Travel Journal
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St. Petersburg, Russia: A Personal Saga
February 2020
By Sandra Bertrand
It all started in the chilly early months of 2017, when wanderlust set in from our 5th floor Manhattan apartment. The vacation prospects for July seemed far away, and our ambitions to explore the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania put us even farther. Joanne, my equally travel-obsessed, English teacher partner reminded me that we had an old acquaintance in Finland…another country we had never visited.
“We could fly to Helsinki and meet up with her there,” I proffered.
“Wait,” she said. “How far is a train from Helsinki to St. Petersburg?”
Well, you get the picture. We poured over train schedules on the web, perused the travel books at Barnes and Noble, and dusted off our passports. I began the first of several trips to the Russian passport office in Lower Manhattan to present my reasons for wanting to visit what was once referred to as Peter the Great’s “folly.” As an art lover, I gushed over the chance to finally visit the Hermitage, one of the largest museums in the world. The voice behind the bullet-proof glass simply replied, “If you’re approved.”
We were finally accepted, after prodigious paperwork requesting every job we had ever had (not so laborious for the younger generations). Our passports were stapled with an add-on document attesting to our legitimacy to cross the borders into the land of the Imperialist Romanovs. We began assembling our plans in earnest. Our old-time travel buddies from Amsterdam, Nettie the actress and Annaville the writer, were suddenly available to hop aboard for our grand adventure as well.
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On the 13th of July, we arrived from our FinnAir flight at the M Hotel. It was a pleasant enough boutique hotel tucked into an alleyway within yards of the Nevski Prospekt. The city’s main thoroughfare, it was once referred to as the Street of Tolerance for its clutch of churches of every denomination. I was still a bit shell-shocked from a serenade on the taxi’s radio of Frank Sinatra’s “The Lady is a Tramp.” Was I imagining a rendition of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake?
We had barely signed the register when our pals arrived, the registrar producing from behind the counter a cold bottle of champagne. It was all “on the house” and smiles, hugs, and a toast to Joanne’s birthday ensued. I tried a “Nazdorovie” (to your health), which was the extent of my Russian vocabulary, but our hostess spoke perfectly acceptable English.
“We could fly to Helsinki and meet up with her there,” I proffered.
“Wait,” she said. “How far is a train from Helsinki to St. Petersburg?”
Well, you get the picture. We poured over train schedules on the web, perused the travel books at Barnes and Noble, and dusted off our passports. I began the first of several trips to the Russian passport office in Lower Manhattan to present my reasons for wanting to visit what was once referred to as Peter the Great’s “folly.” As an art lover, I gushed over the chance to finally visit the Hermitage, one of the largest museums in the world. The voice behind the bullet-proof glass simply replied, “If you’re approved.”
We were finally accepted, after prodigious paperwork requesting every job we had ever had (not so laborious for the younger generations). Our passports were stapled with an add-on document attesting to our legitimacy to cross the borders into the land of the Imperialist Romanovs. We began assembling our plans in earnest. Our old-time travel buddies from Amsterdam, Nettie the actress and Annaville the writer, were suddenly available to hop aboard for our grand adventure as well.
- - -
On the 13th of July, we arrived from our FinnAir flight at the M Hotel. It was a pleasant enough boutique hotel tucked into an alleyway within yards of the Nevski Prospekt. The city’s main thoroughfare, it was once referred to as the Street of Tolerance for its clutch of churches of every denomination. I was still a bit shell-shocked from a serenade on the taxi’s radio of Frank Sinatra’s “The Lady is a Tramp.” Was I imagining a rendition of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake?
We had barely signed the register when our pals arrived, the registrar producing from behind the counter a cold bottle of champagne. It was all “on the house” and smiles, hugs, and a toast to Joanne’s birthday ensued. I tried a “Nazdorovie” (to your health), which was the extent of my Russian vocabulary, but our hostess spoke perfectly acceptable English.
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Once we’d reached the open-air tour boats lining the Griboedova Canal, there was no English tour offered. (There were none in Dutch either.) We were a bit miffed at the prospect of a Russian-speaking guide, but at least we could recognize some of the sites from our tour books.
