St. Petersburg was our Paris of the East, or the Russian "window to the West," as the city's founder, Peter the Great, once called it.
Despite taking ages to pass a border guard who made it clear that Americans were not particularly welcome, I immediately felt at home in the city.
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| Made it to Russia! Complete with my new Cyrillic name and fresh passport stamp. |
As displaced Parisians, Nicolas and I were immediately struck with a sense of familiarity thanks to Saint Petersburg's wide boulevards, the ornate bridges criss-crossing the Neva River and canals, the grandiose architecture, and the international flare.
Unfortunately, due to the boat schedules and our 72-hour time restrictions, we had to book our departure trip for the following evening, allowing us just 36 hours to see a city that could easily take a week or two. This meant we had to rapidly switch from our leisurely Tallinn pace to power tourist mode.
We were happy to take advantage of the weak ruble, but still felt a bit of a price jump compared to Tallinn, where we could dine and drink like royalty. Still, we didn't feel too pinched as we sat down for meals. Being in Russia's second largest city, it was no trouble to find a place specializing in Russian and Ukrainian dumplings, which we promptly did.
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| Traditional Russian food. Left: Pelmeni, meat-filled dumplings. Right: Varenyky, curd-filled dumplings with cherry sauce and sour cream. A food he happily associates with his late Ukrainian great-grandmother, Nicolas insists I note that varenyky are traditionally Ukrainian. |
Our stomachs happily full, we spent our afternoon running around town trying to check off as many major monuments from the tourist list as possible. The pace of life here felt fast, busy, energetic. Everything was so big, so colorful (notably a trait not shared with Paris), so beautiful. My personal favorite was the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood. It seemed to have come to life straight out of the Candy Land board game we used to play as kids. Trying to see all of Saint Petersburg in just two days was unfair to this city. A photo collage might do a good job of capturing the whirlwind of sightseeing.
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Saint Petersburg in 36 hours.
Left column, top-down: St. Isaac's Cathedral; the view down the Fontanka River from Anichkov Bridge; the Winter Palace by night.
Second column, top-down: the Smolny Cathedral convent; Dvortsovyy Bridge by night; Feodorovskoy Sobor.
Third column, top-down: me outside the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood; red carnations, the most common flower to place at Russian soldiers' graves, around an eternal flame monument. Flowers were there to mark the May 9 anniversary of the end of Soviet involvement in WWII; the Admiralty.
Right-most column, top-down: Nicolas outside the Peter and Paul Fortress; the inner courtyard of the Winter Palace (Hermitage Museum) |
For once, the following morning, the weather wasn't entirely in our favor. Under heavy skies, we toured the Peter and Paul Fortress and then headed for the Winter Palace, once the official residence of the czars (pre-1917 revolution), now home to the Hermitage Museum, one of the oldest and largest museums in the world. I'm not sure exactly how it compares in size to the Louvre, but it certainly gives the Parisian gem a run for its money.
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| Views from inside the Hermitage Museum |
And lest Saint Petersburg look merely like a sparkling monument of the past, here's just one glimpse at how modern and trendy it is, with store fronts à la New York/ London/ Paris.
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| I couldn't help smiling at these store front windows along Nevsky Prospekt, a major boulevard in Saint Petersburg. |
And in honor of Nicolas, I'll wrap this post up with an image of just one of the many Western chains that made it to the Motherland, complete with Cyrillic sign post.
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| Burger King, now in Cyrillic. (For the life of me, why a Frenchman would find *this* cuisine enticing...) |
Before we knew it, we were rolling our suitcases down the sidewalks, doing our best to avoid the major puddles, and wheeling back up the boarding ramps past customs and back toward the European Union. By now, I'm convinced that getting that Russian tourist visa will be worth it, one day.
