I've recently had the unnerving discovery that I've been living in Russia for some considerable length of time now. To be precise, I've been here for 7 months, and now all of a sudden, there's less than one month left. I'm certainly not using this as a 'light at the end of the tunnel' style of remark, far from it, academically my time here has been the most useful of any of my previous 16 years of education.
Anyway, the realisation prologue aside, the past couple of months since I've last updated this have been as eventful and action-packed as any since I've been in Russia. The beginning of April saw a brief re-excursion to Sheffield, and as this journey was like each of the previous journeys, it was also punctuated by my own idiocy on at least two occasions. Firstly, my bus over to Riga had been scheduled for an 8:00pm departure, despite having booked it myself, I hadn't actually checked this and had rather obliviously assumed it was 10:00pm. Oh well, a €20 replacement bus ticket for the morning it was.
On my way though I had realised that my migration card, the card that needs filling in on arrival and handing in on departure had been removed from my passport. Instantly on realisation, I was aware exactly where it was, and that there was nothing I could do about it, being in my folder in my room. Time to twist the truth and explain that I'd lost it sometime over the last 4 hours, which incredibly surprisingly brought about a successful reaction from the Russian passport officials. Me 1-0 Russia.
Since that trip to England, John had embarked upon a visit to Russia to sample its numerous delights, in a kind of, sort of, cultural exchange programme after I had visited him in Limoges in my last blog post. Having collected him at the airport, there's nothing like a marshrutka journey from the airport to give him a baptism of fire into Russian life. Said marshrutka (a kind of bus, which is actually just a bloke in a minivan who stops to pick up/drop off wherever people request it) only narrowly avoided crashing into the car in front at one set of lights, this isn't particularly abnormal.
After a brief two day introduction to St Petersburg and the main bulk of its tourist attractions, including St Isaac's cathedral, Kazanskii Cathedral and the Hermitage, we were on our way to Moscow along with Helen, Rachel and Lucy on the standard third class of Russian train travel, as previously described, platskart. I wasn't going to let John come to Russia and not show him it properly now, was I?
The journey from St Petersburg to Moscow took nine hours overnight, which is ridiculous really when I tell you that a high speed rail link is capable of doing the same journey in two and a half hours, but when you consider that for a nine hour train journey, we paid just £15 each way, it's not bad in comparison to the 10 minute journey into Skipton costing £3.50 in Britain, which is also much less fun.
On the whole, the Russians found our British citizenship absolutely fascinating, after much alcohol was dispensed from the Russian's seemingly never-ending arsenal of beverages, they had moved the topic quite neatly from football onto politics, much "yes, I quite agree" ensued before we had arrived in Moscow for my first venture into the capital.
The Russians we met on the train, I'll let you make your own mind up on who's Russian and who's English.
Moscow is an absolutely enormous city. Reading the invaluable Lonely Planet guide on the morning of arrival had taught me that more people use the Muscovite underground system than both the London and New York underground systems combined. This city is a completely different beast to the Petersburg atmosphere I've grown accustomed to.
Nonetheless, weary from the overnight travelling, we checked into our hostel which was extremely conveniently placed in the vicinity of a metro station and just off the main road heading towards Red Square. After a short snooze, we thought we'd check out Red Square, being the thing in Moscow that everyone bangs on about all the time. No. Being a couple of days before Putin's inauguration and a few days before Russia's gigantic victory parade ceremony, there was absolutely no access to Red Square or the Kremlin for us, and this would continue to be the case right up until the day after we leave. Fine, let's see what else Moscow has to offer.
This would be a continuing theme, Izmailovsky flea market was also nowhere to be found; the football match we bought tickets for had been inexplicably postponed for 24 hours; and for Helen, she appeared to be wearing the wrong kind of clothes to access the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. I think I'm just destined to be cursed for any kind of travel plans forever.
We did manage to see plenty to make the trip worthwhile though, the lovely Gorky park was a delight to spend the afternoon in whilst the Moscow heat entertained us. Russians do seem to love their parks; the Summer Gardens in St Petersburg have just re-opened after a 2 year restoration period, I'll do my best to report these to you on my next update, but aside from this, Russia is teeming with parks of all sizes and levels of beauty, which is brilliant when you consider the significant upturn in weather over the past couple of months.
Aside from Gorky park, we definitely saw enough of Moscow to render the trip a great success and a lot of fun. Even with the closure of Red Square, we still managed the obligatory tourist photos outside St Basil's Cathedral (that mental one with loads of colours), wandering down Arbat (Moscow's main street away from the Kremlin) and with temperatures in the mid twenties, acquired an unlikely Russian tan.
St Basil's Cathedral, the mental one with all the colours.
Moscow seems to be an incredible city, and one in which is very quintessentially Russian, much more so than St Petersburg, everything from the extremely well serviced public transport system to the extremely well decorated underground stations to the extremely heavy police presence to greet Putin's eventual inauguration. I'm not altogether sure which city I prefer, but then, I'm not sure that anyone will necessarily be able to answer that with a simple yes or no. St Petersburg has its imperialist charm and is very arguably Russia's cultural capital, whereas Moscow definitely has a higher sense of 'going on' and bustle about it that you just don't really see outside of capital cities.
Once we'd arrived back in St Petersburg, John had 4 hours to catch his plane, so straight to the airport it was to bid him adieu on his voyage back to France. Promptly followed by me realising that I'd left my phone on the train after it had fallen out of my pocket, yep, one final mishap to seal the trip. Not to worry though, a replacement from a Russian phone shop, complete with novelty Cyrilic alphabet keys and a camera, cost me £7, making it the cheapest camera I have ever bought.
Since then, I've been to Peterhof, a huge palace and garden complex on the outskirts of the city which is not entirely unlike Versailles and the Schonbrunn palace in Vienna. Filled to the brim with fancy fountains and gold domed palace buildings, this is Russia at its finest and most imperial. You could spend almost any amount of time just strolling through the gardens and relaxing, especially if, as we did, you go on a hot day.
Peterhof and its fountains (All photos from this post courtesy of Helen, check out her blog about Russia also at http://helenswiressurvivorsguideto.blogspot.com)
The weather in St Petersburg has picked up enormously recently, it seems almost alien to think now that there were points where the thermometer threatened -20 temperatures and walking without falling over was a triumph. These days we're disappointed by temperatures below 20, and one day we even enjoyed having the highest temperature of anywhere in Europe when we experienced 28 degrees in St Petersburg.
Another phenomenon of being here in the summer is the White Nights. It doesn't bother getting dark here until gone midnight, which as you might expect is somewhat surreal. Indeed I'm writing this post at 10:20 and the sun is still shining in my eyes. What's even better is that there is still almost a month of it getting even lighter, which I'm going to take as total compensation for the ridiculously short days of the Petrozavodsk era of my year abroad.
That's about all I can really think of for this post, I apologise that I've essentially condensed two months worth of activity into about 10 minutes of reading, especially when I've done so much, but I guess the two aren't particularly conducive to prolific blog posting, I'll definitely write another one before I leave though.
In the meantime though, good luck to all of you doing exams in Britain at the moment, and I make no such apology for enjoying myself here.
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