Our last morning in St. Petersburg. Today is the relaxing day, when we take a canal cruise and basically sit all day. At the end of the canal cruise will be the Church on the Spilled Blood, which may not sound relaxing, but might be.
Breakfast with the cruise ships lined up like cars.
Let me briefly explain something. Normally Barbie and I arrive in a European city, we do a little research, and we decide what to see. Since we were seeing St. Petersburg from a cruise ship, and since the Russians have strict policies and advisories about where you are allowed to go, we chose to go on the same shore excursions that my parents had chosen. It was a great decision, and we have seen great things. However, we did not realize that St. Isaac's Cathedral, which dominates the St. Petersburg skyline, was not on the list. And everywhere we go, we have seen its golden dome in the distance, taunting us. Therefore, since the point of the Waste is for you to feel like you are traveling with us, St. Isaac's shall tease you today.
There it is, taunting me. Books tell us it is both the fourth largest cathedral dome in the world and the tallest, as it begins atop massive granite pillars. Pillars so large that when the cathedral was being built in the early 1800's, special ships and a railway had to be built to carry the 120 ton pillars from Finland.
Taunting.
Taunting.
Yes, every Soviet-era car that I see will be photographed. These cars are kind of cute, and knowing that every car in the country looked like this leaves little question why there was money available for nukes and a space program.
Insults and curses throughout the world are likely to be in English. I did not tell you that outside the Hermitage a guy who held out a guide book for me to buy shouted something at me that rhymed with, "Stuck flu!" You know, I bet if a university student based his master's thesis on a study to discover the phrase that is understood by the most human beings on Earth, I do think it would be that expletive from American English.
We climbed aboard our canal cruiser and the tour began.
Taunting, even while we are on the canal.
Soviet era architecture.
Tsarist era architecture.
See the kid waving? On this first bridge, I thought, "Hey, that's cool, a local kid waving to the tourists."
On this second bridge, we all became aware that this young man was going to jog alongside our boat and wave to us from every bridge.
By this bridge, everyone on board was discussing how much they were going to tip this kid.
There he goes, running alongside the boat. By the way, the passageway ahead connects buildings of the Hermitage Museum, which sit on both sides of this canal.
At this point, I was calculating in my head how much cash this kid is going to make from our boat.
The best shot I have gotten of the Peter and Paul Fortress. For the record, it began as a fort to seize and hold the area for Peter the Great. Then, when a fort was no longer needed, its thick walls made it an ideal prison. (Among the early inmates you would have found Peter the Great's son, Alexey, and centuries later Dostoyevsky, Gorky, Trotsky, and Lenin's older brother, Alexander Lenin.) Buried in this fortress you will find all the Tsars, from Peter the Great onward.
A nice look at the Hermitage, with the Old Hermitage on the left and the Winter Palace in the center, with St. Isaac's taunting us on the right.
Double-self-portrait, courtesy of the forward facing camera. Note that a hydrofoil stops right in front of the Hermitage. And that St. Isaac's is lined up accidentally exactly between our touching heads. Taunting.
There is the bridge boy, earning a living with his feet and hands.
The Cruiser Aurora. How important is this ship? Built in 1900 for the ill-advised Russo-Japanese War, in October 1917 its crew revolted against their upper-class officers and placed them under arrest, took the Aurora to the Winter Palace, and fired a blank wall from its forward gun, a signal for their fellow revolutionaries to enter the Winter Palace and remove the provisional government. This was the October Revolution. The Russians refer to it as the world's mightiest ship, because it brought down a government by firing a single blank.
We were told that the building THERE with all of the antennas is the building that was referred to during the Soviet era as, "That building." Because it housed the KGB, and speaking those initials out loud was a sure-fire way to end up in the gulag.
It is amazing that the Soviet Union lasted for 70 years. I learned on this trip that Lenin himself expected the Bolshevik's tenure to barely last. In fact, he said that if their reign lasted 100 days it would be a victory. If you want to be fascinated, look up the process whereby the Bolsheviks ended up in power. The Revolution in Russia took place in two parts, the February Revolution and the October Revolution. In February 1917, the revolutionaries removed the Tsar and attempted to set up a constitutional democracy. In October 1917, the Bolsheviks, a minor party with a few thousand supporters, managed to take advantage of the provisional government's lack of quick action and used the armed forces to seize power, leading to a five year Russian Civil War that eventually gave birth to the USSR in 1922.
Consider the idea that Russia might have been a constitutional democracy beginning in 1917, and think about what parts of European and Global would have been different. I think that the correct answer is Everything.
Yesterday I hoped for a hydrofoil-in-action-shot and today the patron saint of iPhone photography delivered.
In the center of this pic runs a young St. Petersburgian in white and orange, readying himself to smile and wave at the tourists.
