#635 Saint Petersburg

Of course, there is much more to Saint Petersburg than the food!

For one thing, we have 18 hours of daylight today between sunrise at 0455 and sunset at 2258.

The city is beautiful.  Kelly and I went to the extra trouble and expense to get a Russian visa that allows for the most flexibility in our travel.  Nearly all (95%) enrichment voyage passengers did not get the visa.  Here are some of the 5%.

Also known as Venice of the North, Saint Petersburg is crossed with a web of beautiful canals.  There are 22 bridges that cross these canals and the Neva River that must be raised to let ships pass.

Subway travel on the Saint Petersburg Metro is another fun mode of transportation around the city.  It is one of the deepest, busiest, cleanest, and prettiest subway systems in the world. 

Two beautiful masterpieces that we saw on this visit include the stunning Church on the Spilled Blood:

 And the Summer Garden adjacent to the Summer Palace of Peter the Great.

Yours in counting ourselves lucky to find ourselves in this beautiful city again,
Mary

#634 Food in Saint Petersburg

The food exploration continues in Saint Petersburg!

A bustling farmer's market with honey, pastries, fruits, vegetables, meat, and so much more:

 

 

A donut shop to rival Spudnuts:

 

 

 A tea bar offering bubble tea with chewy tapioca balls:

 

 And a street vendor selling corn on the cob for the cornhusker in our group:

 

On board the MV Explorer, we are celebrating Russia in the dining room with borscht for dinner and in the Glazer lounge with White Russian cocktails.

Yours in gastronomical celebration,

Mary

#633 The Friendly Faces of Saint Petersburg

As we step off the MV Explorer in Saint Petersburg, we immediately encounter 3 friendly and familiar faces.

Just past the immigration officials, we spy our first familiar face: the violinist who plays for hours each day at the Lieutenant Schmidt embankment.  He and Kelly are good friends.  Smaller cruise ships can sail up the Neva River and dock here, much closer to the city.

Alisa, a Russian tour guide, remembers us from our last visit in August 2013.  She is leading trips for this enrichment voyage too, but since we have a Russian visa for this visit, we are exploring on our own and won't be hanging out with Alisa this time.   

Our third familiar face is Kira, a SAS F13 student who has now graduated and lives in Moscow.  And we F13 alums reap the benefit of her visit to Saint Petersburg.  

Yours in enjoying the friendly faces of Saint Petersburg,
Mary

#581 Europe's small towns

Thinking about the first seven ports of our fall voyage, we discover that we enjoy getting out of the big cities to explore the small towns and the countryside.

From Saint Petersburg, we travel to Vyborg and walk Monrepos Park.

From Hamburg, we travel to Lubeck and marvel at the Holsten gate.

From Antwerp, we travel to Bruges and admire the canals in The Venice of the North.

From Le Havre, we travel to Honfleur and its beautiful harbor.

From Dublin, we travel to Howth and hike the exhilarating cliff walk.

From Lisbon, we travel to Sintra and walk through fog at Pena National Palace.

From Cadiz, we travel to Ronda right up to the edge of its dramatic cliffs.

 

Yours in this small-town girl loving the small-townness of Vyborg, Lubeck, Bruges, Honfleur, Howth, Sintra, and Ronda,
Mary

#562 Vyborg, Russia

Our overnight trip to the Hanseatic city of Vyborg takes us to the northernmost point of our fall voyage just a few kilometers from the Finnish border.  As recently as 1944, Vyborg was part of Finland!

On our way to Vyborg, we visit a beautiful dacha, or country home, near Komarovo with six students.

Over tea in her beautifully artistic home, our hostess Katya feeds us delicious home-made Russian delicacies (pirozhkis, yum!) and we discuss her father's military service fighting the Nazi forces in WWII.  She explains her personal experiences growing up in the Soviet Union, one of the three Russias she's known first-hand. We leave well-fed and better informed.

We grab a panoramic view of Vyborg from the tower of Saint Olav inside a Swedish-built medieval fortress on an island overlooking the city and the Gulf of Finland. 

