One of the top concerns of international travel, right after finding free toilets in your moment of need, is food. Low blood sugar and unfamiliar cities don’t mix. One moment you’re winding your long, hungry way toward the Guide Book’s top-rated breakfast cafe, the next moment you’re standing in an empty cobblestone street very clearly devoid of anything resembling a cafe, much less a top-rated breakfast cafe thankyouverymuch.

“Alright. Well, what’s the second top-rated breakfast cafe in St. Petersburg?”

And you’re off once again: back through long streets, over small canal bridges, diving through morning traffic with a prayer and a hint of desperation. By now you’re getting crabby. Sure you’re walking through the textured back alleys of St. Petersburg Russia, the likes of which you may never see again in your entire short life, but aside from a quick snapshot of a lady washing her little European car you’re increasingly uninterested in the fact that you’re in jolly old St. Petersburg Russia and by God you could be instantly transported back to Boringtown Kansas without the slightest touch of regret so long as a soft chair and a warm plate of food was waiting to meet you.

But we’re almost to the second top-rated breakfast cafe in St. Petersburg—it’s just around this next corner, and…

…it’s not here. In fact, once again, absolutely nothing of any sort appears to be here.

Do, pray, tell me the intended use for a Guide Book that contains addresses entirely unrelated to the destinations described therein?

But wait. All of St. Petersburg is under construction at the moment, and there’s a great grimy thick blanket of construction covering that bit of the street down there. Sweet heaven above, let there be some sort of food behind that plastic sheet!

Andrew trots down the street to take a look:

Great merciful gods, there is! And how!

Cheesecake pies and cabbage pies. Green onion and egg pies. Chicken, hare, or whortleberry pies. Lemon, apricot, or apple pies—with or without cinnamon.

Break out the rubles, it’s time to feast!

Take it from me: with a belly full of warm pie and good black tea, the world is transformed.

Full and happy again, we set out to properly enjoy the rest of the day. The sun had returned to its typical hiding place behind drizzly gray clouds, and we let ourselves enjoy an unhurried day exploring by foot and by boat the churches and bookstores and canals of St. Petersburg.

I won’t bore you with a comprehensive list of the places we visited that day, but I will mention that even if you’re not the church-going type, if you ever find yourself in this city do take the chance to visit The Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood. (Or “Big Bloody Church”, as I’ll call it.)

Big Bloody Church was built by Czar Sonny Alexander on the very spot where Czar Poppy Alexander was assassinated on the street. The story as I heard it was that the first bomb failed to kill Poppy Alex, after which he made the mistake of stepping out of his carriage to taunt the attackers for their failure, which gave them a swell opportunity to rectify their mistake.

In consequence, his son built a church on the site of his dad’s murder, and as a dramatic touch left the bare cobblestones showing where the deed went down. Because sonny boy was in a gruff, pro-Russian sort of mood at the time, the style of this church eschews the European models that inspired the rest of St. Petersburg and goes all-out hard-core Russian.

The onion-domed exterior is beautiful in the way that the great all-out hard-core Russian churches can be, but the interior is…stunning. Every visible surface is covered in gorgeous, detailed mosaics. That’s over 7500 square meters of mosaics. And the kicker? The church was only used for a few years before—surprise—Russia goes secular and churches become warehouses. This one stored potatoes. Later it got upgraded to opera sets.

How ’bout those humans, eh?

Anyway, as I said: I won’t catalogue the whole St. Petersburg trip. But to sum up: cool city. Less hectic than Moscow. Very pleasant, as long as you stay safe on the subway. Recommended.

That night we went back and gathered our things from the hostel, hopped on a bus to the train station, and boarded our very last overnight train. Destination: back to Moscow.

We’re home.

It takes some getting used to; “The people around me can understand what I’m saying? For real?”

I’m still waking up at 4 in the morning and going to bed before sunset, but we’ve more or less recovered. As such: on to St. Petersburg.

We arrived early into a beautiful morning. St. Petersburg gets about fifteen sunny days a year, and we got one.

The first order of business was getting to the hostel. Normally that wouldn’t merit mention on the blag, but the St. Petersburg subway is not entirely incidental to our story.

One thing you have to understand is that the Russian subway system is a marvel. Much more so than New York’s. For one thing, if you’ve waited more than two minutes for a train you get the feeling something’s wrong. But the physical structure alone is also more impressive. The old blue trains thread deep under the earth through endlessly varied art deco stations, each unique and each (usually) beautiful. And when I say the trains go “deep”, I mean “really really deep”. When you go down into the subway system, you’re going down into the subway system. Down where you will be safe from, say, bombs. Which is not coincidental.

