Russia Day 4
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.
