Hello once again from the beautiful Western Ukrainian town of L'viv. I recently finished my incredible adventures in Russia and wanted to tell you about my trip and the amazing things that I had the wonderful opportunity to see. My dad has asked that I make this blog shorter than Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace" but knowing how much I like to tell stories and how much I was able to see and wish to tell you about, this is going to be a difficult limit! To begin, I left for Russia on Wednesday June 9th and was in the Russian Federation until June 19th. My trip included Moscow, St. Petersburg and a small day trip to the town of Tsarskaya Celo (The Tsar's Town) outside St. Petersburg. I traveled with my good friend, Sean, a fellow Northwestern '09 grad who was living and working in Hong Kong from where he flew to meet me in Moscow.
The desire to travel to Russia began back in 9th grade when I took "World History" with Mr. Baxter, those of you connected to Shattuck may recall this teacher. As we discussed Russia, Mr. Baxter one day incorporated a slide show of pictures he had taken while traveling in Russia - the afro he sported in front of St. Basil's church, is an image that I can recall to this day and one that made me realize I had to see this vibrantly colorful country for myself. The incredibly close proximity of Ukraine to Russia made it impossible not to take this opportiunity to fulfill my 9th grade dream to see Moscow and St. Petersburg. And I can now say - this truly was the trip of a lifetime!
Sean and I met at Sheremetevo Airport in Moscow following my flight from Kiev and his from Hong Kong - you may recognize the name Sheremetevo as it was the airport that the President flew out of in the movie "Air Force One" - luckily we had no problems with our flights! We stayed at a hostel in Moscow named "Buddy Bear" which is owned and operated by a very friendly Russian who is in his late 20s! Daniel was very helpful for us throughout our stay. Our first full day in Moscow proved to be one of a few downers in the beginning but luckily improved as the day went along. First we headed to Red Square to start the day off with the Lenin Mausoleum, the resting place of the infamous Soviet Ruler (though in his will he asked to be buried next to his mother in St. Petersburg - a wish that was unfulfilled as Stalin saw Lenin's body to be of use for increasing the cult of Lenin) only to find that the Russian Independence Day festivities had closed all of Red Square to prepare until the 15th! We were crushed that we were all the way here in Russia and may not be able to see Lenin, but moved our focus to the nearby St. Basil's Church - which Sean referred to the entire time as the Ice Cream Church, I knew of it as the "Onion Dome Church." This church was commisioned in 1552 by Ivan the Terrible to commenorate his win over the Tatars in Kazan and was completed in 1561. We took way too many pictures of every angle of this church that we could see with Red Sqaure being closed, but this is the most symbolic of Russian buildings! It was such a breathtaking view to behold when we came around the corner of the Kremlin to first see it - though Sean and I agreed, it is a lot smaller than we expected it to be! One interesting side not about Red Square is that the word for Red is Russian is the same as the word for Beautiful so the square was originally named Beautiful Square but over time changed to Red Square and was named this even before the Soviets came to power - and was simply a convenient coincidence for them to have used the color Red for their flag.
Following walking around the outside of the Kremlin walls, we went inside the "Gum," a glass ceilinged State Department Store which houses the most expensive of luxury goods. Sean and I walked around the inside but did not do any shopping! Instead we did a small walking tour of Kitay Gorod which translates as China Town but has nothing to do with China. Kitay Gorod holds some of the oldest churches in the city. I carried around a scarf as the Russian Orthodox tradition requires all women's heads to be covered upon entering a place of worship. The churches were very pretty inside as churches in Russia, as in Ukraine, are painted from floor to ceiling with images of Jesus, Mary and all the apostles and saints - not a spot on the wall will be bare, all must be painted, proving to be an interesting site!
In the afternoon we walked along the Moscow River which is constantly covered in ferry boats taking passengers and tourists from one end of the city to the next. We stopped to see the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, the largest church in Moscow. The original was torn down by Stalin and the spot made into the largest swimming pool in Russia, however, a replica was restored to this place following the fall of the Soviet Union. We were able to go into the large church, which feels a bit like the interior of the Vatican Chuch, a few days later - it is gigantic on the inside and quite an impressive site with its stain glassed windows and painted walls!
The best part of our day, for me, was our trip this evening to see the Bolshoi Ballet perform (Bolshoi means "Large" in Russian). I had the incredible opportuity to see the Bolshoi Ballet perform once in Minnesota while they were on tour, through one of Mrs. C's many ballet trips to the cities, and was so happy that Sean and I were able to get tickets to see a performance while in Moscow. Though the main stage is under renovation, we saw the ballet performed on the small stage. The ballet was excellent and I had never seen this ballet performed. It was the story of a farmer's daughter who falls in love with another farmer's son, but is supposed to marry the duke's son and does not want to. (A similar story to most ballets!) The theatre was incredible with crystal chandeliers lining the stairwell and the hallways. Sean and I were able to get our picture taken on the main floor, however we were at the top level though the view was still perfect!