Some of the stations try to pretend they’re near the surface. They might, for example, sport oval “windows” in the ceiling to mimic the open sky with mosaics of tile. But everyone knows better.

Anyway, the extra special thing about the St. Petersburg subway is that, unlike the Moscow subway, it’s not safe. Before Andrew’s parents visited, Beth had read about the new technique of the Petersburg muggers: two guys will pin you from either side so you can’t move your arms, and then someone will remove the contents of your pockets at their leisure.

Maybe Andrew’s dad looked especially like a tourist, or maybe he looked especially vulnerable, or maybe both. Whatever the reason, one day in the Petersburg subway they heard a shout and turned to see Andrew’s dad pinned from both sides.

What happened next makes me chuckle every time I think about it. I’ve never met Andrew’s dad, but if he’s anything like Andrew he’s a confident fellow not given to being pushed around. With a roar—GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME—his father backed up into a wall and then came out swinging.

I like to imagine the look of surprise on the muggers’ faces: “This was…not what he was supposed to do. Ummmm….PLAN B!” Deciding they’d bit off more than they wished to chew, they ran. No one was hurt and nothing was lost. But still: scary.

So on this bright morning on our own trip to St. Petersburg, Andrew and Beth warn us again: this is not the Moscow Metro. Be alert. Then they hand us our little subway tokens. Elizabeth and I glance at each other with wide eyes, hug our bags closer, consolidate our precious documents somewhere our sweaty hand can hold them tightly, and begin the long, slow drop into the belly of St. Petersburg’s subway system. It was the first of two nervous rides through the Petersburg Metro. Happily, we make it through un-mugged and rise back up into the streets of St. Petersburg.

In his poem The Bronze Horseman, Pushkin writes that St. Petersburg is infused with an austere harmony. It is a befitting description. The broad streets are flanked by flat, unbroken walls colored lime and apricot, tan and pale sea-green. The streets are tremendously wide, even the cobbled back alleys. The city feels…noble. The buildings are straight-backed, well-bred structures that do not crowd each other or compete for attention, but instead stand confidently and self-assured in close rank.

Gazing down a broad prospekt, it’s hard to imagine the kind of man who would attempt to build this city from scratch. But that’s what Peter did. He was smitten with the cities of Europe, and wanted his own city to mimic them. Everywhere you see the influence of Europe: the canals, the cathedrals, the parks.

Where would we be living amidst all this? As noted at the time, Beth and Andrew managed to find us some very cool digs. Not only was the Hermitage literally around the corner, but the hostel itself could not help but have class, considering the building that housed it.

With our bags safely locked up, we began our first day in earnest with a visit to, you guessed it, the Hermitage.

What can I possibly say about the Hermitage? It’s huge! Huger than huge! You cannot possibly imagine how huge it is! And it’s full of crazy amazing art! And big golden rooms! And big crystal rooms! And multiple throne rooms, in case you have multiple queens with nothing to do but receive multiple foreign dignitaries! We spent the whole day there!

Maybe the most treasured time at the Hermitage was spent with Rembrandt. Elizabeth in particular had been looking forward to seeing these pieces for months.

By the way, don’t sweat the spacing too much when labeling your priceless works of art. Fit in as much as you can, but whatever doesn’t fit just squeeze on somewhere at the end:

At this point, I’d like to stress very strongly that I turned my flash off for the few photos I took in the Hermitage. I stress this because I was the only goddamn person who did so. I cannot say how infuriating and heartbreaking it was to watch flash after flash fired off at these paintings. The “guards” in these rooms—and I use the term loosely—were old women who sat sleeping in chairs in the corner.

It was truly stomach-churning, and it reached a fever pitch at the two Leonardo’s. Below is a shot of the crowd buzzing around The Madonna and Child. Not one of these people actually went up to look at the painting. Every single one just wanted to take a photo. A crappy digital photo. Usually with a flash.

The idiocy burns, on so many levels.

You can see Andrew there in the background, about ready to knock some cameras to the floor. I was feeling similarly.

But. Idiots aside, the Hermitage was amazing.

When we finally reached our saturation point (”My eyeballs won’t look at paintings anymore!”) we left the palace. Beth found us a Georgian restaurant, and after our second tense Metro ride (Andrew and I were so ready to rumble) we had our first taste of the utterly delicious Georgian cuisine. Afterward we skipped the Metro entirely and walked home over the river and through the Petersburg night.

