Boots on the Loose

Founded by Peter the Great back in seventeen hundred and three, Saint Petersburg recently had its three hundredth birthday. The name was switched to Leningrad in nineteen seventeen when Lenin rose to power. But was quick to switch back around nineteen ninety one when the Soviet Union fell.

Saint Petersburg is a place I have been wanting to visit for many years now. I don’t know what it was about it. Something to do with how it looks in pictures, perhaps? We ended up enjoying the city very much. But I hate to say it – Moscow wins the contest by just a little bit. Perhaps the uniformness of the buildings in Saint Petersburg. Perhaps the ever-so-slight roughness to things.

Always best to keep expectations of a place down, I guess!

We are Rule Addicts

The other day Jen made a comment that has stuck with me. We were in a town called Listvyanka on the shores of Lake Baikal. We were en route to the trailhead of the Great Baikal Trail. To get there you pass through a bit of a beat-up neighbourhood – partly due to the tough winters, and partly to do with Russian politics. Plus probably other things I’m unaware of.

The road was a mess, corrugated sheet metal fences everywhere, extremely aggressive-looking dogs barking in protection of their masters’ homes. The houses ranged from very rough little log cabins, practically sitting at a forty five degree angle due to all the frost heaving in the ground. To massive, oligarch-style mansions that look like they came from one of the world’s top ski resorts. An insane mix of people with more money than they know what to do with, and people with barely enough money to scrape by.

She said, “man, does this ever make home seem like a boring place.”

…not boring, like there’s nothing to do. Boring, like safe. Like, nothing dangerous, or interesting, or out-of-the-ordinary ever really… happens.

She’s right. And that got me thinking a lot about the repercussions of that. And more importantly, why is it that everyone at home is always so worried/concerned/stressed about every little thing? When really, there is relatively little to nothing (of great importance, that is!) to stress about?

Stress for Survival

Clearly, humans have evolved to feel stress. It is a survival instinct. Without stress, we wouldn’t have the fight or flight instinct. Without stress, we would have starved or been killed a long, long time ago.

Stress is in our DNA.

And unfortunately it is always there. No matter how good or how bad the situation around you is.

Zoe tells us stories about working in the Central African Republic right at the point where civil war recently broke out. I can imagine people would be feeling a lot of stress about whether or not they were going to live or die that day.

We were recently in Mongolia where being shot and killed is completely a non-issue. But we met a family there who just got over a very tough winter. Much of their yak herd died. The family probably won’t die from hunger because of it, but they did seem worried that it could end up being a very tough year for them.

I noticed one of the less-well-off residents in his yard on our walk in Listvyanka that day. He isn’t going to die from war, and his garden and livestock looked much too healthy for him and his family to be hungry. But he did have a mountain of firewood he was hastily trying to prepare to keep his family warm and well.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could somehow stop worrying and just be happy at the level where we are not being shot at, and we are warm and dry with full bellies?

What Happens When Real Problems go Away

On the extreme other end of the things-to-worry-about spectrum, the society I come from is so rule-obsessed, we have gone crazy.

Anything that has a remote possibility of a less-than-perfect outcome has a rule cast upon it.

And for some reason we are becoming more and more obsessed with following those rules. To the point where people go out of their way to point out to someone else that they are breaking a rule. Like some sort of vigilante.

People yelling at each other for not wearing a helmet while bicycling on the sea wall. People screaming at each other for not using a turn signal while driving a car.

Gross.

We coat our playgrounds in rubber for fear that our children may fall and scrape a knee. And we don’t let them walk to school anymore because we now think it is too dangerous. 

It could be cold, dark, and raining back at home. And there you will see a pedestrian standing on the corner in the middle of the night. Getting wet. Not a car to be seen. Waiting for the pedestrian light to change colours.

Oddly, we will actually still sell you cigarettes if you want to buy them, but they will cost you a fortune. And there’s basically nowhere left you are allowed to smoke them. Perhaps they should just be made illegal at this point if we are going to worry so much about them?

