russia – a trip to moscow and st. petersburg

The trip to Russia started at the 14.11.2005 at 5pm and lasted 7 days – a group of about 40 students, Helsinki railway station, Tolstoy night train to Moscow. The first hours passed quite fast, it got dark, and we had to give away our passports 2 times during border controls. The train stopped every now and then, and drove very slowly the rest of the time. The beds were more or less clean, but way too small for me…

Moscow
We arrived in Moscow in the morning at 10am, and were surprised that our hotel (Roosija) was about 5 minutes to walk from the Red Square and the Kremlin, extremely central, clean, and unbelievably huge. From the entrance hall, we had to walk about 5 minutes through the hotel (same distance as to the Red Square) to reach our rooms, and we got lost more than one time. 12 floors, and at least 200 rooms each floor.
The temperature was mostly around zero degrees celsius, no snow though. I spent most of my time in Moscow walking around in the centre, visiting “must see” sights.

A very short sum up of the Russian history, and facts about Moscow itself:
Moscow has about 11 million inhabitants living in the city, and another 3 million in the suburbs, making it the biggest city of europe. It was founded about 1150, switched being capital of Russia quite a few times with St. Petersburg after this was founded about 1700. After one of the many revolutions this country has seen, and after the civil war from 1918-1922, the communists were in charge. They again proclaimed Moscow as capital of Russia, and started destroying churches, due to the fact that communism and atheism were supposed to be close together (this, by the way, is the reason for the beauty of St. Petersburg – the city remained mostly the way it was because it was not capital anymore, and the communists started tearing down churches and other buildings in the new capital Moscow).
Further plans by Joseph Stalin were stopped by the second world war (by the Russians till today called “great patriotic war”), which delayed and at the end stopped the total destruction of the old part of the city.
After the collapse of the Sovjet Union in 1991 the government started to rebuild old buildings, one of it the “Church of Christ the Savior”, the biggest and main church both of Moscow and Russia.
Today, Kremlin and the Red Square can be found on the UNESCO world heritage list, and with 9 railway stations, 4 airports and 3 harbours Moscow is the most important industrial city in Russia.

What did I actually do in Moscow: First of all, of course, travel with the metro. Cheap, very crowded (we did not manage to get in with the whole group and backpacks), and “nice”, but not as amazing as I thought it would be. Quite a few stray dogs (I hope that is the correct expression) run around in Moscow, the food can be the same price as in Germany or a bit cheaper, but you also can pay way more. There are only few things in English, most signs are in Russian, which requires not only a dictionary, but also a list of the cyrillic alphabet and its translation. On my map for example street names were in English, but the street signs itself were not, thus making it next to impossible to know where I was at the moment …
In Moscow extremely many uniformed people run around – security, police, army. You have them in McDonalds, in supermarkets, on the streets, which does not necessarily make you feel safer, as the police in Russia still is quite corrupt. And they have the right to through you in jail for a night when they catch you drunk on the street, in order to help you not go get a victim of theft or even die because it is so cold.
The traffic in Moscow is amazing – first of all, there are so many cars, and second there is an important rule: They won’t stop for you. Our travel company “Zerkalo” gave us a paper with important tips, and the traffic tip is: “Forget your pedestrian rights unless you like being mangled. Don’t follow the reckless Russian pedestrians blindly.” And that’s true. Don’t even think about it.
On the first day, we had a guided bus tour for 4 hours, which was quite interesting, though I forgot most of the details. There are incredibly many orthodox churches and monastaries in Moscow, and every second building or statue is either about the victory over Napoleon or over Hitler. Some other students in our travel group perceived this as rather disturbing – Russians are still very proud about their role in the great patriotic war, and have a rather … subjective view on the things that happened.
Kremlin, by the way, is the Russian name for a kind of fortress with walls and towers, most of the Russian cities have Kremlins. I personally found the visit rather exciting, due to the fact that there are many beautiful churches inside the Kremlin, and the security issues are next to ridiculous. They even scanned our backpacks (despite the fact that we had to leave them outside anyway). On the other hand, Moscow had to suffer from more than 5 big terrorist attacks during the last years, and they are very sensitive and careful now. Metal detectors in McDonalds and churches is one of the things they have done, and I understand it.
The Red Square is a huge place, which is “closed” every day from 10am-1pm (they put fences around it), and during that time you can visit the corpse of Lenin in the Mausoleum in the centre of the place. I did not go there, but many others did, they said he still looks quite real.
If you happen to find a restaurant in Moscow where you actually can read the word restaurant, and can read the menu in English, too – do not go there, if you are not a rich person, by the way.

Communication: Difficult. Most Russians seem not to speak English or German, though the chance that they speak the latter is apparently higher. And at least according to my experience, they are not the friendliest people. Of course, this is difficult to say, I was only there for a few days, and did not get any bigger problems, but at least I was not treated as human being from time to time. For example, if you want to buy a ticket in the tram, and do not have the proper amount of small coins, they just ignore you (happened three times to me). But one guy of our travel group spoke Russian, and as soon as he started talking to him, they totally changed and were extremely friendly. Strangle people.

