Homeward Bound

What is it that happens to luggage on the return trip. Why is it that what you neatly packed into your suitcase on the way out will now not fit into a bag twice the size. All the boxes of biscuits, chocolate and soap we had brought with us for our various hosts were gone and the only extras we had acquired were a handful of souvenirs. But after munch huffing and puffing, squeezing and squashing we were done and ready for check out.

It was with no great sadness that we departed the Petro Palace. The hotel, allocated a four star rating, was in truth a two star. There was no in-room wi-fi, unless you paid £15 per day and water had to be purchased. (I forgot to mention that you cannot drink the tap water in Russia – too many impurities.) There are two important points in the hotel’s favour: it is located in the centre of the city and adjacent to all the main areas and buildings of interest, plus the concierge service was fantastic. The girls who manned the desk spoke fluent English and went out of their way to supply our every need. Top marks. 

It was, however, with great sadness that we left St Petersburg itself.

There is something entirely magical about St Petersburg. Peter the Great is said to have envisioned the city rising out of the mists of the marshland bordering the River Neva. And even today, given the season and the weather, St Petersburg can be wreathed in mist. You could say that every city has its complexity and its unique spirit but St Petersburg has an extraordinary presence. Everywhere you turn there is a harmony of line and an apparently effortless fusion of water and buildings. It has a turbulent history too, beginning with the loss of over a thousand lives during its construction and, of course, the blockade that stretched from September 1941 to January 1944. And somehow its history and spirit seem to flow through the waterways of the city and into the veins of the people. How could we not be sad to leave. 

Our final few hours in St Petersburg were to be spent at the Mariinsky. First, we were to watch another company class – this time one which Xander was taking – and second, a performance of Shurale, a ballet based on a Russian fairy tale and made up largely of folk dances.

Develope

Arabesque

5th position

Pas de trois

The class started out with thirty or so dancers but by the end only five were left, including Xander. I have a video I would like to share with you of two members of the corps de ballet. (I'm still getting the hang of my video camera so apologies for not being able to make a clean ending - obviously the contents of my handbag are fascinating...)

It was difficult to appreciate Shurale. We were sitting high up in the ‘gods’, which provided a wonderful view of the stage, but our minds were elsewhere – the journey home, and all the hassle and rigmarole associated with flying in these post 9-11 days. We shouldn’t have worried though, the taxi arrived promptly, and at precisely half past two we were heading away from the Mariinsky watching the figures of Xander and Dimitri disappear into little dots.

One word of advice:  if you’re flying out of St Petersburg airport: don’t leave it till the last minute. Aside from not being able to check-in on line, which is pretty standard for British Airways, the baggage security check takes place before you get into the departure hall. And once you have checked in, the queue for passport control takes forever. We must have been almost forty minutes waiting to be checked out of the country.

How quickly our ten days in Russia had gone. We had seen so much, made new friends and gained insights about the country that few people achieve in a handful of days. It was a little too soon for a post mortem, we needed to let our memories filter our experience. And that would take some days.

Until then.


PS Since I have now mastered the art of uploading video, you can see the Dance of The Little Cygnets in glorious techni-colour in the previous blog, Tsarskoye Selo.

Tsarskoye Sela

Another day; another palace...

Assembly point: the Concierge’s desk. Time: 10 am.

We were headed to Tsarskoye Selo, AKA Pushkin Palace, once home to Catherine the Great, and some fifteen miles south of St. Petersburg. This time there were just the three of us, plus our guide, Maria. And we heard Maria coming... The quick, sharp clack of steel-tipped heels on tiled floor informed us we were going to have to pay attention.

The hotel provided the people carrier – a relic from the Cold War, possibly – but although it rattled a lot and you had to sit in very specific places to feel the air conditioning it proceeded at a cracking pace along Nevsky Prospect. “See, over here on the left, apartments built in the time of Stalin, and over there on the right, buildings erected in the Kruschev era. Notice the functionality of the latter. Now, also, see here the memorial to the great Siege of Leningrad... Would you mind, please to pay attention.” Glower, glower, tch, tch.

On arrival at Pushkin Village – Pushkin did indeed have a dacha there – we joined a line of visitors. Not for long though. Maria didn’t like to wait, and gave us a master-class in queue-jumping, elbowing out of the way competing tour guides with the skill and fervour of a rugby forward. We looked straight ahead, avoiding the glares and unseemly gestures of those we were leaving behind.

In front of the palace a small group of musicians, dressed in uniform, suddenly burst into a medley from Swan Lake – dance of the cygnets followed by big swans – which proved irresistible to Gail who, handbag in hand, pas-de-cha’d her way to the end.  Here is a video of the occasion - apologies for camera work, it was my first attempt!

