Before you visit Russia as an individual traveller, that is to say not on a cruise ship or organised tour, you will need a visa. The form to apply for said visa is, in Ian’s case ten pages long and in mine, six pages long. The questions are ludicrously thorough.
23.7 Information about employment in organizations (governmental or non-governmental) of the following categories: armed forces, government or municipal administration authorities, judicial authorities, law enforcement authorities, private security companies.
Have you ever worked at any of such?
This one smacks of a little paranoia…
23.16 Have you ever by any means publically declared for dismantling the constitutional system or territorial integrity of the Russian Federation?
They want to know if you have social media account/s, where and when your parents were born and died, if your children have passports and the passport numbers if they do and they want the dates of travel and the destination of every trip taken by you in the last ten years!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
23.19 is a doozy
23.19 Have you ever had transmissible infectious diseases or suffered psychiatric or mental disorders dangerous to society?
We did our best, booked our appointment with the Russian Visa Application Centre here in London and rocked up with our credit cards. Ooooo yeah, it’s expensive too. Our first attempt did not go well as a lady who looked and sounded like Natasha Fatale from the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show became particularly dissatisfied with a couple of our answers and my attempt to pass off my three year old passport photo as having been taken in the past four months.
Our second attempt was more fruitful. They make no guarantees that a visa will be issued to you and of course before you apply you must have your entrance and exit details finalised along with the address of your accommodation and two letters of registration issued by that accommodation provider.
All this for Five Days in St Petersburg! I really wanted to go to St Petersburg however so we pushed on. Natasha looked my application over stared at me and snapped “You are the housewife, yes?” To which I just felt the only answer could be “Yes.” She riffled through some papers on her desk and handed me an A4 page which basically said, “I hereby state that I am the housewife.” And she told me to sign on the dotted line. Where do you imagine that piece of paper is filed?
I’m not sure how to describe St Petersburg. It’s big and traffic congested and built across the marshland of the River Neva delta so it is crisscrossed with 300 kilometres of canals and tributaries and over 800 bridges that cross them. The buildings that line the waterways and streets are grand, solid, Baroque and Neoclassical structures that really come into their own when the sun sets as they are floodlit in a way that highlights their decorative features.
The churches and cathedrals are numerous and ornate, in some cases astonishingly, mind blowing-ly ornate. The fairy tale picture book design of the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood is stunning on the outside but that does not really prepare you for the inside. Every surface from floor to domed, arched and vaulted ceiling is covered in colourful illustration but it is only once your eyes and mind settle after the initial awe-struck surprise that you realise it is all mosaic tiles, not painted as you first imagined. It was built in the late 19th and early 20th century on the site of Tsar Alexander’s assassination.
Unfortunately the tallest spire/dome was covered in scaffolding during our visit. I asked a lady at one of the stalls near the church when the scaffolding went up and she said since spring. When I asked how long it would stay up, she shrugged and puffed out her cheeks in the universal gesture of “how long is a piece of string?” It’s been a long time since its last spit and polish apparently. It is a perpetual risk while travelling in Europe, that the thing you really want to see will be cloaked in scaffolding during your visit. (Take note if you are hoping to take a holiday snap of Elizabeth Tower aka Big Ben between October, 2017 and some time in 2021!) Old buildings need restoration and repair if they are going to stay sights that visitors will want to see.
We walked for kilometres through the snow covered parks and streets and encountered everything from the beautiful to the downright ugly in the architecture. On our descent into the airport it was hard not to miss the areas blanketed in featureless grey concrete monolithic apartment blocks in such stark contrast to the handsome buildings in the centre of the city. St Isaac’s Cathedral was another astonishing piece of architecture but one that you can climb if you so wish. Ian took the nearly 300 steps to the top for brilliant views of the city while I wandered the beautiful interior while listening to a divine sung service resonating in the cavernous space. (It’s not the climb I object to btw, it’s the possibility that I may be jammed into a very small space with a number of other human beings without easy egress.)
We were totally
Russian and a bit Georgian when it came to our meal choices. We ate blinis and
caviar, borsht and beetroot salad. We sampled Khinkali and Pkhali and delicious
fried rye bread sticks. We enjoyed some Georgian Khachapuri and Chebureki. I
had a yummy rich smoked meats soup called Solianka that came as a meal deal
with a generous vodka shot. Hey, when in Russia… We also tried the birch laced
vodka which was excellent.