On our second day in Moscow we were able to head inside the Kremlin. This was, however, following a few hours in the train station in which my Russian was fully put to the test so we could exchange our return train tickets from St. Petersburg for one day earlier in order to see Lenin in the following week. Moscow was the capital of Russia for many years and is the birthplace of most of Russia's political and religious history. Until Peter the Great moved the capital to St. Petersburg in 1703, all politics occured within the walls of the Kremlin. When Lenin took power, he moved the capital back to Moscow in fear of the riots which were occuring in St. Petersburg at the time. The Kremlin is also where Napoleon sat while Moscow burned under the destruction of his troops in 1812 and where in 1991, the Soviet Union was dissolved. It is a very interesting piece of history and Sean and I were very excited for the chance to enter! Though the majority of the Kremlin is closed off to tourists, we unfortunately did not catch a glimpse of Putin!, we were able to check out the Cathedral Square within the Kremlin walls which house the Churches of Annunciation, Archangel Cathedral, the Assumption Cathedral and the Ivan the Great Belltower. The churches date back to the 15th century and onwards but were, just like the Cathedral of Christ the Savious, painted from floor to ceiling with intricate religious paintings and icons as well as detailed doors both to enter the church and to close off the Altar from the people. As there was no audio guide for the churches, Sean and I used our language talents to pull the information regarding the churches from tour guides throughout. Sean speaks French, Italian, German and Mandarin and I had Russian and Spanish so we walked around and slipped in to join the different tours and were able to then point out to one another the important icons and facts about the churches - this is also how we learned that Ivan the Great and Ivan the Terrible were buried in the Archangel Church and not in the Peter and Paul Fortress (a St. Petersburg Fortress in which all the tsars following Peter the Great are buried). Two other interesting pieces inside the Kremlin walls are the Tsar's Bell and Tsar's Cannon. The Bell claims to be the world's largest bell (though through eavesdropping Sean heard that it is the second largest in the world) but it has never rung due to its enormous size. The Cannon, which has also never been shot, stands to show the power of the Tsars. The cannon balls which sit near the Canon are actually even too big to go into the nozzle of the canon. The Kremlin has 5 towers around its triangular shaped structure, each sporting a red star to represent the Soviet Union. These stars replaced the double headed eagle symbols of Imperial Russia (upon Stalin's order), but today the stars remain as Moscovites do not see them as a symbol of the Soviet Union but simply a part of the Kremlin walls.
Our last day in Moscow was the day of Russian Independence from the Soviet Union, June 12th, 1991. As most businesses and tourist places were closed, Sean and I used this day to do a lot of walking around the city. The highlight was our boat trip down the Moscow River in the afternoon to site see the view of the city from the water. It was a beautiful sunny day and we were able to get some great pictures. One of the items we passed was a very large statue of Peter the Great on a ship. My guide book told the story that the statue was originally made for the United States to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Columbus landing in the Americas, but upon viewing this statue, the United States immediately rejected it. Russia came in and purchased it and with a little bit of touching up, the man in the statue soon became Peter the Great and now rests in the Moscow River. A fun story! After collecting our things from the hostel, Sean and I headed to the Leningradskaya Train Station for our night train to St. Petersburg. The train took off at 8pm and arrived in St. Petersburg at a very early 5am!
St. Petersburg became the capital of Russia through the orders of Peter the Great who entered the city and began to construct its first few buildings. St. Petersburg sits at the intersection of the Neva River (small and large Neva's) and consists of 44 islands and 50 canals. It reminded me a lot of Amsterdam with its picturesque architecture and scenery alongside many canals covered in tourist boats cruising around the islands. In St. Petersburg, Sean and I stayed at a hostel called the "Crazy Duck" (yes these names are funny but both places worked out very well!). The hostel was wonderfully located near St. Isaac's church and a quick walk from the Winter Palace and Hermitage. As we had arrived at the hostel by 6am, we had a full day ahead of us to site see and so we began to walk up towards the Neva to head to the Hermitage. We passed a large statue of Peter the Great, we say St. Isaac's Cathedral, and caught our first glimpse across the Neva to the Peter and Paul Fortress and the Vasilevskiy Island museums. The Hermitage and Winter Palace were built by Catherine the Great and Elizabeth respectively, to hold the collections of Catherine the Great that she acquired from all over the world. The original collection held 225 paintings in 1764 but now holds enough paintings that it rivals the collection of the Louvre, in Paris. Through the help of our Northwestern Wildcard Student IDs, Sean and I got in for free to the Hermitage and got an audio guide to share to understand all that we were about to see. The museum includes pieces from ancient Egypt and Greece all the way to more modern works by Picasso. As the works are held in a palace, many of the rooms were decorated in Imperial furniture and had dresses belonging to the Empresses. My favorite pieces were the Imperial Rooms including the throne room which had been the meeting place of the very first parliament in Russian history back in 1905. The meeting had been a huge catastrophe as Tsar Nicholas II had elected half the parliament, consisting of all his high ranking officials, and the people had elected the other half making it a meeting of the haves and have nots. One picture taken of the congress showed the people divided right down the middle as they stood facing one another - it was quite interesting to be standing in this room. Another interesting room was a simple dining room in which the Provisional Government (the government which overthrew the Tsar during the February Revolution but were then overthrown by the Bolsheviks/Communists in October) had waited to be arrested on the night of October 25th, 1917 when the Bolsheviks were taking power. Sean and I finished off our time in the Hermitage with a tour of the Diamond Fund which included all the gems and gifts Catherine the Great had received throughout her ruling including diamond covered pocket watches, snuff boxes and jewelry. It was incredible the wealth in one room!
