Day 5
St. Petersburg Russia
Children on every corner of every block. Globs of them. All dressed in sweet little white and navy blue school uniforms, bouquets of flowers in hand for their teachers. The first day of the school year. Nervous and excited and smiley and filling the air with anticipation.
There are 30-60 days of sunshine per year here, and we got two of them. In a row, even.
The city, chock with slums, slid around outside the bus. Gritty and dirty and falling apart. Grey and black and missing chunks of walls and ceilings falling in. Mile after mile. Even the greenery was unhappy and unkempt and needing a good shave and a haircut.
Then quite suddenly, new apartments with new styles. Windows intact and glistening and looking around at the world. Paint fresh and modern. Shiny. Grounds trimmed and mowed and orderly. Funny trees with clumps of red berries placed in perfect rows along the streets. The wealthy have moved out of the city and to the outskirts of Tsar’s Village – Tsarskoye Selo.
We stood in line to get into Catherine Palace. The deep sky blue of the palace stealing away my heart. Palace gates black and brass, pretending to be gold. The exterior accents used to be painted in gold foil, but when Catherine realized how much it actually cost, she switched to yellow paint. To avoid admitting her financial struggles, she told the people that the gold on the building shone in such a way that the fire department thought the palace was on fire and would come sometimes several times a day. She said she didn’t want to take services away from the people if there were a real emergency, so she’d switched to yellow paint.
I wonder if they believed her.
Instead of security guards and security systems, the palaces all had Matryoshka. Babuskas. Grandmothers who watched each room. Sentry hawks with paper fans, ready to strike out at any wrong-doers.
We slipped paper booties over our shoes to protect the palace floors, and wandered through glorious rooms Dripping with Wealth. A tiny, round plush blue chair in the corner for the little ones, massive blue and white fireplaces, a hall of gold. Cupid statutes posed in front of blood red sheer drapes, golden lions on the walls, white satin chairs with accents of gold, wooden floors inlaid with sweeping designs of deep walnuts and light birches. Circles and swirls and flower shapes. Golden tassels and rich golden window dressings and bright yellow fabric covering the walls like wallpaper, bordered in yellow braid.
Too much gold is in poor taste, they say. And I think they’re right.
Someone leaned on a glass case. A babuska expoded into action with a lot of slapping of her fan and hollering in Russian and pointing. The offender quickly removed his arm from the case and the Babuska retreated to her corner, grumbling.
Massive Staircases and Marble Fireplaces with silken screens in front, geometric perfection everywhere. So comforting. If there is a triangle of flowers over here, there must be one over there. Rose bush on the right? Rose bush on the left. 15 foot 2 1/2 inch hedge on the left?
Correct.
We left Catherine Palace with a sigh and moved right over to Yusupov’s Palace. Vases adorned with golden dragons and chandeliers everywhere. Each room with increasingly impressively inlaid wooden designs. A room specifically for musicians. Designed so the music bled into surrounding rooms without the bother of actually having to look at the musicians.
Jukebox-version 1.0.
The official Yusupov Palace singers put on a short performance. A show of the excellent acoustics. The hairs on my arms stood up and I felt the salt in my eyes and the kind of heat that builds up inside the back of your throat right before the tears fall. It was the most beautiful quintet I’d ever heard. The song was maybe two minutes long, but I was drained afterward. As though I’d cried for hours.
As though I’d attended a funeral mass.
And then down the hidden staircase into the man cave where Rasputin was poisoned and didn’t die, then shot and still didn’t die, and then shot again later on and finally did. I tried to conjure up the energy which certainly had been absorbed into its walls. And I may have felt something. It wasn’t pity. It wasn’t evil. A bit of sad and a bit of mysticism.
It just felt like the the energy of The End.
The giant rocket I’d seen when we docked just turned out be a big old office building. And locals who hate it call it The Corn Cob. And it didn’t look as imposing on our way out of port. It really was a statement, but it read differently now.
The grit and the palaces. The history and the children and the sea and the bloody sunset.
Can’t say St. Petersburg is lacking in character.