I was trying to explain to an Italian guy the other day (who seemed very keen to move to Canada) about how you aren’t actually allowed to buy a bottle of wine and drink it on the beach. He really couldn’t understand what I meant. Not like, in disbelief. More like, actually not understanding. Like it was Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity. Or something.

I had to explain it a second time, and add examples before he got it. I may have changed his mind a little about moving over, I think.

Apparently back at home you will now get a ticket if you are caught drinking a coffee while driving your car. Drinking a coffee??

C’mon. It has gone too far.

I have often tried to figure out why our society is going the way it is in regards to this rule addiction. And quite simply, it is because life has been too easy for too long for us. And no matter how easy life gets, at the end of the day we are humans. And as humans, we must worry about something.

Perhaps what we need are some real problems to worry about for a while. Like having no food, or heat, or a gun pointed at us. Perhaps then we will learn to take it a bit easier on things that really aren’t of great importance.

Trip Update: Saint Petersburg

A relatively quick four hour train ride from Moscow, our seats are easily the nicest of the entire journey from Xian, China.

Upon arrival to Saint Petersburg we manage to decrypt the overly-complex metro system and take three different metro lines to get to our apartment. A few days later we end up walking back to the train station to pick up tickets for the next leg, and the walk only takes around thirty minutes!

We decide to change things up and rent a place on Airbnb for Saint Petersburg. We are met at the apartment by the cleaning lady, Svetlana. Possibly the best name in all of Russia. The place is clean, but pretty rough around the edges. But for only fifty dollars a night, you can’t hope for a better location.

For the first of our three days, we hit the streets walking. We start with a walk through a park that spits us out in front of the “Saviour on the Spilled Blood” church. I give it two whole-hearted thumbs up. Truly one of the best churches I’ve seen in my life.

The exterior has all the charm of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow. And then some. But the interior puts it to shame. You haven’t seen finer mosaic work than what is on the inside of this church. Absolutely stunning.

We set our sights next on the beautiful Peter and Paul fortress that stands tall on the other side of the river. In doing so we do a loop that crosses five bridges, allowing us to set foot on four different land masses in only a few hours.

The fortress is home to the remains of the Romanov family, Russia’s last Tzar family. They were executed in 1917 at the location of the Church on Spilled Blood in Yekaterinburg. Apparently there was much deliberating before the remains ended up here.

With only a couple hours left before closing, Jen and I huff (hoof?) it back to our side of the river, and onward to the Yusupov Palace. A neat place to walk through but honestly, after the upcoming grandeurs of the Hermitage and Faberge Egg museum, it now seems hardly worth it.

Noteworthy of the Yusupov Palace however, it is apparently where Rasputin was killed and thrown into Saint Petersburg’s frozen river.

He was Russia’s greatest love machine. And someone didn’t like him.

An awesome dinner at a Georgian restaurant (Georgian food and wine is REALLY good) and out for a cocktail. In the bar walks what is obviously a Russian oligarch and sits near us. But he soon picks up on our accents and our Russian oligarch turns out to be Tom from West Virginia.

Very nice guy, we start the conversation off with a round of vodkas including a toast by Tom to us. Because that’s what they do in Russia.

Tom has been living in Saint Petersburg for a very long time as one of the bar owners. He goes on to explain the horrifyingly small number of tourists there are visiting the place this year. Basically, due to the political story we are all being fed on the news back at home.

And that is clearly why he is so over-the-moon to see us visiting the city right now. Very cool.

Aware of the fact that the next day is going to be another big one, we head back at around one o’clock in the morning. The sun is as down as it gets and the sky is still bright blue. We are a relative stone’s throw from the arctic circle and tonight marks the start of Saint Petersburg’s White Night celebrations.

Motorcycle after obnoxious motorcycle is zipping by us as we walk home at speeds likely pushing two hundred kilometres an hour. I don’t know what it is. Perhaps there are no speed limits in Saint Petersburg, or perhaps the police all go to sleep at night. But every night the street racers come out to play like ghouls. It is definitely a thing here.