Not a bad first day, but there was more still to come.

Today’s our last day; we leave tomorrow morning.

I’ve only made it through half our time here on the ol’ blag, but I’ll get to the rest eventually. Just not while we’re here.

In the meantime: NO PRANCING.

(Image credit for prancing man: Andrew’s sister Jane. I never managed to grab this shot while in the Metro.)

To properly capture the full arc of day five, we have to begin before dawn.

Russian train cars are charming in many ways, but climate control is not one of those ways. (Also septic disposal, which is accomplished by simply flushing the toilet onto the tracks—but I digress.) Some cars feature a top window that tips open, but we would not benefit from this feature until our second night. Our little room grew very warm that night, and the film of sweat left on our skin from our sprint to the station didn’t help. At 3:30 AM, giving up on falling asleep, I left the compartment to relieve myself, which was bad timing because we’d stopped at a station. The restrooms are locked any time the train is anywhere near a town (see above re: septic design), so it was another half hour before that bit of business could be accomplished. The hallway felt ten degrees cooler than our compartment, so I grabbed my book and pulled down a hallway seat to read. I eventually did get a few hours of sleep that night, but we were all slightly dazed when we pulled into Petrozavodsk at 8:45. We did our best to bathe with a few wet wipes, pulled out fresh T-shirts, and trooped into the little Soviet train station.

One quick, over-priced cab ride later we were at the Karelia Hotel. We searched for some breakfast but the proud owners of the fancy new Karelia Hotel also had a rather un-fancy but over-priced buffet breakfast, and the cafe down the street wasn’t open yet. Instead we wandered down to the hotel’s Pony Club (ooolala!) and waited for the bus that would take us to the boat dock.

To reach our island destination we would be riding Meteors: 70’s-era hydrofoil boats boasting a vivid green paint job and designed like a spaceship from an old sci-fi magazine. They cut the three-hour boat ride down to one, and have a little capsule of an observation deck to boot.

Our destination was Kizhi, the island museum. The first view from the Meteor was quite a sight:

The theme of the museum is “wood”. Russians really like wood, even if it’s clearly fake. Everything in Beth’s apartment is wood, and if it isn’t wood, they cover it with fake wood. Kitchen floor: fake “inlaid” wood linoleum tiles. Bathroom walls: fake wood wallpaper. Bathroom baseboard: different fake wood wallpaper. Bathroom door: fake wood veneer. Same for the subway car interiors. Which is odd, but also kinda cool in a retro sorta way.

This island, however, was all the real deal. Old wooden structures collected from all over Russia: big churches, little churches, windmills, merchant houses, farmhouses, cabins. All made entirely of wood. No nails, no metal fasteners; just an ax and a damn good carpenter.

The light poured down from a cotton-cloud sky, strange Russian birds chirped in the grasses, and the noise and the heat and the smog of Moscow was long gone.

At the end of the track we discovered the prize: playground!

Hey, what are those kids playing on? Maypole!

We wanna play on the maypole too!

Ahh yeah. Rocking the maypole.

We’re like, professional level maypolers. Check out these moves.

And theeeeennnnn….

Snap.

Due to a frayed, weather-beaten rope, Andrew comes crashing to the ground. Ruffled but unharmed (near miss!) Andrew bounded up, and we all bounded off for the return boat. Shortly after boarding, the other three conked out.

I opted for the observation deck again. Because, look, there was all this to breathe in:

