Our First Impressions

Greetings to all our family and friends from St. Petersburg, Russia. It is hard to believe we are living in this historic, old city.

The first big hurdle was getting used to the cacophony of voices everywhere we go with people speaking Russian and others (the elders) translating for us and others around us. It just makes my head spin. The first two days it was snowing and/or raining all the time. So there were several wet people all talking and crowding into our new apartment when we went there to meet the landlady. But, here’s the great news, our apartment is very nice! After leaving the car we walked through a couple of drab, dirty courtyards that wound into the center of the block to the doors at the back of these very old apartment buildings. It all looked so ‘Dickens-ish’ to me. I’ve read about this kind of flats. We get through a beat up, old iron door with a key (and a keypad for visitors), then up two flights of smelly stairwell. Another beat up iron door with three (3!) locks which are opened with different keys, and finally we can open the door into the apartment. From there on I was amazed at what I saw. It is very light and airy. Everything is clean, freshly painted and much is new, such as nice, new windows, kitchen and bathroom. Obviously, the landlady has just refurbished this place, and she is getting a premium price of nearly $1,000 per month from us. (It’s definitely not that nice!) The ceilings are about 12 feet high and have beautiful, wide crown molding and fancy chandeliers. But it was very hard not to laugh at the decor. The large bedroom looks to me like a French bordello. It has peach carpet and peach walls, red satin bedspread and matching bedside table lamps with red shades trimmed with red feathers! Hanging from the very interesting chandelier is a long, American Indian-type dreamcatcher made from peach feathers and crystal beads. There is a large living room furnished with a rather elegant large hutch/china closet piece of furniture and leather sofa and chairs with green and peach sheer drapes covering the two big windows that cover one whole wall of the room. Then there is a small but nice one-wall kitchen and a little breakfast table. And in the center of the whole place is the bathroom, which appears to be all new and clean. There is a small washing machine in the bathroom. No one has clothes dryers here, evidently, so we just hang our clothes on a rack to dry overnight. The walls have the darndest assortment of stuff on them you ever saw and there are porcelain figurines and nick-nacks everywhere. There is even a large, stuffed tiger sitting on a cupboard in the living room. So there you have it – a guided tour of our new home. I think we are going to be quite comfortable here.

We have been getting our sea legs under us. We live within walking distance of many of the greatest museums, palaces and cathedrals in all of Russia. A couple of the elders came over on our second day and walked us over to the Institute/branch building, the metro station, CitiBank ATM and a grocery store – the essentials for us to know. After that, with a map and a guidebook, we were set. A couple of days later, since we do not as yet have a real assignment to keep us busy, we struck out on an excursion on our own. We walked for three hours! We went to The Church on Spilled Blood, a beautiful, old cathedral. Shaun and Alana gave us a puzzle for Christmas of this church so we felt like we ‘owned’ all the architectural details that we had ‘puzzled over.’ It has five onion-type spires covered with colored mosaic tiles and gold. We had to save seeing the inside for another day, but it was just so amazing to be standing there.

Just a little about St. Petersburg because it is quite a unique city. It didn’t just grow up over the years from a village as most cities do. It was laid out and built just over 300 years ago, in 1703, by the tzar Peter the Great. It is rather young as far as European cities go – much younger than Moscow. The Tzar wanted this city to be the Russian gem of all the best Europe had to offer and he hired the greatest architects from many countries to lay it out and design palaces and cathedrals. It incorporated the epitome of baroque architecture. The bad thing is that he chose the spot at the head of the Gulf of Finland because he wanted a great shipping harbor, but much of the land was just bogs. It is built on 40 islands, as well as mainland and is called the Venice of Russia, with rivers and canals running all through it. It used to flood terribly but that seems to be taken care of now. It has, also, vast slums and great poverty. If you read anything of Dostoevsky you get a feel for how dark and dreary life was here for the common person. There were so many, many years of famine, poverty and oppression. It is a city of great contrasts.

The Metro is rather fascinating. Because St. Petersburg is a city of rivers and canals, the metro system goes down very deep, under the rivers. When you enter a metro station you get on an unbelievably long escalator. You can’t see the end of it and it takes 4 0r 5 minutes to get down to the train level. All the up and down escalators are packed with people. Just imagine the engineering of that piece of machinery! Getting around in this huge city is not for the faint of heart. So what are we doing here? We are just beginning to find the answers to that question and will have to let you know later on.