It was only yesterday that I wrote in purple prose about the architecture and collections in The Hermitage so I don’t want to repeat myself and bore you in the process. Obviously, the palaces have their own personalities and collections – and Tsarskoye Selo is much smaller - but there are only so many mentions you can make of corridors of tapestries, halls of chandeliers and truck-loads of precious jewels.

Tsarskoye Selo was Catherine the Great’s favourite residence – she spent the summers there – and we could see why, given that Saturday was shaping up to be one of those glorious autumn days and the palace with its hundreds of windows was sparkling like a fountain in the midday sun.

One of the main attractions of the palace is the Amber Room. This sounds exotic but when you actually get in there it’s a huge disappointment. There are no big slabs of amber but thousands and thousands of tiny pieces that go to make up the wall panels, and it all looks like plastic, a brown plastic mosaic. It is not the original Amber Room either, since this was taken away piece by piece during World War II by the marauding German army. There is a great mystery as to where the stolen amber went: some say it was taken to a castle in East Prussia, now Kalingrad, which was subsequently razed to the ground in an air raid; others that it sank without trace in the Baltic. Suffice to say what you’re seeing now is a testament to the dedication of the restorers who, over the course of many years, painstakingly recreated the room from drawings and notes made across the centuries.

We did enjoy a separate exhibition of Meissen china, which was tucked away from the main route through the palace. We couldn’t afford to buy a dinner service in the museum shop but Gail and I came away with identical bone china bowls. Memories are made of this...

Perhaps the best part of our visit to Tsarskoye Sela was the park itself. Vine-covered, crescent-shaped walkways led to ornamental pools, and great sweeping lawns took you down to the pellucid lake. (I just had to get that word in; it’s such a favourite, and only three syllables.)

 Every so often amidst the trees we’d see a bridal couple being photographed – obviously you want the grand-children to know you married in style even if you now live in mutual loathing on either side of Russia. 




Which reminds me... Last night on our way to Terrassa, we kept seeing women clasping a single flower in one hand and a guy in the other. Apparently, it is something of a tradition in Russia to give your girl flowers on Friday night – it’s a token of your ardour and commitment. Sweet, don’t you think.

The journey back passed in much the same way as the journey there: periodic blasts of cold air from the ancient a/c system and sporadic shots of information fired at us by Maria. By the time we got to the hotel we were glad to see the back of her.

On our wish list for the afternoon was a tour of St Isaac’s Cathedral for Sue, R and R for Gail and me, then the three of us would try to find the fabled Beluga – basically, an up-market souvenir shop.

There must be something about the word beluga because, big as the shop was, it kept itself hidden from view. We asked directions several times, always in our best Rush-lish, but people shook their heads. Even the girls in a souvenir shop, which turned out to be fifty paces from Beluga, claimed never to have seen it... However, our travels were not in vain. Obeying our intuition we set off in a north-westerly direction and en-route discovered an antique shop – Tertiaspb. (I mention this because it is a treasure trove, should you ever come to St Petersburg.) We found old programmes dating back to Pavlova’s day and also some of the Ballet Russe. They were too much of an investment for our depleted rouble accounts but I was able to afford three little shot ‘glasses’ – hand-painted at the turn of the century.

And there, as we stepped out of Tertiaspb, on the near corner of the square, was Beluga.

You’re ahead of me, aren’t you. Yes, it was a big disappointment. Rows of babushka dolls, fake Faberge eggs and shelf upon shelf of amber. But at least Gail had her bone china cup and saucer – purchased from the not-Beluga-souvenir shop – and I had my shot glasses.

As we wandered back to the Petro Palace in the warm afternoon sun, we realized this would be the last time we’d walk along Nevsy Prospect; tomorrow we would be returning home. And it hit us like a sledgehammer. St Petersburg had truly smiled on us and caught our hearts and our imagination.

Dinner with Xander at Ocean. 

Until tomorrow.

The Hermitage

Before I wade into our visit to the Hermitage, I realize you must be wondering about the taxi situation - such a major part of our Moscow experience. Well, taxis, or rather the cost of cab rides, is not such a big issue here. Everything is half the price of Moscow - meals in restaurants, entry into museums, and taxis. Indeed, the reason why I haven't mentioned the t-word since we've been in St Petersburg is because the rides seem so cheap. However, we were still being 'done'. And this is how we found out.

On leaving the Mariinsky and Onegin, Dimitri organized a taxi back to the hotel. He informed us it would cost 250 roubles - about £6. As we were driving home our unusually chatty driver asked us if Dimitri was an old friend or we had just run into him outside the theatre... When it came time to pay I handed over a 500 rouble note, which our charming cabby immediately pocketed. Hmmm... My hand still extended for the change, he dipped into his little baggy and produced, very reluctantly, 250 roubles. You see, he was hoping he could charge us the usual tourist rate, which is, on average, double the real cost. Even in lovely St. Petersburg.

Another little gem I meant to mention in the previous blog was Valery Gergiev. We had been talking to Dimitri about the glorious music coming from the pit during Onegin,which provoked a comment about the west's love affair with the conductor, Gergiev. Dimitri shook his head, explaining that there were many equally great, if not greater, conductors in Russia, and we had had the priviledge of hearing one of them that night - Boris Gruzin. We had actually met Mr Gruzin in one of the intervals, and he was clearly flabbergasted to find three ballet dancers who were also opera enthusiasts. Usually the twain do not meet; artistes of the ballet and opera rarely appreciate each others virtues.

Our call next morning was for 11 o'clock by the concierge's desk. There we were to meet the rest of the group going to the Hermitage.

A little word here about tour guides. From the outset Sue had been trying to persuade us to invest in a guided tour but Gail and I were resistant: seeing untidy groups of people being led around museums by a bolshy, noisy person waving a stick, was not our idea of fun. But we relented for the Hermitage, and how grateful we were. Our guide, Ria, turned out to be funny, informative, efficient and not at all noisy and bolshy.

At the concierge's desk we discovered our gang of three had morphed into a six with the addition of a pair of Israeli grandparents and their thirteen-year-old grandson. We felt a pang of sympathy for the young man who was clearly as pleased to be doing a tour of an ancient building as he would be about the prospect of a double-maths lesson. Actually, I think he'd rather be doing the maths. We only managed to garner the name Cassif, which meant we spent four hours with this charming family not knowing whether they were Mr, Mrs and Master Cassif or Cassif was the Christian name of the grandfather. (Forename would probably be more appropriate - I've become accustomed to this term through filling out so many immigration forms.) So, we were either being very rude or over polite. We'll never know.

Anyway, the Hermitage and a short history lesson.






The Hermitage, or to give it its full title, The State Hermitage Museum, is spread over five palaces set in magnificent style on the banks of the River Neva. The Old Hermitage, originally the Winter Palace, was built in 1754 and became the home of Russian Emperors, including Catherine the Great, right through to Tsar Nicholas II - the last Tsar. The Small Hermitage was built ten years ten years later in 1764, although the use of the word small has to be understood in the context of a building the size and scale of the Palace of Versailles. You start to see why revolution was inevitable. Such obscene wealth has a limited appeal to the common man.

The Hermitage is not just a fabulous collection of art and artefacts; the palaces have to be seen and awed at for themselves. Room upon room of glittering chandeliers, velvet-covered walls embroidered with silver thread, slabs of malachite, jasper and lapis-lazulite, even a peacock clock made entirely of gold whose feathers splay out when the hour is struck. (This event happens once a month now.) We took a separate tour of The Gold Room with another guide who may have been around at the time of the revolution, such was her knowledge of the period and her age. I have run out of superlatives and hyperbole, I'm afraid. You'll just have to go see it all for yourselves.

Much to our amusement and enlightenment, Cassif turned out to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of Russian history, so much so that he occasionally took over the tour. "Russia is a very young country. Migrating tartars populated the land just over a thousand years ago."  Our guide, Ria, was gracious in the extreme and continually thanked him for his input but I wondered if her nails were secretly digging into her palm. (If you ever find your way to this blog, Cassif, know that we appreciated you.)

I can't leave the Hermitage without mentioning the paintings: its collections are among the greatest in the world - especially those of the Dutch and Flemish masters - and having spent some time arguing about which collection we should be sure to visit the three of us ended up seeing our personal favourites - Caravaggio for Gail, Monet for Sue and Rembrandt for me.

We spent a little over four hours in the museum and not wishing to break the pattern of the trip, Gail and I set off in the direction of the hotel while Sue and Lonely Planet headed for the sights. Crossing the road in front of the Astoria, who should we run into - no, not Jill and Norman - but Galina. She walked back to the Petro Palace with us, pressing us to come back to St Petersburg in the late spring when the white nights allow you to walk around this beautiful city as if it were four in the afternoon. "And the blossoms..."

Our evening was to be spent with Xander, and one of his favourite restaurants - Terassa. This restaurant benefits from a panoramic view of the city but it also has seriously good food. Sue and I went for aubergine parmigiani while Gail and Xander had a spicy beef stir-fry.

St Petersburg is experiencing something of an Indian Summer and we walked back to the hotel along Nevsy Prospect in balmy temperatures. It seemed as though all of the city was out enjoying summer's last hurrah. Passing an entrance to the underground rail, Gail asked Xander if it would be worth taking a peek since Moscow's metro stations are practically works of art. "Absolutely not!" he replied, "Going into the metro here is like descending into an underground missile silo...". The only minus to the city I can report at this stage. As you can probably tell, we are in love with St. Petersburg; we are in love with Dimitri and Galina and Xander.