Vyborg will soon be a destination for fans of modernist architecture when the restored Vyborg Library reopens after major renovations. If you've visited an Apple store, you've seen the work of Finnish architect Alvar Aalto at the Genius Bar.  Aalto's library in Vyborg (1933) features a wave-form ceiling and dozens of circular skylights creating "many suns in different positions." 

Our push north takes us as far as the unusual English seaside garden at Monrepos where we climb the pink granite boulders for a better view of the sea.

Yours in northern latitudes,
Kelly

#561 Saint Petersburg libraries

Librarians make the best guides!

Julie, Kelly, and I step off the ship in Saint Petersburg and are warmly greeted by Julia, a Russian business librarian.  Julia has a couple of master's degrees under her belt and is working on her PhD. And today, she is kind enough to spend her time showing us around the historic center of Saint Petersburg, a UNESCO world heritage site. She could not have been more welcoming.

Our first stop (and location of the above photo) is the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library. Gleaming and full of high-tech equipment, the grand building sits in a prime spot just off the Neva river across the street from Peter the Great's bronze horseman.

We tour the city's largest Russian Orthodox church Saint Isaac's Cathedral on our way to the Saint Petersburg State University's Graduate School of Management, where we enjoy a cup of tea, exchange gifts, and meet other GSOM librarians.  We end our day at Julia's favorite Chinese restaurant, Two Chopsticks.  Spasibo, Julia!

We say goodbye to our new Russian friend during our walk back to the MV Explorer where we discover that Captain Jeremy (celebrating his birthday) has left the lights on for us.

Yours in recommending local librarians when you travel,
Mary

#313 Library visits in NO, RU, DK

Our SAS library tour continues. So far, we've enjoyed some terrific libraries and we've had a couple of disappointments. I could not schedule a tour for either the National Library of Russia in Saint Petersburg or the Royal Library in Copenhagen, aka The Black Diamond. The librarians at each institution proved to be - dare I say it? - less than helpful. So, sadly, I missed out on my secret-librarian-handshake-required, behind-the-scenes tour of each. We snapped these photos of The Black Diamond as we walked around on our regular, non-password-protected, self-guided tour.

It looks like the Danish Museum of Art and Design has a cool library too. I didn't know about this one until the day we arrived and unfortunately, the library was closed on the day of our visit. (I peeked through the door to snap this photo.)

Other libraries have excelled in helpfulness along the way - particularly the Bergen Public Library in Norway,...

the University of Bergen library...

and the small public library in Korsor, Denmark where our ship has been docked the last 4 days. When I introduced myself to a librarian in Korsor, she made sure to compliment the students who had visited - saying they were polite, respectful, and very appreciative of the free internet access!

Yours in library review,
Mary

#309 Visiting a Russian home

For our Russia capstone event, Mary and I escorted twelve students to the home of a local family.

Mom was home to greet us at her fourth-floor, walk-up apartment near downtown Saint Petersburg. Dad was away at sea working as a merchant marine and their son who attends college at Saint Petersburg State University was out on a date. After a tour of their three-room apartment, mom treated us to tea, coffee, cookies, and conversation through an interpreter.

Away from the tourist sites and general SAS hubbub, we came face-to-face with everyday Russian life...paying bills, juggling family time with work, relying on public transportation, exercising the right to vote, cold winters, short summers, the influence of television, and differing views of gay lifestyles.

In many ways, Saint Petersburg was not an easy port. Our home visit gave us a reality check to end our short stay.

Yours in leaving Russia,
Kelly

#308 Peter's Palace

I grew up not far from the Missouri town of Versailles, pronounced "ver-SALES". Yesterday we visited the Russian version of Versailles, Peter the Great's summer palace Peterhof overlooking the Gulf of Finland.

Gardens and fountains surround the gilded palace, all listed as part of this UNESCO World Heritage site. The water features (over 140 of them) work by gravity...no pumps required.

The Russians think Peter topped his inspiration, the French Versailles, but comparisons with the Missouri Versailles are glaringly omitted.

Yours in promoting Missouri tourism,
Kelly

#307 Best birthday cruise

And the winner of the 2008 Best Birthday Cruise Award goes to our tour guide Catherine for White Nights in Saint Petersburg, a one-hour cruise along the city canals.

When Saint Petersburg was founded, it was built on marshy land and hundreds of islands. Today, the canals are the best place to admire the city architecture of this 'northern Venice.'

Yours in working hard to give out all the birthday awards,
Mary

#305 Russian Cuisine

Oh look! It's a typical 1950's Soviet mom with a heaping helping of steaming pelmeny.

"Pelmeny. Siberian. Meaty"
[Translation credit: Margarita Nafpaktitis, UVA]

Today in our Russian Cuisine class at a local pectopah (restaurant), we made fresh pelmeny.

Here's the old family recipe: Pastry 2 pounds flour 1 egg 1 glass of water Stir, roll, then cut into small rounds. Filling ground beef, pork, or lamb, mixed with garlic, salt, and pepper Put some meat on the pastry. Fold and pinch the edge. Boil in water until floating, then cook 2 minutes more. In short order, we were all eating fresh Russian pelmeny with a little sour cream on the side.

Yes, Mary and I cook more in Russia than we do at home.

Yours in the pectopah kitchen,
Kelly

#304 Fifty in Saint Petersburg

I've learned a lot on the 4575.4 miles I've traveled from Charlottesville to Saint Petersburg - visiting new places, attending the daily global studies course, and talking with my traveling companions. And, as of today, I've been traveling through life for 50 years - visiting new places, learning new things, and talking with my life companions.

To help with my possibility statement for the future, I'm reading Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life. By telling about the life of Marcel Proust, de Botton offers advice for our lives on such things as how to love life today and how to take your time.

Proust and de Botton seem to agree that "an advantage of not going too fast is that the world has a chance of becoming more interesting in the process." This especially rings true when traveling by ship at 15 miles per hour. Visiting new places, learning new things, and talking with my companions all become more interesting.

I'm grateful for the 50 years, for your birthday greetings, for the innumerable opportunities, and for all the interesting things that happen when I am not going too fast!

Yours in Russian birthday musings,
Mary

#303 In Saint Petersburg

We have arrived in Saint Petersburg, the second largest city in Russia! Previously called Saint Petersburg, Leningrad, and Petrograd, the city is again named Saint Petersburg or informally, Peter. The first thing we did was to make our way to the Hermitage Museum.

The Hermitage occupies six magnificent buildings including the Winter Palace along the River Neva in the heart of Saint Petersburg. Like the narrator in Russian Ark , we wandered from room to room awed by the architecture of the building and the art within. (Russian Ark is a single-shot walkthrough film with period re-enactments, spanning three hundred years of court meetings and balls in the Winter Palace. - Thanks, Todd, for the tip!)

We were not the only ones visiting the Hermitage Museum to view the world's largest collection of paintings. The crowds were thick during this summer season, and often we waited for large groups to clear before we could admire the works of da Vinci, Michelangelo, Monet, Picasso, Rembrandt, van Gogh... Empress Catherine II started the Hermitage collections in 1764. Since then, the collections have grown, been sold off, and grown some more into the fabulous collection it is today.

But at some point, we just gave up. We learned that if we spent just 1 minute admiring each item in the Hermitage, it would take 11 years to see it all.

Yours from Russia with love,
Mary

#282 The White Nights in St. Petersburg

"From late May to early July the nights are bright in St Petersburg, with the brightest period, the White Nights, normally lasting from June 11th to July 2nd. The White Nights (Beliye Nochi) are a curious phenomenon caused by St. Petersburg’s very northerly geographical location - at 59 degrees 57' North (roughly on the same latitude as Oslo, Norway, the southern tip of Greenland and Seward, Alaska). St. Petersburg is the world's most northern city with a population over 1 million, and its stands at such a high latitude that the sun does not descend below the horizon enough for the sky to grow dark. In fact night becomes curiously indistinguishable from day, so much so that the authorities never need to turn the city’s streetlights on!" - from Saint-Petersburg.com

We're off this summer to enjoy the white nights in St. Petersburg! Along with 600 students, we'll be sailing on the summer voyage of Semester at Sea to Norway, Russia, Denmark, Belgium, Italy, Turkey, Greece, and Croatia.

Yours in looking forward to being unable to distinguish night from day,
Mary