Hi everyone!
I hope all of you are well! Please forgive me for my typos but I’m really tired and hungry now! The only thing I’ve eaten since breakfast is an ice cream cone and it's 7:30 now and I’m quite hungry. More like absolutely famished! Dinner soon!
Anyways, here we are in St. Petersburg. When many people think if Russia they envision the old Russia where people had to stand in line for hours for bread, where there were shortages for everything, where only the rich had toilet paper. That is far from the Russia I have seen this week!
St. Petersburg is both amazingly beautiful and grotesquely ugly at the same time, even on a single street corner! This city has all the grandeur of a long-lived and prominent European city. It has amazing buildings, lots of palaces and wonderful cathedrals, and even one of the largest art museums in the world (the Hermitage). But St. Petersburg also had the pollution, dirt, noise, and poverty of any major city in a developing country. Plus, it has that extra feeling that just lest you know you're in a post-Communist country!
St. Petersburg is a city full of contrast. Beside beautiful historic palaces are the cold Soviet-style cement structures built in the Communist days. Our hotel is one such structure. It is absolutely massive in size, not necessarily in height, but in length. It takes us about 5 minutes to walk from the elevator that we take in the lobby down the hall to our room. In the us, a hotel like this would usually be luxurious... with a pool, hot tub, spa, fitness center-- the works. But here, the provide3 only the simple things that you need to be comfortable, no luxury or elegance. That was the Soviet way--- efficiency was the rule.
I can see why they say not to drink the water in this town. When you turn on the water in our hotel, it's brown colored for at least the first 5 minutes. Even when the color fades, the water still smells a little funky... just like their polluted river!
We’ve had some amazing adventures here so far! Probably our best adventure was today... going to visit the Peterghof palace. It’s a palace outside of St. Petersburg, and is very similar to Versailles In France or Shoran in Germany. It wasn't being there that was the adventure, but getting there!
Okay, so first we had to take the subway to a train station. Not the main station, but a smaller one. Let me tell you about the metro here in St. Petersburg! It’s crazy! First, the actual stations are difficult to find, because they're not marked. Then, you get there, and have to buy a token to put in the machine that will let you in the station. We buy the tokens by holding up our fingers stating how many we need because none of the attendants speak English. Then, you go down this escalator that goes through a terribly long white (but still amazingly dark) tunnel. You feel like you're descending into an abyss. Plus, the escalator rumbles under your feet and you feel like it's going to just fall apart at any moment. Then, you have to figure out which metro to get on. Well, in many countries that's difficult. But, here it's extremely difficult!
None of the signs are in English. None at all. And they use a different alphabet from ours. Some letters sound the same like m, k, and a. Some letters sound different: like h sounds like n, p sounds like r. Then, they throw in some Greek letters and some other letters I’ve never seen to mess you all up. Moscow is actually spelled Moskba. So, the names of places where you want to go on the metro are all messed up and you can't recognize them unless you know the Russian alphabet.
So, we got on the metro which was so jammed packed that we could barely breathe. I had nothing to hold on to but it didn't matter because we were packed together so tightly that I never lost my balance.
Then, we got off at this train station that looked like it was about to fall apart. We went to an attendant who didn't speak English and had to spell out in Russian where we wanted to go- Peterghof. So, we bought the train ticket, and she wrote 10:08 on a piece of paper-- when the train was to leave. It was 10:06! So, we ran out to the platforms, but didn't know which train to get on. Nothing was labeled. So we got on the train everyone else was getting on and prayed that it was the right one. Thankfully it was!
The train was hot, packed to the max. Everybody on it was Russian. The train was packed with about 150 people per car! It was hot and smelly, and yet it was a wonderful and exciting experience at the same time! And strange people were constantly running through the cars, trying to sell things. They would stand at the front of the car and make a 1 minute speech about it. Then, they would go, and another would come!
Many of the Russians use the train to go to Peterghof in the summer because Peterghof has wonderful palace gardens and fountains. The Russians here like to picnic in the gardens, and bathe in the fountains. It was good all these Russians were going to peterghof because we probably would have had a difficult time finding out where to go otherwise. But, even though none of them spoke English, it was okay. We just followed the crowd off the train and onto the right bus, and got off at the stop where nearly everyone else got off, and then followed them to Peterghof!
Then, we got off at a station that we thought was right, but we weren't sure, but most others were getting off so, we did too! Turns out it was right! Then we took a rickety bus whose engine was literally falling out of the thing and went to Peterghof!
Crazy day. I can't believe we made it! What luck! I thought we were going to get so lost!
Most tourists get to peterghof by a boat that can take people there.... Peterghof sits right on the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea. We took the boat back to St. Petersburg in order to save time. Besides, we might not have made it back to St. Petersburg otherwise!
Well gotta go! My time is running out!
Brittany
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