It was a splendid sun-shot day, the skies - not unlike Paris - like a grandiose canopy. We felt like schoolgirls, catching in the air the hint of a wide world beyond the confines of home. Annaville and I bounced up and down, pointing our iPhones at The Church on Spilled Blood with its ornate, onion-shaped cupolas, avoiding certain decapitation as we approached another bridge, pushed back down into our seats by our more pragmatic companions. It was a leisurely cruise onto the Neva River, the shrill Russian tongue of our tour guide fading into the background as we passed the cruiser Aurora, the navy vessel that signaled the fatal storming of the Winter Palace in 1917 with a single shot. On the northern embankment, we glimpsed the Fortress and Cathedral of Peter and Paul, housing the tombs of the Romanovs. We passed an incidental wedding party with a bevy of bathers on the sands below. It was all eye-opening and too much at the same time. |
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Pub Signpost in St. Petersburg
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Upon disembarking, our friends presented us with a tiny porcelain souvenir plate, replete with our four faces snapped no doubt by a cruise photographer. It’s become a little refrigerator magnet that never ceases to make me smile.
Our first night’s dinner followed a stroll through the columned arcades of Gostinyy Dvor, otherwise known as the Great Bazaar - the commercial heart of the city since the 1700s. By this time, we had little patience to search for culinary options. We spied a jolly mustachioed gentleman emblazoned above a nearby pub. We were thankful for such a discovery in a country where sign reading in a Cyrillic alphabet was next to impossible. Shots of vodka preceded a meaty borscht and a stroganoff with a healthy ring of mashed potatoes instead of egg noodles. By the time we retired, I was too tired to consult the itinerary we’d printed out from home. All I knew was that the Hermitage and the Winter Palace awaited us in the morning, and for two “girls” from Bakersfield, California and Nanticoke, Pennsylvania that was enough. |
“Pinch me,” I said to Joanne upon entering the great public courtyard fronting the entrance to the Hermitage. A grey drizzle of rain fell across the expanse, and I stood dumbstruck as a Cinderella-like carriage with a costumed princess glided in front of me. A grand ensemble of buildings lay before us, the most impressive of which is the Winter Palace and the Hermitage which Catherine the Great had built (1771-1787) to house her vast collection of art.
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Once inside, we began our ascent up the wide sweeping staircase to the Russian Baroque State Rooms. From a nearby window we spied a long line of visitors still outside, concealed under their panoply of colored umbrellas.
(Tip: Reservations for a two-day visit should be booked several months in advance to avoid lengthy waits.) The residence is the brainchild of the Italian Bartolomeo Rastrelli, appointed State Architect to the Russian Royal Court in 1738. After a fire gutted the palace in 1837, many of the rooms were restored to their original grandeur. At every turn, the eye is bedazzled. One of my favorites was the Malachite room, boasting over two tons of ornamental stone of the richest green. As for the paintings, it helps to limit oneself to a few examples in this embarrassment of riches. I sought out a Caravaggio and an El Greco before heading for the Rembrandts. When the feet grew weary, we located a lunchroom, promising ourselves to return the next day to ogle the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist display. |
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Dinner at L'Europa, Belmond Grand Hotel
Left to Right: Nettie, Annaville, Sandra, Joanne |
Sometimes spoiling oneself doesn’t hurt. After all, would you travel all the way to Oz and not follow the yellow brick road? We’d booked dinner at L’Europa, the prime restaurant in the Belmond Grand Hotel, to celebrate Joanne’s birthday in style. The six-course dinner with wine and vodka pairings was a $150 investment for each of us. With a shake of her red mane, Nettie announced, “Let’s do it, girls!” We were summarily seated under a gorgeous Tiffany glass ceiling, which the waiter proudly explained was installed in 1904, and presented with the Degustation menu:
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Throughout the meal we were alternately treated to piano sonatas, operatic selections and what seemed to be a few balletic pirouettes on a teacup-size stage at the far end of the room. Eventually we stumbled home, a bit giddier than we’d arrived.
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In the morning, we were back at The Hermitage to see all the Monets, Renoirs, Cezannes, Matisses and Picassos we thought we’d seen in other museums in the original, but hadn’t - a lavish assembly thanks primarily to Serge Shchuken and Ivan Morozov. These Moscow heirs to great fortunes were avid collectors, and we wandered, room after room, with no bells or whistles set off from our close inspection.