Not an awesome sight, so much as an overwhelmingly beautiful one. And, for me, shaded by melancholy. It’s a sad thing to look at a beautiful piece of the world, and know you will see it only this one last time.

~~~

By now it’s around 4:30 PM, with a half hour left on the Meteor. We have no concrete plans until our next train leaves at 11. Beth had mentioned earlier she’d like to find a “banya” that night, but she didn’t know where one might be and hadn’t found one on the Internet. I didn’t really know what a banya was, but since I was (inexplicably) not feeling tired, I did have an idea of how to find out.

During the day we had befriended two young women: Maria and Svetlana. Both are from Petrozavodsk, but Maria attends the University of Minnesota and has lived in the U.S. for the last eight years. Maria is the sort of cheerful, outgoing person who must make friends with nearly everyone she meets, and as soon as she heard us speaking English we quickly made the Minnesota connection, learned she had a friend that went to Carleton, and the chit-chat just rolled on from there.

I climbed back through the Meteor, found Maria, and explained that we were really hoping to find this “banya” thing, and did she know of any? She said she didn’t, being out of town so long, but Svetlana (the quiet one, since she doesn’t really speak English) sure did. Before we’d left that boat we had a hand-drawn, two-sided map (in Russian and English) detailing the three best options near the train station.

Armed with this gift, we thanked them profusely, hopped on the city bus, and headed back downtown. After a quick bite to eat at an odd fashionista cafe where all the cool kids in Petrozavodsk seem to hang out, we set out to follow Svetlana’s map.

Now, I was rather charmed by Petrozavodsk by this time, with it’s soviet-era vehicles and smaller-city vibe, but it’s true that pulling off the main drag from the train station things started to look a little sketch. Beautiful when lit by the long-setting sun, but not really the neighborhood any of us expected to find a nice place to bathe…

Our hearts began to sink. Maybe we were reading the map wrong. This couldn’t be right. Now we’re just going to have to trudge all the way back, sit in the smelly station for three hours, board the train tired and unwashed, and try to sleep through another hot night. Do not want.

Wait, though. There’s a little sign that says CAYHA. (Sauna.) Looks like it roughly corresponds to #1 on Svetlana’s map. Not much to see from the outside, but…..hell. Let’s just go in and see.

40 bucks to have the whole damn building to ourself for an hour? Well, you sure can’t beat the price, but who knows what kind of run down, unpleasant little room lay behind the…

Helllooooooo CAYHA!

Giddy with delight, we took our showers, grabbed our towels, rushed past the billiard tables, and began baking ourselves in the dry heat. For a full hour we alternated between the heat and the cool pool. The sweat of the train rolled away, the grit of the Petrozavodsk air dislodged, and we sank with satisfaction into a limp, unhurried relaxation.

Svetlana and Maria, wherever you are: thank you again.

With just the right amount of time to spare, we rolled back into the train station feeling like new human beings. Beth and Elizabeth ducked into a market to find us all some dinner, we pulled our bags out of the train station locker, and we settled in again for our second overnight ride. This time south, to St. Petersburg.

We’re back from St. Petersburg and points north. E has a vicious blister on her little toe, and I… well, let’s just say I appear to have unwittingly consumed some Petersburg water, even though I thought I had carefully avoided it. (Teeth brushed with bottled water: check.) Aside from that and three days of cumulative sleep deprivation, we’ve all returned in one piece.

Now that I’m back with the lappy, I’ll begin catching up from where I left off: Russia Day 4.

The day before our trip north was relatively calm up until the end. We broke our fast with blini and kvas.

Blini are a scrumptious wrap, made savory or sweet, similar to an egg crêpe with wheat. We also sampled the kvas, which is kind of like a mix between non-alcoholic beer and coke. I reckon it could grow on me, although I’m not craving it like the blini.

Setting out with happy blini bellies, we headed off to see some art. Engaging their best Russian accents, Beth and Andrew instructed us on how to look more Russian (don’t smile), and managed to sneak us in the museum at the “I’m a native Russian, not a rich tourist hoping to get hoodwinked” rate. Well, almost; Beth and Andrew got the native rate and E and I got the student rate. But this ritual would be repeated at nearly every ticket counter over the next few days with 100% success rates thereafter. Because the Russians? They really like to stick it to those tourists. To the tune of 3 to 5 times the native Russian rate.

Anyway, we saw a bunch of art. Thanks to a rich Russian merchant who decided to collect many important pieces, protecting a number of politically sensitive works, and then building a big ol’ building to share the love. Portraits and sculptures and an amazing artist from the turn of the last century named Mikhail Vrubel—an artist I had never previously heard of and will never now forget.

Stepping out into the sun, we took a quick zig down to the bridge of locked trees (my own name; I don’t know the real one), where newlyweds come to mark their commitment with a big metal padlock on a delicate metal tree (only one of several pictured here):

Do they ever cut any of these off? I have no idea.

By now it was about 4, and our night train was due to leave at 6:20, so we zagged back to the Metro. “Plenty of time to get back, pack, and catch our train!” we told ourselves.

Time to catch it? Yes. But only just. The Twitter archive records our near miss, written moments after we collapsed into the coupé, sweating and huffing and quivering from adrenaline.