Drinking vodka is a national pastime in Russia. We shared a restaurant one evening with a large table of men and one or two women who we were told were celebrating the army promotion of one of the fellows who sat in pride of place at the head of the table. The evening consisted of a steady stream of vodka toasts and lengthy chuckle inducing speeches. The speeches got longer, slurier and more hilarious as the evening wore on. The waiters brought food that wasn’t really touched but the jugs of beer and the flow of vodka were consumed with unparalleled vigour.
The evening was punctuated regularly by the entire table venturing onto the freezing footpath outside the restaurant to smoke cigarettes. This was a table of youngish military men and yet every one of them sported an impressive pot belly. It got me thinking about the average life expectancy in the Russian Federation so we googled over dinner in the most romantic couples way of 21st century dining and found some shocking, but not all that surprising, figures. A quarter of all Russian men die before the age of 55 and their average life expectancy is 64. Females on the other hand can expect an average life of 76 years. I know it’s a long cold dark winter and you may well live in one of those depressing grey boxes we’d seen as our plane popped below the cloud, but surely those figures are a national disgrace. Putin may well enjoy taking his shirt off for the world to see but his passion for physical fitness doesn’t seem to be filtering down.
Probably the main reason I wanted to visit St Petersburg was The Hermitage. The museum contains over 3 million works of art and cultural artefacts. It has been calculated that if you spent one minute in front of each display for eight hours of every day, you will have seen the entire collection in 15 years. By my calculation it would be more like 17 years but you get the drift. It’s a biiiiiiiiiig place with about 10 kilometres of galleries and rooms.
With this in mind we set aside an entire day to investigate The Hermitage and to be honest we hardly noticed that close on nine hours elapsed before we staggered out into Palace Square with just one cup of coffee and a sandwich some time mid-afternoon to fuel our perusing and admiring. The Museum occupies six buildings set on the River Neva the most stunning of which is the Winter Palace, the former home of various Tsars. Grand in scale and richly ornate in decoration there must have been a shortage of gilding artists and chandelier makers during the time of its construction because every one in existence was working on that palace is my guess.
There is an entire spacious corridor called the Raphael Loggias that is an exact copy of the Gallery in the Papal Palace in Vatican City. Empress Catherine sent artists to Rome to copy the original in incredible detail while the wing was built to the exact specifications of the gallery in the Vatican.
One of the rooms has exquisite columns of beautifully patterned green malachite. And then there is The Da Vinci room which holds not one but two Leonardo Da Vinci paintings which is quite something when you consider that there are only 15 paintings in existence generally attributed to him. The Kolyvan Vase is another outstanding exhibit. Cut from jasper and standing more than 2.5 metres tall it weighs almost 19 tons. It beggars belief how they got the thing installed! Ian and I were particularly fascinated by the wonderful Egyptian collection of mummies and sarcophagi, hieroglyphs on stone tablets and papyrus and tomb statues and artefacts.
We also discovered an almost hidden floor of catacomb like rooms down some stairs at the end of a long side gallery which was filled with incredible collections of tools, cooking utensils, jewellery, leather clothing items, even a preserved mummy and a large wooden cart. They were recovered from buried barrows in Siberia and the Caucuses, remnants of several cultures that thrived on the steppes in the 6th to the 2nd centuries BC. Some of the pieces were exquisitely crafted art such as metal finials and wood masks. These are cultures with names we have never heard of in regions we never imagined had advanced cultures in ancient times. It was revelatory and intriguing.
So I finally got to do my own “Russian Ark” and the experience did not disappoint. Hey only another 16 years and 364 days and we’ll have the whole thing knocked over.
If you want to buy a set of Russian or Matryoshka Dolls in Russia, there is no shortage of choice. I wanted the last doll to be as small as possible, because I love tiny things (there’s a story about that mania if you care to look in “Our Stories”) I was not disappointed. My biggest doll is 5 ½ cm tall and he represents the Papa, inside him is the Mama and eight children, four boys and four girls. Yes NINE dolls inside all beautifully painted. The baby is less than 2mm tall but has rudimentary features if you use a magnifying glass. I know that the dolls are all about motherhood and what have boys got to do with it but I liked the idea of this family and it certainly satisfies my love of the little.
I decided not to go with the 24 set because the little one is not small enough. (That and the fact we would have needed another suitcase and a bank loan.)
St Petersburg was amazing. We loved exploring its many wonders and now that a dossier on our entire personal history exists and possibly sits on Putin’s desk marked “mostly harmless” we may be tempted to return, but only if they take the wrapping off the church spire first.
Do svidaniya!
*So this is an actual calendar you can buy in a bookshop in St Petersburg featuring Putin in all his favourite poses, including, fishing, riding a motorbike and shirtless with a big gun