in a better mood because their city is prettier or maybe they’re just used to tourists, but it was a pleasure to have people smile at me when I spoke with them in a way that didn’t convey contempt.

Exhibit D: the Dostoevsky factor. How could I not be charmed by a city that was home to such fantastic artists? Like Jpey, I snuck some illegal pictures.

Dostoevsky's study.

There were a lot of other contributing factors, like four days of glorious weather with only a wayward rainstorm, cheap cab rides, charming waitresses, and the color of the Hermitage – oh wait.

Exhibit E: The Hermitage. I guess maybe from watching Russian Ark (what's that? -- ugh, it still makes me shudder), I had this image of the museum as a dreary, dark place. But it’s actually incredible. So the Hermitage is the biggest museum you can imagine, set up in the winter palace of the tsars. Lots of rooms are exhibits themselves, but what’s really astounding is the breadth of art contained there. There’s some incredible statistic about how looking at piece of artwork a minute for the rest of your life wouldn't cover a fraction of what's there.

Here’s what it looks like from the outside:

Inside it alternates between disgusting (full of tourists/opulent) and amazing.

Finally, I'd like to draw your attention to two things. First St. Petersburg's anti-corruption campaign takes the form of these stylized ads. Here the fist is crushing "corruption." Moscow, not surprisingly, has nothing along these lines.

Second, look what I found on the shelves of my local bookstore.

Just to really underscore the difference between the cities, the night train back to Moscow was waaay less interesting/wonderfully old fashioned than it sounds/Cary Grant made it out to be, and the conductor hated me. Now that I think about it, she was probably from Moscow.

So I'm back home, where I can scowl all day if I want to, bitch about grimy streets and bad weather, obsess about the state of Russian media, and not have to worry about tourists getting between me and morozhenoe.

Turisty

Yesterday Danielle and I hit all the high points of the Kremlin:

1. Ticket office, where the woman refused to honor my Harvard ID as a real student id, even though the sign (alas, only in English) promised a discount for foreign college students. A bilingual shouting match ensued, with me, pointing at my id: "It says student!" Please note what I actually said was, "It says студент!" as if that would help. And her saying, "ISIC only" very sternly. And then me saying, "The sign says student!" All of this took place through the tiny window at the bottom of the glass, which forced me to stoop awkwardly in order to talk to her (doubtless a set-up deliberately constructed to demoralize would-be troublemakers). We went back and forth for a while until I was shamed into handing over the extra 150 rubles.


2. I'm sure this is blasphemous, but this (the State Kremlin Palace) is maybe my favorite building there:




It's very downtown Cleveland 1965, which I know is not really the point here, but I still love it.












3. After the cathedral square, we moved on to “The Secret Gardens” (I can’t say this without hearing the only Springsteen song that makes me cringe). It was here, amidst the elaborate flower patterns and in the brilliant Moscow sunlight, that I had my first taste of Russian morozhenoe. It was magical; I don't know if you can tell, but that goofy look on my face is actually one of bewildered wonder.


How to describe the taste? There aren't true flavors -- one's first impression is simply of intense fakeness rather than any specific taste. This is quickly followed by overly sweet, delicious vanilla, like syrup (in my case -- there is chocolate as well). The texture is similar to a marshmallow's, but it's chilled. I imagine Russian children must believe that this is how clouds taste. For me, I would describe it more as... vicarious nostalgia.

[Actually, I'm thinking: I am totally trying all the other flavors.]

The only thing missing was Dimya; we could have a picnic and I’d tell him my views on free media. He would swoon over my brilliant analysis, buy me ice cream, and ask me to accompany him through The Secret Gardens. I would admire his navy suits, tower over him, and garble my syllables. We would be perfectly awkward to/for each other.


I won't bore you with the rest of the details of our tourist activities, but I will say that Annunciation Cathedral smelled like Widener's stacks, I really enjoyed the circa-1993 wedding gowns we saw, and the secret to Moscow fashion appears to be combining as many different trends as possible (Jodhpur/cargo/harem capri pants? Fabulous. Mullet/mohawk/braided rattail? Super chic.).

Day 1.5

Everyone:

1. Dima Bilan looks grosser than ever, maybe even grosser than you thought possible. The life-sized billboards of him certainly caught me by surprise. [If you don't know who he is, google image search, then thank your lucky stars you're not seeing what I am.]

2. I appear to look like I know what I'm doing. In approximately six hours on the street (to be fair, about two hours of that consisted of my loitering creepily in metro stations), four people have approached me to ask me something. Probably something legitimate, although I can't be sure. Possibly they all wanted information about how to get somewhere, maybe they asked what time it was, they might even have inquired about where I got my awesome shoes. But the point is, I have NO IDEA what they wanted, which leads me to number three.

3. I haven't the slightest idea what I'm doing here. I mean, I can use the metro, but that may be the end of my abilities. Make change? Nope. Light a gas burner from a match? Maybe one time out of ten. Use my cell phone? Absolutely not. This makes me somewhat hesitant to charge ahead with my interviews/carrying on a normal conversation with a Russian.


On the plus side:


Our kitchen is larger than mine at home.














My room is fantastic and contains...












a statuette of Ferdowsi!

















Our entryway: to the left the exterior set of doors, to the right Danielle's room. Straight ahead: Ten Thousand Persian Proverbs, General Linguistics, Means of Connection of the Signifier and Signified in Modern Tajik Literary Language, and so forth.