But we’d brought food, and we had 14 hours to recover, so we were in good spirits nonetheless as we set off by rail into the north.

Day three was pretty quiet. Owing to the perfection of the weather we decided just to head out to one of the parks, accompanied by some chocolate croissants.

Tonight we get on a night train bound for St. Petersburg and points north. We won’t be back to Moscow until Sunday, so updates will probably be twitter-only until then.

I’ll leave you with this egg carton to admire in the meantime:

We set out under a white sky that drizzled indecisively most of the day.

The Russians really value their authors. The gentleman above wrote a thick book on World War II. The horse heads you can barely see in the background are set in the bank of a hill and, when the water is running, appear to be laboriously fording a river. Downstream brass “pages” of the author’s notebook float away in clumps. The sculpture here is quite creative—something we’d continue to notice later in the day.

But first, we visited the biggest church in Moscow:

Stalin, you might be curious to know, dynamited this church to build a swimming pool. Granted, his original intention was to build the world’s tallest building, but seeing as the cathedral was on a riverbank, the foundation for this new building promptly flooded. Even Stalin couldn’t ignore the fact that they’d picked perhaps the worst possible site for a skyscraper—oops—and so in an effort to turn lemons into lemonade they built the world’s largest swimming pool instead. (Now that’s comedy.) This enormous public pool was open all year round, and the heat that kept it swimmable in the winter also gave the whole thing a permanent shroud of steam. This shroud was apparently so thick and impenetrable that it was used to conceal more than one murder. Hey kids! If you find any bodies be sure to tell the lifeguards.

Luckily, the church’s destroyers carefully documented it before they blew it up. So they rebuilt the cathedral in the 90’s just about exactly as it was before. No photos allowed inside, so you’ll just have to come here to witness the spectacle of the interior.

Moving on, we headed off to the former Southern-most tip of Moscow: the high-falutin’ convent where the Czars sent the wives they didn’t want anymore. Incidentally, the subway station on the way was lined with white marble from the original detonated church.

Next to the convent was a lake:

And next to the lake was the cemetery. The cemetery was like nothing I could have expected. Lush, green, and tightly packed, this is where all the famous, rich, and well-connected put their bones. As Andrew explained, with the lack of religious iconography they had to come up with some other way to make their headstones special. The results are…well, see for yourself:

But the pièce de résistance has to be:

We finished up the cemetery with a visit to the graves of Chekhov and Stanislavski. The original actors from the Moscow Art Theatre were all buried in the same section, and have the seagull insignia marking their stones.

All for now. We have to get started on day 3.

Well, let’s get this photo out of the way right out of the gate:

We arrived at around 4 AM our time, and stumbled into the puddly, smokey Moscow airport in a daze of excitement and slight trepidation. Apart from a sour young customs lady who snapped at me for not filling out the proper card everything was smooth. (They didn’t give us—or even mention—these cards on the plane, you just had to magically know to go find a little table that had them in the corner.) Beth and Andrew picked us up outside customs (Green Lane! Nothing to declare!) and we rode into the city under a very gray and drizzly sky.

We attempted to push through to bed time without sleeping, as a sort of all-out kamikaze effort to reset our internal clocks. As such, we all headed off to the market to get food upon arrival.

And something to drink, although I’m afraid we didn’t decide to go with the Super Hooch:

Shortly after this photo was taken a young Russian lady walked up to me and indicated that I was not supposed to be taking photos in the grocery store. I’m not sure why, but I got my super hooch shot, so I mumbled “sorry” and wandered away.

About this time we’d been up for 24 hours straight. Elizabeth was doing remarkably well. I think she actually got a few hours sleep on the plane, but even so: remarkably well. I, on the other hand, was hitting my limit. I could tell this because, aside from the crippling daze, everything seemed hilarious. Finally, I gave up when I looked into my sisters cabinet, and, spying this chocolate bar, broke down into my first episode of truly hysteric laughter:

Wiping tears from my eyes, and willing myself to stop laughing, I decided it was time for a few hours of nap.

I’ve been told that your first day waking up hung over in Russia is disconcerting. The ceiling has wallpaper and the walls have rugs. And you’re lying looking at all of it from what seems like the opposite wall.

Whatever. The nap helped. We later took the subway to Red Square, which is beautiful in the twilight, by the way, and then headed home for a dessert of “Poncho” cake, and a good 12 hours of sleep.

I wonder what we’ll see today?

On Saturday Elizabeth and I are headed to Moscow. I am calm about this as long as I don’t look at any Cyrillic.

In honor of this, my first trip to a country where I don’t speak the language (i.e. a country that doesn’t speak Ammmerikan), I’ve convinced myself that it is actually a reasonable thing to join Twitter.

Life on the Internet is like an oil slick. It gets larger and larger, and thinner and thinner, and less and less substantive, but it never goes away.

I am: Chris_Ashworth. Here Hear me tweet.

Because my sister found this, and WAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA: