travels with my sons

Gallery: St Petersbug

kerob — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 13:40:00 GMT

Travel with my sons

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kerob — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 13:29:00 GMT

Reid and I spent a great two weeks in St. Petersburg with Joe. We took the train to Petragrad around the Bay of Finland to the Summer palace. Though crowded, it was overpowering. The trip home was adventuresome. The taxi to the airport was fine (if some mild extortion at the end). Recovered my luggage which had been missing for the entire trip. Aeroflot is a mismatch now of an airline. Trying to be commercial, yet staffed by bueracrats who still think it is a state run airline that is accountable to no one. A great trip. I visited the Hermitage, went in the morning and stayed all day, the Russian Museum, St. Isaac's, the Russian Orthodox Church, the Duma, the parks and walked and rode the metro all over the city.

Weeks in St. Petersburg

kerob — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 00:38:00 GMT

My two weeks in St. Petersburg were a great delight. The metro is a terrific form of transportation to get to where you want to walk or to get home from where you have walked to. The escalator down is lengthy, 3 minutes or more and gives you time to watch the hundreds of people coming up (or down). I never had to wait more than a few seconds for my train and while they were crowded, it was orderly and polite. The city is a delight to walk in, hours were spent in the Hermitage, the Russian Museum, Peter and Paul fortress, St. Isaac's, Andrew Prospect, the Russian Orthodox churches, the cemeteries and parks and just walking on Nevsky prospect or along the canals and Neva river. The city is either very dusty and congested or wide promenades or empty streets. While I never had a run in with any authorities, I saw several times police shaking people down (or enforcing rules through the collection of fines directly at the time of detention) and felt as though it always possible that I would be caught doing something wrong that I had no knowledge was wrong or required. The confusing layout of the streets and canals, the completely alien alphabet and language and the constant daylight was disorienting, but the palaces, churches, museums and restaurants made it all worth while.

First Impressions

kerob — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 11:33:00 GMT

June 25-6. I leave SF to LA, luggage booked through to Moscow to be collected and then transferred to St. Petersburg. Waiting at LA at the gate. Several hours to kill, gradually people arrive. Reid described a chaotic trip the week before, his flight delayed for several hours leaving from LA, missed connection in Moscow, spending the night at Moscow airport and catching the first flight in the morning to St. Petersburg. My trip looks promising. The plane is at the gate and while no apparent activity seems to be occurring, it is not still in the air from Moscow (as happened to Reid). About 45 minutes before the scheduled boarding, people begin lining up in an eventually serpentine line that stretches throughout the waiting area. Aeroflot personnel begin roaming among us, checking our boarding passes and passports (sometimes several times by different personnel as there is no way to tell if we have been checked as we did not board the plane). I talk to a person next to me on his way to a church he is pastor of in Mongolia and has traveled several times to Russia. I ask why are they lining up, don't we have assigned seats? He says welcome to Russia, something I am to hear frequently. Eventually we board (by areas despite the line and lack of decorum) and leave an hour and a half late. I begin to worry about making my connection. The flight is uneventful; I sit next to a young Russian living in southern California working on obtaining his USA citizenship also going to St. Petersburg. He kindly offers to assist me in the connection between Moscow and St. Petersburg. During the flight, after the sleep period, a Russian man wakes, stretches, scratches his belly, takes a bottle from his duty free bag (I assume to be vodka) and drinks deeply for what seems to be a long time, belches politely and looks around for breakfast. I arrive in Moscow, having missed my connecting flight and go to the baggage collection. No baggage. My seatmate goes through customs and I expect to never see him again. I go to lost luggage and experience also a recurring theme. As long as I refuse to speak Russian (I cannot) eventually a fairly bilingual representative will be incredibly helpful in a generally frustrating but usually successful way (not this time). If you speak Russian, the dialogue is brisk and dismissive. I am helped; the Russian seeking her luggage is not. I am given a form and told how to fill it out; she is dismissed with a shrug and finality. Eventually, I complete and receive a lost luggage form with several phone numbers to call both in Moscow and St. Petersburg and pass through a now deserted custom check point with no contact at all. I now (after several confusing instructions) seek an Aeroflot office that is hidden behind an unmarked and well hidden door in the southwest corner of the second floor of the international terminal to transfer from my scheduled flight to the last flight of the evening to St. Petersburg. I run to the shuttle to the domestic terminal, force the closed door to re-open, get to the terminal with 20 minutes to spare and find my seat mate patiently waiting for the same flight. The plane to St. Petersburg seems to be a freshly painted but otherwise unchanged airplane from the cold war era. The light is too dim for reading; the tray table is broken and falls onto my chest. During preparations for take off, white smoke gently wafts from the vents overhead. The airline staff is friendly and competent. I arrive at St. Petersburg late in the evening of the 26th, to see my elder son, exhausted and worried. We catch the last shuttle into town and hitch a ride to his home. It is the early morning hours and still light enough to read by.

I have arrived.

The first stage scouting

kerob — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 14:14:00 GMT

My son (Joe) is graduating from European University in St. Petersburg next week. My other son (reid), a student in California and I are going to visit him (joe). Reid left yesterday from SF. I will follow next week (I am a criminal defense lawyer and completing a murder trial). Reid left from SF to LA. He got hassled in SF because he had a screwdriver in his carry on luggage. (It was his work backpack and he forgot it was in there.) He got to LA only to find that the Aeroflot connection to Moscow was 3 hours late so a 4 hour layover became a 7 hour layover. Reid was worried that he would miss his connecting flight to St. Pete and be stranded in the Moscow airport, unable to speak the language and unable to contact anyone. Joe was calling home from St. Pete to verify when to pick up Reid and upon learning the problem was scornful of Aeroflot and worried that Reid would come in so late to St. Pete that he, Joe, would have to take a taxi instead of the metro (ruinously expensive) let alone give up his poker game. Joe could get no information and kept checking with us in CA about Reid. Eventually he went to St. Pete airport to see if Reid caugt the last flight (no--Reid called from Moscow and had to spend the night in the airport to catch the early morning flight.) Joe was upset that (when he returned from the Airport at 2 a.m. to hear he would have to return at 6 a.m. to pick up his brother. About midnight here in CA, the brothers have united and Reid will never fly again, he tells me we are taking a train home. I wonder will they pick me up next week when my flight is delayed.

Travels with my sons

kerob — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 23:06:00 GMT

My older son is going to graduate school in St. Petersburg, Russia and will graduate this summer. My younger son and I will be going to visit. The three of us traveled together in Ireland two summers ago and it was a kick. Joe (the older) has emailed to give us advice on how to survive. He says that the White Nights is a period when the police may actually be more dangerous than the the pickpockets and other thiefs because every one is drunk and looking for a mark. His advice: pretend to be drunk. Travel with a can of beer in your hand and look russian. Reid (my younger son) and I have shared some amusement about this plan, though I privately have some worry. Joe has described twice being accosted by russian police for bribes during the last year and once being robbed of his wallet. I talked to a co-worker who spent a summer at a different college in St. Petersburg and he says Joe is pretty much correct. The professors were always losing their wallets to pickpockets because they looked like tourists, especially in the metro. Reid has already shown himself to be somewhat absent minded. When we were going to meet at the Russian consulate in SF to apply for our visas (I'm in Eureka, CA and Reid is going to school in Davis, CA), I met him at the train station in Berkeley after he had missed the first train (overslept) and forgotten his passport. He had to go back later on his own. Joe was amused by the story and expressed some doubt whether Reid should come along. Reid replied that he has a "nearly 100% survival rate" from life threatening events in his life. Reid is going over the week before me and Joe is trying to decide whether to give up his poker night to meet him at the airport.