Outside the Hermitage stands the Alexander Column which is a column commisioned for Tsar Alexander I to honor the defeat of Napoleon. Also near the Hermitage is the Admiralty, where only Officers of the Russian Navy may enter. The building has a beautiful golden dome which had to be painted black during WWII to decrease its visibility for the Germans to bomb it. Sean and I called it an early evening as we were really tired from the train and day in the museum, but summer proves to be a difficult time for sleeping in St. Petersburg. Known as the "White Nights," St. Petersburg remains very light out until quite late at night/morning. 1am being the latest that the sun will set, proves that falling alseep at 10pm just seems wrong as it looks like 4 in the afternoon outside - this meant that I had to sleep with my eye mask on each night while we stayed in St. Petersburg!
On our second day in the city we decided to take a day trip out and see Tsarskaya Celo. This is the village in which a palace was built for the tsars and where Tsar Nicholas II spent his last free days with his family before being forced to abdicate and being placed under house arrest in another town out east. The town is a 30 minute bus ride outside St. Petersburg where the palace and gardens shine in the sunlight following their restoration from WWII destruction as it was invaded by the Germans in 1944. We began with the gardens around the bright blue palace, where there is a small pond surrounded by bath houses and sculpture gardens. One sculpture is a girl sitting and crying next to a broken pitcher which is spilling water (the fountain part). We got in line to enter the palace and I was befriended by a Russian woman, Valya, who stood next to us in line. She explained that Russians are terrible at lining up, this occured after a huge group of people just pushed right into the middle of the line, and that she would be sure we got in. The next time the guards let in a group of people, Valya grabbed my hand and pulled Sean and me over a railing and into the palace. When we got to the entrance with a large group she explained confidently "We're with the group" when I told her Sean and I werent with that group, Valya looked at me and said "we ARE with the group" - ok! haha While inside the palace you must wear slippers over your shoes which makes for fun slipping and sliding. The first room we saw was a golden Great Hall complete with the two thrones of the Tsar and Tsarina. The tour included rooms for dining, dressing and relaxing, however the most spectacular was a room entirely made of Amber. Each piece of the wall had been covered in a carved piece of amber fit into the overall design of the entire room - spectacular. In the basement of the palace were pictures from when it had been bombed and destroyed during WWII - the restoration work that was required to put it back to its splendor is quite impressive.
The following day brought us across the Neva to see the Peter and Paul Fortress. The Fortress was built by Peter the Great in 1703 to protect the city from any water invasions. Inside the walls of the fortress include a cathedral, a political prison and a number of smaller museums. I was very excited to enter the Cathedral as this is the resting place of all the tsars following Peter the Great, including the final Romanov family who were laid to rest on July 17th, 1998, the 80th anniversary of their death. What is interesting to note is that the bodies of Maria and Alexis Romanov have never been found, while the body of Anastacia has been identified in the remains which were found outside Ekaterinburg - so the "Rumor in St. Petersburg" that Anastacia survived the murder of the Romanovs is not true. We also walked around the inside of the fortress including a tunnel which goes through the fortress walls allowing soldiers to go from one end to another during a battle. The political prison was interesting as well as this was where Trotsky was held for a large portion of his political career prior to the Bolsheviks coming to power, and also where Lenin's brother was convicted and hanged for his anti-tsarist actions.
Following the fortress we crossed the Neva on the other side of the Winter Palace to walk through the Summer Gardens and Palace towards Nevskyy Prospect, the most well known street of St. Petersburg. Along this street stand's the "Church of our Saviour on Spilled Blood" - a church built to look like St. Basil's on the spot where Tsar Alexander II was mortally wounded. The inside of the church is covered in mosaics rather than paint - all the way to the top of the center dome - an impressive site as every inch is covered in small stones inlaid to make the images of saints and apostles. We also walked over to the Kazan Cathedral, built in 1811 to be a replica of the Vatican Cathedral. The Church was very large on the inside and had a long line to pray to Our Lady of Kazan, the icon which the General Kutuzov prayed to before his military campaign against the French in the 1800s. In the cathedral lies the captured keys of French cities because of the campaign against Napoleon.