For the record, Vladimir Putin is from Saint Petersburg. And there are many pictures of him doing silly activities on t-shirts and coffee mugs everywhere. It seems to fit really well with the rollerbladers, nightly street racing motorcycles and daily jet skis buzzing around the rivers.

A mere two blocks from our apartment, we pass through the iconic arch the next morning. The gateway to the Hermitage.

In the same league as the Louvre in Paris, or the uffizi in Florence, the Hermitage can display around thirty percent of its three million piece collection at one time. For the record, three hundred thousand art pieces requires an extraordinarily large building to house them in.

The building was built as a palace in the seventeen hundreds for Catherine the Great. Later converted to an art gallery. And it fits the bill, size and beauty wise. In our six hour visit, we see only a small sample of what there is to see.

Similar to the motorcycle ghouls at night, the tour buses show up at the Hermitage like daytime goblins. I will never understand where all these people go when not at major sites like the Hermitage. Walking around town, there really are so few tourists out and about.

But at the Hermitage? There are thousands upon thousands of tourists. It is exhausting. At points, we hunt out less desirable things to look at, just to take a break from the crowds.

In front of one of the (relatively small) Da Vinci paintings, there works a woman physically holding people back from getting pushed into the painting. Because a hundred people are trying to take a photo of it at once. Many wanting themselves to be in the photo with the painting. I can’t help but to just shake my head and move on to the next painting by boring old Raphael, or Rembrandt, or Picasso, or …

Three o’clock rolls around and we must move on. Me, deep down, secretly happy to. We have tickets to go see the Faberge egg museum and our tour starts at 4:10pm sharp. And we have a city we need to walk across to get there.

There is a reason I lose a pound a week when travelling.

Faberge was a Russian jeweller (with a French surname) that built these INCREDIBLE little eggs, most commissioned as gifts to people of great importance. Many of them would take a team of people years to build. And would have incredible details worked into them, like a functioning clock with a rooster that pops out on the hour.

The Faberge egg museum is actually someone’s private collection of these eggs. Among many other things that Faberge also built. The building it sits in is yet another gorgeous palace, probably the nicest we have seen so far. The main attraction room houses a dozen eggs. Apparently the owner purchased ten of them from the Forbes family in America for over one hundred million dollars. (I believe there were more eggs too that just weren’t on display)

We head out of the second museum of the day and hunt down a well-deserved cold one.

They call Saint Petersburg “Venice of the North”. Or maybe they don’t. In any case, one of the things to do is to take a boat tour through Saint Petersburg’s canals. A fine way to spend an hour at the end of a very long day.

The next morning sees a major turning point in our trip: our great travel companion Zoe gets on her flight back to England 🙁 Leaving Jen and I holding the reigns into Estonia after one last day in Saint Petersburg.

But before all that, we decide to make use of the second day on our Hermitage passes. So into the French Impressionist area we head. Beautifully, it is actually in a completely different building. So there are little to no crowds.

So many paintings from artists so famous, even I know who they are. Rooms filled with dozens of Picassos, Monets, Van Goughs, etc, etc. And almost no one in there but us. Spectacular.

We leave with just enough time to squeeze in one last symbolic pint of beer with Zoe. Rush back to the apartment and off she goes.

Jen and I off to tie up some lose ends before our exit of the country the following (very early) morning. After all, one can’t leave Russia without a Russian doll set, a Russian hat, and a shot glass with Lenin on it, right? Russia has certainly nailed the tourist trinket market.

One last walk along the river, we end the evening enjoying a beer at an outdoor cafe. With the sun trying unsuccessfully to set on our left, and a local band playing in the square that flanks the Hermitage right in front of us.

As the motorcycle ghouls start to increase in numbers, we give our final one hundred ruble note to the bartender and call it a night.

Thanks for everything you’ve shown us, Saint Petersburg. And thanks for everything you’ve given us, Russia. I hope to see you again sometime.