St Petersburg II

As long as no one spaks to me, I feel confident in my Russian. I can recognize the alphabet, find my way on street maps, and say please, thankyou and a few other words as if I were a native. Ok, it's obvious that I'm not when I stand under a sign with about 20 characters on it sounding it out.

Our 3 days in St. Petersburg were fun, although somewhat tiring as the city is sprawling and when the sun doesn't start to descend until 10 pm, it's dificult to know when to call it a day.

Life in St. Petersburg's Metro system (which by the way plunges so far undergound because it was meant to double as a bomb shelter) seems to mimuc life above ground. Everyone is on the move. No one strolls. They have determined feet and they negotiate the many road hazards with surprising ease - (Open man hole covers, missing chunks of sidewalk, pot holes, bits of knee-high wire poking up).

No one smiles above ground either but at least they have an excuse. Their mouths are either puckered around cigarettes or opened wide around ice-cream. Being only 48F out desn't seem to deter the Russian appetite for ice-cream.

If anyone is sitting down, it seems it's because she is paid to do so. I say "she" because it's the old Russian women who sit at museum entrances to make sure no one walks in the wrong way or doesn't pay. Ands, it's the women with babushkas that sit at public toilets to collect the 14 cents to take a pee. We even saw an old woman standing beside a line of porta-potties. Yeap, these cost money too.

They rubel you to death in Russia. And they rubel the foreigner even more. The local cost to enter the Hermatage was about 60 cents. The foreign price is 30 times that. But for $10 a ticket, I can't complain. The Hermitage is awesome. The rooms in the winter palace are as impressive (maybe more so) than the painting and artwork on display. The celings are hand painted in intricate detail. The floors are inlayed wood to mirror those designs. Tables and enormouse vases are made of lapis, malechite and other stones/ They left us in awe. If you ever make it to St. Petersburg, you have to see the Hermatage.

Most of St. Petersburg is grand architecture. Unfortunately it's also grey and drab at the same time. The beautiful St. Issacs Cathedral looks magnificent, but something about it being dwarfed by taller buildings makes it seem to lose some of its greatness for me. You really have to be on top of a building to see it. But the insides of the cathedrals are amazing works of art.

A lot of St. Petersburg is under construction right now. Scaffolding and work crews are everywhere. Hopefully this means they will fix some of the crumbling buildings to their former glorious states. One spectacular looking Turkish Mosque with a huge oneion-domned tiled roof was in ruins. The scafolding was rotting away. They have a lot of work to do. Mini-vans and buses too are in a state of decay, as are many of the soviet-style apartment buildings. In America, most of them would be condemned.

When we first arrived, we saw, along the canal, a man rowing a small boat next to a floating rusted gas tank. The grandness of St. Pete is offset by the filth and decay.

But now, we are off to a grander city - Moscow. We leave on the 11pm train.