arrived yesterday via train from Helsinki in beautiful St. Petersburg - even after seeing lots of photos etc. it's impossible to imagine the gorgeousness of the palaces churches forts etc. of this amazing city - i am STILL having major problems with logging into email and am not sleeping due to surfeit of cultural information so i'm even more cranky than usual - we had a short tour around the city after our guide Vika (short for Victoria) met us at the station - went to the fortress of SS. Peter and Paul where St. P. started (i think - my brain is so scrambled i can't vouch for accuracy of information) - the inside of the church in the fortress has the tombs of all the tsars/czars starting from Peter the Great, including most if not all of the family of Nicholas and Alexandra - but to my surprise, what caused me to break into tears was not the fate of the Russian royal family in 1918, but memories of the trip my mother and i paid to Moscow - something about the strangeness of being back in Russia, with the Cyrillic signage and Orthodox churches, made me think so strongly about our visit in 1966 - as most of you know i'm not a very sentimental type but somehow i had such strong feelings about how happy she would be that i finally got to st. petersburg - in any case, here i am!
after the fortress and driving past a statue of Pavlov (and therefore remembering Pavlov the dog, who accompanied me and Isla to Asia more times than she would have liked!), we went to the Church of the Spilled Blood, where Alexander II was murdered in 1881 (complete with the actual cobblestones, protected by a fence and gorgeous canopy - this place is only equalled in my experience by Hagia Sophia in Istanbul - mosaics, marble, carvings, icons and fantastic Russian onion domes in many colors - most of the work has been restored since the church fell into ruin during Soviet times and was used as a warehouse for potatoes and theater scenery, but has been mostly restored in the last 20 years)
btw although this keyboard has a Roman setting thank goodness, just about every word i type is being underlined in red since apparently whatever vocabulary it's checking against is not English! (this is all adding to my crankiness - i'm trying to get over it since here i am in st. petersburg and the sun is actually shining now after big showers while we were waiting on line to get into the hermitage this morning, but lack of sleep is not helping!
so back to the Hermitage - completely exhausting, similar to the Louvre in having just too much wonderful unique art and architecture to take in - if we were there for 7 years and allowed 1 minute per object without eating or sleeping or taking any breaks, we'd just about cover it - 1 extremely cool thing i intend to check out on youtube is the 'peacock clock', where a peacock spreads his fan, a squirrel eats nuts, a rooster crows, and on and on, at the top of the hour (they only allow it to happen once a week now, and we're not there on wednesday so i will have to wait to see it online) - i think i said before it's almost impossible to describe but 1 thing to think about is that the current winter palace, which is a bluish green with brownish yellow detailing originally had GOLD where the yellow is now - that is a lot of gold and i'll have to also check this out online to see if anyone has recreated the effect with CGI
ok my time on the computer is almost up here in the lobby of our hotel right on 1 of the many canals (VERY reminiscent of beautiful Amsterdam) - so do svydanya (it would look much better in Russian and if i had the patience i would switch the keyboard to cyrillic for that phrase) for now
