St. Petersburg, Russia

As a nut interested in Napoleonic history, MJ really enjoyed her visit to Borodino. And that now completes her participation in the Tour of Napoleonic Battlefields – we saw Waterloo on our family jaunt to Europe in 2000, so enough is enough. Though I may let her visit some when we get to Egypt. And now it was time to head to our final destination – Saint Petersburg. However, the distance from Borodino was too far for one day, so we decided to overnight at Velikiy Novgorod. Even that was a long day of driving on Russian roads. But because of the late sunset and long twilight, we had plenty of time to walk around and see some of the sights of one of the oldest recorded cities in Russia. When we picked this town as our destination for the day, we hadn’t realised how old the city was or how much there was to see. But we had a nice walk around the inner city, visited the Kremlin (yes, another one), walked past a number of churches that were sadly closed (!) and even had time to explore some of the local shopping. One great advantage of being in Europe at the moment, is that we are enjoying a second summer – more lovely cherries! YUM!!

On the next day, after a short drive, we managed to locate our camping place which was located on the western outskirts of Saint Petersburg. This was only the second camping place we had found in Russia and boy! was it NOTHING like we are used to in Oz. The best thing that we can say it that it was secure, so we had no worries about leaving our tent and stuff set up whilst we were out during the day. When we arrived, there were 8 vans of various types belong to a group of Germans, Austrians & Swiss travelling together on a tour. It was amazing to meet a couple from Oldenburg and boy! were they surprised to hear “Moin! Moin!” from me. We had a great time chatting with a great bunch of people and it was also great to meet a group of people who we could converse with. Message from Nick – who MJ could talk to.

Anyway, according to the website for the St Petersburg Camping. The railway station was very close to the camp ground, thankfully they were right in relation to this, we were only about 15 minutes walk from the train station. But when we walked up there on our first day, Nick was wondering how we were going to buy tickets because there wasn’t a ticket booth nor had he seen a ticket machine. One thing I have been saying to him so far this trip is that he has to stop expecting things to be to the same standard as we have at home. And I was right, again. There was a ticket office, and it was located in a concrete structure that Nick had identified as an abandoned pile of concrete building materials. For the price of about 4 Aussie dollars, we had purchased our tickets from Martyshkino to Balkicstiy station (about 1 hour travel) in trains that had varying levels of luxury – you could get padded bench seats, moulded fibreglass seats, plastic benches or plain old wooden benches! Boy were those train trips comfortable!

We became very adept at the Saint Petersburg Metro and ended up travelling on all 5 lines at some stage during our 3 days in town. We managed to revisit some of the highlights from our first trip to Saint Petersburg as well as discover some new delights. We managed to find the Russian equivalent of the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris and saw the graves or memorials for Tchaikovsky, Mussgorsky, Rimsky-Korsakhov, Borodin, Glinka (& his sister), Rubenstein and Dostoyevsky, as well as a variety of Russian notables. And we also spent a lovely morning at Peterhof, which was a “country” estate designed by Peter the Great after a visit to France. Many aspects of it were influenced by Versailles or Marly-le-Roi in France, but it is very like San Souci (Potsdam, Germany) – lots of lovely gardens to walk around with many buildings and structures. And the fountains! If anyone is planning on a visit to St Petersburg, then Peterhof is a “must see”.

On our final night in town, Nick had arranged to purchase some tickets to the Opera. Personally, I would have preferred the Ballet, but he was categorical in his refusal to go to the Ballet, so Opera it was. Because of our dates, we were limited in choice – if we only we were a week later, then we could have gone to see Aida! Sadly, that wasn’t an option – so we went to see “Iolanta” by Tchaikovsky. Now, if any of you are fans of G&S (closet or otherwise), you may recognise the name and think that it was the original or copy of Iolanthe. No, nothing to do with each other and both have very different story lines. Like most things writer by Piotr Illyich (Tchaikovsky), the music was beautiful and some of the performers were amazing. The performance was in the Conservatoire theatre (it was a Matinee performance at 7:30 at night). I must admit some curiosity as to the age of the theatre because it certainly appeared as though it had been around for a while.

On Monday morning, Nick got to enjoy one final session of driving on Russian roads and to be annoyed by Russian drivers – just so that he won’t forget in a hurry! As he said, he can think of many words that begin with the letter “F” to describe Russian drivers, but the only one I can include here is “frustrating”!