Never enough time to fill our cups of curiosity, we headed back to the Church on Spilled Blood, that five-domed memorial to Tsar Alexander II who was assassinated in the same spot in 1881. A riot of color and munificence, more than 20 types of minerals including jasper, rhodonite and Italian marble fill the interior, lavished not only on the iconostasis, but every inch of the surface. The whole effect is a jaw-dropping, claustrophobic experience, jam-packed with participants and their iPhones to capture the ineffable. A much-needed breath of fresh air followed in Arts Square, facing on the northern side the former Mikhaylovskiy Palace, now the Russian Museum. |
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Our late day visit to perhaps the world’s greatest collection of Russian art hardly did justice to the artists or craftsmen represented. What it did prove was that their portrait painter Serov, their master of classical subjects Bryullov and their social realist Repin among so many others could stand with the greatest of the West’s own. A second encounter with our favorite Impressionists was an added thrill. That evening, we strolled around Ostrovskiy Square, named after the Russian dramatist. We stood under the monument to Catherine the Great, the only one in the city. But the highlight by far is the Alexandrinskiy Theatre. It’s a grand affair, especially with its portico of six Corinthian columns, crowned by a chariot of Apollo. Unfortunately, its doors were closed for the season, but lit up in all its golden splendor, it was enough to linger and imagine its glorious history. It was still too early for farewells. Our last day was saved for Peterhof, Peter the Great’s summer palace, and a clear blue sky for our trip on the hydrofoil was an added bonus. |
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Originally conceived by Jean-Baptiste Le Blond following a trip the Tsar made to Versailles in 1717, the Marine Canal allowed the Tsars to sail from the Gulf of Finland right up to the Great Palace. As magnificent as it is, what left me speechless was the Grand Cascade. A sequence of 37 gilded bronze sculptures, 64 fountains and 142 water jets descend from the terrace straight to the Canal and the sea. It wasn’t until we reached the upper terrace for an entrance into the palace interior that we discovered our tickets were for a tour of the ground’s fountains only!
A few minutes of frustration ensued. The truth was…after our visit to the Hermitage and Winter Palace, the real attraction was hopping aboard an open air shuttle cart circling an array of fountains that featured a whale, a great pyramid commemorating Russia’s victory over Sweden, an impressive Neptune and of course, the biblical Eve. A surly cart driver, knuckles tight on the wheel, insisted that Eve was Adam, but we were all having such a happy enough ride, we weren’t about to argue. As the afternoon wore on, we found a bench seat near the Grand Cascade, which afforded enough splendor to last a lifetime. Annaville headed off in search of ice cream and hot dogs and Nettie for a nearby W.C. On the way out, we finally found the ice cream vendor for a whopping $8.00 three scoop wonder. But we were paying guests of Tsar Peter, after all. |
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For our final dinner we returned to our first-night pub, content to be on familiar ground. Sausages and “standard” vodka hit the spot, the wall behind our booth plastered with a poster chart of Russian military uniforms.
I couldn’t help wondering how we would sort out our Russian “experience.” There was so much more to the city than any of us could digest, but at least we’d had a good-sized bite of culture - and caviar no less - to savor for months and maybe years to come.
I couldn’t help wondering how we would sort out our Russian “experience.” There was so much more to the city than any of us could digest, but at least we’d had a good-sized bite of culture - and caviar no less - to savor for months and maybe years to come.
Sandra Bertrand is an award-winning playwright and painter. She is Chief Art Critic for Highbrow Magazine and a contributing writer for GALO Magazine. Sandra was Sanctuary's Featured Artist in May 2019 and is also Sanctuary's columnist for "Travel Journal."
Please note: Sandra is excited to announce that this installment of “Travel Journal” has been translated into Russian by Natalia Koren Kropf. Natalia was born and raised in St. Petersburg, Russia. She is a New York-based artist and current president of the National Association of Women Artists. She is also a poet and enjoys creative writing. The Sanctuary Team thanks Natalia for translating Sandra’s work so that Russian-speaking readers can enjoy a glimpse of an American traveler’s first impressions of this historical city and its many treasures.
In next month’s issue...
Sandra and Joanne visit the capitals of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, foraging out more castles, museums and Stalin-era strongholds. Stay tuned.
Sandra and Joanne visit the capitals of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, foraging out more castles, museums and Stalin-era strongholds. Stay tuned.