My overall impression of Moscow: A huge city, more or less grey. A rather distanced atmosphere, some awesome buildings, nice architecture in general. There seem to be some green areas and nice parks, though I did not really find them. Three days is way too less time to see even parts of Moscow, unfortunately. Definetely worth a trip, if you are not too far away.

St. Petersburg
I liked it much more than Moscow, before I was even there. I had bought a proper guide to St. Petersburg in Helsinki (could not afford two, and the lonely planet to Russia was very expensive as well), and want to sum up some facts first:

St. Petersburg, named after Zar Peter I., was called Petrograd from 1914-1924, and renamed Leningrad after that; it got its original name back in 1991 by decision of its inhabitants. St. Petersburg was founded 1703, at this time at the very western border of Russia, and constructed by very well known architects. The city centre has actually not changed at all since the beginning, and it is just beautiful!
After 1712 St. Petersburg became capital of Russia, and was already a very international city, being able to compete with Paris and London. During 1941/42, the German army tried to conquer the city for 900 days in vain, but about 3 million inhabitants died of starvation.
The city had its 300th birthday in the year 2003, and over 500 million dollar were spent to pay restorations and renovations in the city. Today, 5 million people are living in the city (there is no bigger city north of St. Petersburg on the world), and the whole old part of the city is on the UNESCO world heritage list.

What did I see and do?
First of all, again, the metro. Nice as well, not as awesome as everybody says, though – but it is the deepest metro of the world, which needs no further explanation except from the fact that you regularly see Russians who take out their book and start reading on the way down with the escalator (it is about 70 metres in height). Price: 30 cents per ride. :-D
We took the night train from Moscow to St. Petersburg, this time I slept very well due to the fact that I run around for 3 days already and was extremely tired. We arrived in a snowstorm, and directly started a guided bus tour for 2 hours, which made it impossible to take pictures or see anything except from white, but gave us the chance for snowball fights during the breaks. Of course the bus stopped at a place where we could get “free vodka” – actually it was a shop selling expensive tourist crap, probably one of the relatives of the bus driver or something like that.
The guide from Zerkalo, who was with us from time to time, organizing, was drunk all the time. He is a very nice guy and managed everything well, and earns his money by driving with 40 students to Russia and back every month and getting wasted there. Nice, actually :-)

Imagine St. Petersburg, the old classicistic buildings, huge churches, the hermitage – everything covered in white snow … actually, it was quite a mess, because the wind was very strong, making it impossible to take proper pictures for most of the time. It was quite cold, but due to my equipment staying out for 8 or more hours was okay, but not very comfortable. My boots got wet after a few hours, the jeans were wet as well very soon, but my jacket kept me warm. I spent most of the time walking around, visiting the hermitage and lots of churches in between. To imagine the correct weather situation, just ask yourself why I met several people wearing snow glasses (no joke).

I had a great time in St. Petersburg, and I hated leaving after less than 3 days. I will return, hopefully in the summer, hopefully for at least a week. St. Petersburg has many interesting museums, underground bars and pubs, many special and weird places, and an awesome ******* *** architecture :-). The rivers and the bridges add to the beauty of the city, I have seen the house were Pavlov did his dog experiments, I have seen the hermitage (wow!!!), the amazing Newskij Prospect (again for Stefan: No, this is nothing to read, this actually is the pedestrian precinct), have actually met 2 young Russians who spoke English (!), had a great time with all the funny guys of my group, and found interesting CD shops.
They look like German ones, actually, CDs everywhere. The difference is, CDs cost 3 Euros, look original, but are not. You can either buy the new Rammstein record (wonder who would do that …), and they also sell mp3 CDs (3 Euros for all Apocalyptica or Marilyn Manson songs on one CD!). Wooha.

Hmm … some things from an english menu of a nice cafe we found:
“Hot fritters move with honey” – “prepared as a Schtudel with chees cake and raisin” – “Bakening apple with short maccaroone pastry” – “Austerian Schtrudel baked with fresh apple”

The accomodation in a place without name (more a hostel than hotel, but very comfortable and central) was great, we even had a kitchen and a fridge. Actually, we hadn’t, but we just happened to know the right people …
The prices are moderate, from quite cheap to extremely expensive. McDonalds prices are a little bit lower than in Germany. We started to travel back “home” on Sunday at 3pm, the bus arrived in Helsinki at 10pm. The Russian border control was … funny. The bus was inspected 3 times, four different people looked at my passport, within 1 hour, at different points of the border. The bus had to stop every 5 minutes, and another person in uniform would come into the bus and control the passports. Before the border, we actually stopped to buy booze and cigarettes (and chocolate, hmmmm *g*), and arrived safe and sound (and tired) in Helsinki.
Must … sleep …

Phew. I actually tried to put some structure into this whole thing, but it did not work. I am back now, still alive, and will post some pictures soon. The only thing for me left to say is:

“Listen guys. As I told you, on the left hand side, after revolution. On the left hand side.”

EDIT: I don’t believe I spent several hours to write this huge thing, just because you curious people always have to know everything :-) …