Ponder this one; hundreds, maybe thousands, of pictures are taken of this kid every day.
You figure four or five canal tours per day, with forty or so tourists on each, times ten or so bridges...
... this young man makes a few hundred bucks per day because he can jog and wave. He might be the first local I have seen in St. Petersburg with a smile. And if you did some conservative math, you would estimate that his picture is taken more than 100,000 times per year. (It would be more, but I figure during the winter nobody comes to St. Peteresburg.)
The Church on the Spilled Blood. Peter the Great wanted his new capital St. Petersburg to be European, not Russian, but 160 years after his death Peter's heirs built a church that is as Russian as a building can get.
Officially it is the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood. In 1881, Tsar Alexander II was murdered by a terrorist's bomb on the exact spot where this church was built. Tragically, Alexander II was personally inspired by the enlightenment ideals of his time and was instituting reforms to the Russian Empire. Because of his death we will never know how far he would have taken them, but it is not inconceivable that he might have transitioned Russia to a more democratic system which also maintained its monarchy, like many other European nations at that time. After his assassination, his younger brother took over as Tsar and reversed all of Alexander II's reforms, clamping down harder on the people in revenge for his murdered brother. Yet again, Russian history is a series of moments when things nearly turned for the better, yet turned for the worse.
Getting married today? Why not take some wedding photos with the Church on the Spilled Blood behind you?
Inside, the Church on the Spilled Blood is remarkable Every square inch of it is decorated with mosaics from the New Testament. Simply remarkable. It took 24 years to complete, and during the Soviet era was allowed to fall into disrepair. It took another 27 years to refurbish, making it look today as it did when it was new.
A upwards panorama, to give you an idea of the scale of these mosaics. There are five domes, and inside each dome is a representation of Jesus.
I found this one to be particularly Sci-Fi. God is blowing rays of light from his mouth, forming a halo around Mary's head. Perhaps this is how the immaculate conception was achieved?
This dome features a representation of Jesus in his early teens, which is very rare in art. In case you never noticed, Jesus is either a baby or a grown man in art, which makes sense as those are the parts of his life in the Christian bibles.
Barbie noticed this, mentioned it to me, and now I shall share it with you. Everywhere we go in Russia, women pose like models. They do not just stand and smile; they act as if they watch those reality shows about how to become a model and pose as if this shot is going to get them into magazines. That said, if I had this young woman's email address and showed this picture to a friend at a modeling agency, maybe they would fly her to New York. Because the average Russian teen should, in fact, be modeling.
That is the very spot where the bomb went off that took the life of Tsar Alexander II, reformer and enlightened thinker. The revolutionary who set the bomb likely had no idea his actions would set back democratic reform in his country, perhaps permanently.
Back outside, I wanted to share this picture with you. This is Russia. The state that this building is in represents, to me, the state that this city is in. It could be beautiful, it should be beautiful, but it is not.
On the bus ride back to the ship… closer than ever... taunting.
I thought I would share with you some Rubles. This is around three point three bucks.
We had a late breakfast just before the canal cruise, and grabbed lunch at the grill the moment that we returned to the ship. Note that I have a chicken burger with bleu cheese, as well as a hot dog with ketchup. We have passed through Russian customs for the last time and life is excellent.
At the Church on the Spilled Blood, we ran into an excursion from another cruise ship that was, clearly, one hundred percent gay men. After a fun chat, we learned that the cruise ship we have seen in more than a few ports is an exclusively gay cruise with 2,000 passengers. Barbie and I both figure that the night life is tad more exciting on their ship than ours.
Panorama of St. Petersburg naval yard.
You cannot tell unless you right-click-open-in-new-window, but the ship ahead of us is passing through a very small opening between artificial breakers.
When you are on a cruise ship, it is physically impossible to not take this shot a few times. You look at it and you think, "I have to take a picture of this."
Since we are totally off the dining schedule, Barbie and I strategized after our late lunch at the grill that we would hit the Silk Road sushi bar around 30 minutes before they close, figuring that we could get two seats.
A complimentary on-board sushi bar? Why are not we not eating here every night?
I missed taking pictures of the first two plates, which were Barbie's yellowtail with jalapeno (hold the jalapeno) and tuna sashimi.
My order of octopus sushi and tempura shrimp roll.
Eel sushi and eel rolls. Eel, eel, eel, and eel. We love the eel. Why do we not come here every night?
We were fairly full, but I ordered the, "House Special Roll," because you should always order the House Special, even though we had no idea what would be in it. It turned out to be tuna, salmon and I think some shrimp with rice, inside a cucumber roll.
We finished up with some toro, or fatty tuna, for dessert.
Until tomorrow...
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