We walked Nevskyy Prospect to St. Isaac's to climb the colonnade and look over the city - it was a beautiful evening and we were able to see the river and all the sites. One of the Tsars statues was surrounded by tour buses - Sean and I have noticed that as we've been here in Russia the majority of tourists have been a part of tourist groups coming off of cruise ships and we've been some of the very few single tourists - the majority of other single tourists have been Russians. This has made it both nice to have the city more to ourselves and hard as each tourist site is covered in large groups of people. The picture of the tourist buses was funny and brought us to realize how few other single tourists are in Russia!
On our last day in St. Petersburg it rained so unfortunately we did not get to do the walking tour we had planned. Instead we were joined by a Russian and an American to go to the State Museum of Political History of Russia. This museum told the history of Russia from the beginning to today and is housed in the house where Lenin and the Bolsheviks stayed between the February and October Revolutions - we were able to see Lenin's office and the balcony off which Lenin gave many speeches to rioting workers. In the evening, before Sean and I went for our train back to Moscow, we went to a Russian bath house. For Russians it is very traditional to clean onself in a sauna followed by a dip in a cold lake or cold shower. So we rented out a sauna room and jumped between the hot sauna to the cold shower - it was 170 degrees in the sauna room proving it difficult for Sean and I to sit in there too long - instead we had to jump between sauna and shower about every 5 minutes but we felt clean afterwards!!
Our train to Moscow left at 1:30am and arrived in Moscow and 10:10 am at which we ran with our bags back to Red Square to get in line for the Lenin Mausoleum which was luckily open! The line took little time and we were soon descending the steps into the dark room where Lenin is laid in a large glass coffin with lights illuminating his body. Lenin looks like he is made of wax, Sean said he thinks of wood, the facial hair is still perfectly in tact and it is quite eery how lifelike he still looks 86 years after his death! But it was quite a site to see as I stared at the still in tact features. Behind the Lenin Mausoleum rests the tombs of many other political leaders including Stalin who has a much less impressive grave site. As Red Square now was entirely open we also went inside St. Basil's church which is a twisting networks of smaller chapels and prayer rooms - not the large open church that we had expected from looking at it on the outside!
Our last day in Moscow was a wonderfully sunny one luckily! We did a little souvenir shopping for Sean and picked up a few more items for me and then went and did the Armory tour of the Kremlin (which we hadnt had time to do when we were there the week before). The Armory is a special tour as it contains all the jewels, dining sets, gifts, outfits, armory, carriages and treasures of the Imperial Families. There were diamond encrusted and gem encrusted bibles, plates, frames, boxes and other gifts. Massive plates of solid gold and silver. The best case held 9 Faberge Eggs including one with portraits of the last Romanov Family, another which was a clock, and one covered in diamonds. They were spectacular! We also got to see the thrones of the Tsars including one for the first Romanov which was painted with gold and covered in gems and another case held the crowns, sceptors and orbs of all the Tsars with their mass amount of gems and diamonds - it was breathtaking and made the Jewelry room of the Tower of London look pathetic in comparison!! Sean loved the tour for the Armory rooms which had intricately decorated swords and guns while I had to take a second look at the Faberge Egg case. The last room held the coronation and wedding dresses of Tsarina Catherine the Great and Elizabeth. Both stunning dresses with long tails. It was a perfect last place to visit on our Russia tour!!
On our last afternoon in Russia we spent some time by the Neva river reminicing about all we saw before heading back to the hostel to pack. This trip was incredible and for all those thinking of ever going to Russia - I HIGHLY recommend it!! The history this country has seen and the sites and artifacts that remain will take your breath away. We hadnt expected to find such a vibrantly colorful country filled with such helpful and kind people but that is exactly what we got. Though Russia would be a little hard without some Russian speaking capabilities (my Russian came in very handy!), it is starting to become a more touristy place for foreigners to come and enjoy themselves. Sean and I were very sad to leave Russia when our flights took off on the morning of the 19th, but I'm just so thankful that I was finally able to travel and see a bit of this incredible country!
I have attached pictures below of our travels. Please enjoy! Thanks so much for reading this blog - I hope it did prove shorter than "War and Peace." As I said in the beginning, I am currently in L'viv because tomorrow I will take a train to Krakow to see a bit of Poland and then I will be heading to Prague and ending in Budapest to visit my friend Susie once again. I will be sure to update my blog upon return from these next adventures!!
Have a wonderful summer!
Love, Megan
