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Czar's Palace/Hermitage St. Petersburg
As we’re looking at our last 4 weeks in Russia, we’ve had many intense conversations as to how we can squeeze in as much Russia as we can in such a short amount of time…and show up for work on a regular basis, also. The main issue hampering our plans is from April 15 to May 15 we are not to travel outside of Moscow while Greg’s company renews our work visas for the year we’re not going to be here. I wondered why they bother, but apparently a current work visa is required to move out of Russia. So, we’ve kept our May 25th packing day and can concentrate on cramming in as much fun into our remaining time as possible.
The array of sights and activities to do here are varied, exotic and endless; willing and fun friends to participate with you are legion and when faced with a limited time window, we’re panicking and stuffing as much into every available moment as we can. Having said that, we’ve found ourselves with a FREE DAY (Friday — the May Day holiday). If you’ve seen the crowds in Moscow, you’d know that an international holiday in a large crowded city is probably not going to be something you’re going to experience alone. I’ve gotten past my American need for personal space and we jostle and get jostled by the best on a daily basis. Plans for this upcoming weekend are: Friday- who knows? Saturday: Ismailovo Open Air market to pick up the 2 paintings we bought last week and shop till we drop, and Sunday: take a winding church tour ending up at the Moscow river where we will board a boat and have a picnic on the boat. I’ve made a batch of Russian refrigerator pickles in anticipation of snacking on the boat Sunday.
We took a 3-day weekend to visit St. Petersburg a few weeks ago and I’m just now finding time to share the trip with you. It was only an hour-and-a-half plane trip and we stayed at the Petro Palace hotel, recommended by our friend, Tim “The Oracle” Adams who has lived and traveled in Russia for so long that he always knows the answer to every question you put to him. The name of the hotel didn’t really inspire anticipation of a really nice hotel, so we were pleasantly surprised by the clean, well decorated, spacious room (complete with mini bar and fridge), king-sized bed and convenient location to all the major sights we wanted to see…all at a really reasonable price. Once there we visited The Winter Palace, now home of the Hermitage museum, and walked to the banks of the Neva River where we saw one of Rostral Columns of St. Petersburg. We had to make it a point to visit The Church of the Spilt Blood just so we could tell our Moscow friends which was better…that or St. Basil’s Cathedral because there are feelings of competition between residents of the two cities as to which is more beautiful. On the way to Stroganoff’s Restaurant we walked past The Admirality and on the way back to the hotel from the restaurant, realized that St. Isaac’s Cathedral was right at the end of our block! So with good restaurants right within walking distance (and THE BEST Bakery/coffee shop across the street!) and great shopping, the hotel couldn’t have been in a more perfect location. I wish we could put all the pictures on here, but it looks as if I’m just going to have to break down and set up an account on Picasa and just share all the pictures there. I’ll let you know when we get that together. My one regret was that we didn’t spend a week in St. Petersburg and spend the entire week combing The Hermitage. It was absolutely mind boggling with so many priceless treasures, paintings and antiquities that we just couldn’t do a quick pass, but had to stop and soak up every single thing; which, of course, got us through maybe 1/10 of the entire museum! We left the buffet of beauty unfulfilled and wanting for more.
I want to apologise first for being so late with this blog. So much has happened in the past couple of weeks since we went to St. Petersburg that it’s all a blur now. Just to give you a run-down of recent events, we went to St. Petersburg (FANTASTIC – pictures later) and got home on a Sunday evening in time to hit a concert, had an impromptu dinner party a few days later (invited 1 who grew into 6) and the next day, began a 4-day weekend hosting a friend and her daughter for a huge cat show that was held in Moscow over the weekend. The morning after we sent her home, we got on a plane and went to Texas for a week. We just arrived back here to Moscow the day before yesterday and I can now sit down and THINK before we embark on another busy weekend.
Just as a peek, we LOVED St. Petersburg and would recommend it to anyone who wants a concentrated picture of Russia in a short period of time. I’ll elaborate when Greg processes the pictures (you know he’s been busy when he hasn’t had a chance to do THAT!). In the meantime I want to also say that sometime in the flurry of the past 2 weeks, Greg got offered a completely new job than what he’s used to and a promotion. When we decided to put our hat in the ring for expat work, the entire reason was to do something different, see different places and expose Greg to new job experiences that would hopefully help his career in the future. We thought in a few years something might materialize that would justify our gamble. To say the least, we never thought it would happen this quickly! Of course, we aren’t so naive as not to realize that the world recession had a part in this also. The recession has hit Russia, the ruble fell almost 40 percent from last year and the oil producers aren’t getting what they need to get to be profitable. In short, companies employing expats overseas are rethinking their strategies and if they can find a national to do the job, then they can save quite a lot moving an expat home. So, we’re going back to the U.S. – Sugar Land, Texas to be exact – sometime the first part of June.
