In Which We Take a Walk Around Saint Petersburg

20 June

For the second time in writing this journal, I can use this phrase: This morning, it’s official. In this instance, it means the scratchy throat and intermittent achiness of the past few days is now a full-fledged cold. Mark me down as victim number four. Fortunately, John and Rose are in the latter stages of theirs and both have offered to share their medicine with me. This sharing, whether from Groud, who seems to have a Hermione-like bottomless bag of supplies, or between ourselves (recall Lu sharing her pain medication with me), has also been a typical pattern in our merry little band of travelers.

The overnight train from Moscow reached Saint Petersburg at 07:00 and our transfer delivered us to the hotel at about 07:30. Groud had persistently lowered our expectations about the Anabel Hotel but, excepting some of the typical Russian rigidity and peculiarities to which we’d become accustomed if not inured, it proved quite fine once we were able to check in. Nominally, the hotel sits on Nevsky Prospekt (a bit closer to the east end than to the west end though west is typically the direction we walked) but in truth it sits off the street in the second of two inner courtyards. It’s a lovely contrast – coming through the gate to a fairly serene and quiet space that leaves the busyness of Saint Petersburg’s main street quite far behind. (The picture below wasn’t taken particularly close to the hotel but it is a fairly typical Nevsky Prospekt summertime sight.)

I have a photos folder of some of the sights and buildings found on Nevsky that I found interesting. Take particular note of the Anchikov, or Horse Tamers Bridge and some less-than-ideal shots of the Bloshoy Gostiny Dvor which is the oldest store in Saint Petersburg and occupies an entire city block.

The hotel has no lobby but there sometimes is someone – usually a man – sitting at a desk by the door. In my rant about the Michele Hotel in UB, I mentioned the tiny elevator. Well, I think the elevator at the Anabel, accessible after walking up three steps, might have been tinier. I think two people and their luggage squeezed into the elevator at the Michele but at the Anabel it was closer to either combination of two and one. Naturally, we were staying on the fifth floor.

Breakfast chaos

Expecting our early arrival, the staff had set aside a room to store our baggage until we could officially check in. At this point we encountered some typically obstinate Russian obstructionism. The Russian ethos, in my admittedly cursory experience and brief observation, is a bit odd when viewed from an American perspective. If you conform to their rules and expectations, the Russians can be pleasant and helpful. But any deviation from whatever happens to be planned seems to create difficulties. So, when we asked if John and Ann could simply keep the room where we were storing our bags, or if we could sit in the fifth-floor common area and have some coffee or tea until our guide came to lead us on our walking tour we received the same answer: “Absolutely impossible.” Not, “I’m sorry we can’t help you,” or even a simple, “It’s just not possible,” but “Absolutely impossible.” Now, neither of these situations is of any real consequence and we made the necessary adaptations easily. I bring it up here for the purpose of allowing anyone who happens to read this adjust their expectations accordingly should they ever travel to Russia. Even the forcefulness of the denial is simply the Russian way. But in the end, no harm, no foul.

Since we couldn’t stay in the hotel, but didn’t want to wander too far, we went for breakfast to a restaurant a block or two east on Nevsky. Once there we learned that the capacity for getting orders wrong extended beyond a rushed lunch in Irkutsk or a bar in Yekaterinburg. Granted, there’s a language barrier. And granted, there’s an alphabetic barrier. But shouldn’t pointing to a picture and the English translation on a menu pretty well dismantle both barriers? At least six of our eight orders were wrong. And don’t get me started about the things shown on the menu that they didn’t have or how long we had to wait for our change which was, in an unexpected flourish, delivered individually in elegant little boxes. In the end, you really have no choice but to smile (or at least shrug) and move on. And so we did.

Shortly after breakfast we met our guide Mike (yes, really Mikhail but he told me he’d been called Mike since college) on Nevsky outside our hotel and we set off on our three-hour walking tour of Saint Petersburg. I reacted to seeing a sign pointing to a Carl’s Jr. and Mike said that this was the most popular and best hamburger in the city. Later, a quick Google search turned up three each among Carl’s Jr., McDonald’s, and Burger King so obviously, Russians, or at least Saint Petersburg Russians have good taste.

A walk around Saint Petersburg

Join me as we see the sights and learn a bit about the city and we’ll start at the very beginning. Saint Petersburg was founded on 27 May 1703 after a victory in the Great Northern War. This gained Russia access to the Baltic Sea though the war didn’t officially end until 1721. The city was established by Peter the Great and the Peter and Paul Fortress on Zayachy Island became the first brick and stone building of the new city. Peter named the city after his patron saint and eventually moved the capital there from Moscow.

Today the city is comprised of 42 islands and nearly 350 bridges. Its population is nearly five million and it’s the northernmost city on earth with a population exceeding two million. The mostly baroque and neoclassical eighteenth and nineteenth century architecture in the historic city center where we spent most of our time has been preserved and zoning regulations prohibit the construction of tall buildings in the city center. Other than the television tower, these are the tallest buildings I saw

and, even though they aren’t technically in the city center, they were apparently close enough to be somewhat controversial.

There are a number of monuments to Peter the Great in Saint Petersburg and on our walk we saw two of the best known. The first of these,

was erected in about 1800 in front of Mikhailovsky Castle. The castle was built by Pavel I the son of Catherine the Great. (Pavel or Paul has an interesting tie to Malta where I spent some time last summer. In 1798, after Napoleon conquered Malta, Paul I became the de facto Grand Master of the Order of St. John or Knights Hospitallers. If you want to learn more about Malta and the Knights Hospitallers, you can read my journal of that trip here.) Mikhailovsky is also known as the engineer’s castle because in the 19th century it was used for the Army Engineers School. We’ll get to the second monument in the next post because we reached it near the end of our walk.

Note: In keeping with my 2022-2023 reformation of the blog into shorter entries, backdated to maintain their sequence, any comments on this post might pertain to its new configuration. See the explanation in the post Conventions and Conversions.