This has been very sudden for us and we really had mixed feelings for a while. We really wanted to spend at least one summer in Moscow, if for no other reason than to gloat to our friends in Texas who have been gloating to us about the fabulous weather they’ve been having all winter. I had my script prepared and everything, “What’s the temperature there? 100?! Is it humid, too (knowing full well the humidity is horrible)? Oh, it’s been 71 all week and sunny. We love eating dinner outside at the restaurants, but I have to bring a light SWEATER for the evenings. “ All this imagined revenge has just whipped around and gotten me because it looks as if we came to Moscow in the worst part of the winter, and will be leaving just as it’s getting nice and getting back to Texas just in time to experience the hot-humid full-time.
Of course, we’re grateful for what has turned out to be a 6 month paid vacation in Russia, but it would have helped — for planning purposes — if we had known ahead of time that Moscow would only be a short stint. Certainly I wouldn’t have gone through as much stress before leaving, but I also wouldn’t have cleaned out as many closets, either! I was forced to do a huge overhaul on my life, which was sorely needed and I can say that my addiction to Abyssinian kittens is lessened, thanks to the Kremlin Abyssinian Addiction rehab program and I hope to stay Showhall-Free for life, with the help of friends who can feed me regular doses of unpleasant cat fancy gossip to steel my resolve never to engage in that dysfunctional world again.
As to our remaining time in Russia, we’re going to try hard to experience as much as possible in the 6 weeks we have left. Of course, we’re going to have to deal with ANOTHER move and major relocation, the sale of our house and perhaps a 3rd move in 12 months;but most of the basics have been organized and moved here, so we can simply move the necessities from this apartment to our new apartment in Sugar Land. My days of closet cleaning will REALLY begin in June when I tackle the job of organizing 28 years of antique collecting into a compact and manageable space so we can sell our house in Victoria. Yes, Greg’s master plan has worked and it’s oh so logical to sell, sell, sell! I’ll miss the place, but it makes no sense at all to live in an apartment in Sugar Land during the week only to commute to Victoria on the weekends to mow, clean and basically do all the upkeep required on a huge house like that. It will get old very quickly, I’m sure. We’re going to take our time organizing and hopefully during that time the economy will recover and/or some of my real-estate leads will come along with the perfect buyer BEFORE we have to put it on the market. So, my summer is going to be spent on ebay moving out the stuff I haven’t been able to resist buying for the past 2 decades!
In the meantime, people have been asking about the apartment. Greg took a couple of pictures of the main living area, so I’ll share them with you now.
Dining Room After
Dining Room before
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Just so everyone doesn’t think that Moscow is the Promised land from my “sweetness and light” posts, I thought that I’d show you Moscow
from the average eye instead of a tourist’s eye or via the eye of a privileged expat.
- Average Housing
One of the things that really hit me when I made my first trip to Moscow was the really ugly apartment buildings I saw from the taxi on our way from the airport. I knew that we weren’t going through the slums because there were normal people walking around the streets as well as the area was as clean and well kept-up as possible. I made it my mission to find out as much as I could about how the average Russian person lives and I think I can talk about it with a reasonable amount of factual information now.
There are several different styles of architecture around here, depending on the government leadership at the time. Stalin was known to build some very nice buildings with impressive architecture. Of course, many people died under the slavery of Stalin so that beauty is tainted. Krushchev era buildings were mostly giant pre-fab buildings made with cheap concrete and not very large or nice inside.
Most average Russians live outside the center of the city where there are thousands of large pre-fab concrete apartment buildings, all bunched together in massive complexes. It’s more expensive to live inside the center of the city (within the ring that encloses the Kremlin) and many people who have real estate there rent it out to companies who obtain them for their expat employees. New architecture is also extremely expensive and our rent is over $10,000 American dollars a month because we are in a new apartment building.
Unfortunately because of the financial crisis, which Russia hasn’t escaped, many companies are pulling out and the expats are going with them. This leaves people with empty apartments and nobody to rent to. I’m really not too worried about Russians because it seems to me that since most don’t pay rent (the housing was government housing “given” to citizens who pass the apartment on to their children) and since few stores accept credit cards and many Russians just pay cash for anything they buy, not to mention very few people own cars, they’re not as deeply in debt as most of us are in the U.S. Of course, their ruble is worth less than an American dollar so they can’t buy as much and their pay is lower than the average American in a comparable position, but all in all, I’m under the impression that Russians are pretty thrifty and absolutely save for that rainy day.