Night-night.

Vaganova, Onegin and strange noises off

Our day started exactly as it had on Wednesday, except Gail did not wake up with a pink eye and breakfast passed without incident. Toaster still maddeningly slow though.

We took a taxi to the Vaganova Academy and arrived on the dot of 10.45. The school, which is the feed for the Mariinsky Ballet Company, is almost completely renovated and, with its off-white walls, marble floors, alabaster balusters and coffee-coloured drapes, has an creamy calm about it. In the foyer we met up with Jill and Norman again who were full of the Sleeping Beauty performance they had seen the night before. The ballet took four hours from start to finish ,which surprised us. We couldn't figure out how they got another hour out of a set Tchaikovsky piece...

We were due to see the graduating class - the girls who would be finishing school next July, and hopefully entering the company. The Mariinsky takes on average twenty-two dancers each year but not every year produces a great crop of dancers - in 2009 all eleven boys in the grdauate class failed to get in.. The academy is subsidized by the government, not a single student pays fees; entry to the school is achieved purely on talent.

There was a relatively small number of students in the class, which the teacher, Madame Vassilieva, explained was due to illness. We also thought this might be a covert way of informing us that one or two of her star pupils were absent. And, much as I hate to say this, we didn't think much of the girls we saw. There were two beautiful dancers, one from Korea and another from Russia. The latter was small, however, so she will have to reach the standard of a soloist to be taken into the company. There is a current vogue for tall dancers.

Warming up.

The dancer on the far right was our pick for the future.






Class over, we said our good-byes to Jill and Norman, having exchanged promises to keep in touch. We then went our separate ways. The three of us meandered towards Nevsky Prospect and decided the Singer building with its top floor cafe might fit the bill for lunch.

St Petersburg has some lovely buildings constructed in the Art Deco period, of which the Singer is one. It now houses a large bookshop, on the lines of Barnes and Noble and Waterstones. We chose a table by the window, which turned out to be a huge mistake since the afternoon sun was streaming in turning us to toast. Not too long into our ham-and-cheese who should enter the cafe but Jill and Norman. I tell you, it's serendipity on sticks!

Since we were out on the town that night we decided a pit-stop at the hotel was called for, and the now familiar routine of smalls-washing, showers and, for me, playing catchup on my work.

Not wanting to risk another risotto failure at Teatro, we decided to try the hotel pektopah (that's Russian for restaurant, by the way, only I've probably got the spelling wrong). It turned out to be a wise choice, although we did have some fun deciphering the dishes on the menu. How would you feel about mush potatoes with your Stroganov or some caulyflower with your pike patties, and to finish a blackcurrent sambuk with wiped cream. Lurvly...

We arrived back at the Mariinsky just before curtain up at 7 pm. The performance we were about to watch was Eugene Onegin. I had seen the opera on several occasions and was smitten with Robert Carston's production at the Met in New York, which had Renee Flemming (Tatiana) and Dmitri Hvorostovsky (Onegin) in the lead roles. I was hoping it might be the same production but it was instead a very traditional one. Lovely though. The seats in the auditorium are actual chairs, so you can move them around, should you have a blot on your landscape in the row in front of you. (That's always happening to me, or is this small people's paranoia?) But this is the only benefit because they are kind of uncomfortable during a long act.

I have to say there is something very special about hearing Tchaikovsky played by Russian musicians in the city in which he lived and composed, and in the theatre in which Sleeping Beauty, Onegin and the rest would have been premiered. The playing was simply sublime.

Emerging from the stalls, we ran into Dimitri who was waiting to take us back stage. Several flights of stone steps later we were back in the company canteen - three Earl Grey teas, one with cold milk, please - and met his equally warm and generous wife, Galina. When the bell went for the next act, the three of us shot up, and were smartly waved back down again. "In the Mariinsky, there is no hurry..." The interval lasted almost fifty minutes. Now we understood why Beauty had taken four hours.

This laid-back attitude to intervals is symptomatic of the difference between Moscow and St Petersburg. In Moscow, everything is big, pressurized, fast and impersonal; in St Petersburg, people take time to smell the roses. Or is that the vodka...

Onegin was magical. Tatiana ( Viktoria Yastrebova) was just how you imagine her, limpid of eye, slim and dark - basically, exquisite with a voice to match; Onegin ( Vladimir Moroz) was picture-perfect too - he could have my hand in the Cotillon any time. If I do have a niggle it is about Yastrebova's performance. It was interpretation by numbers: on beat 4, take six steps to the chair; on beat 6, pick up handkerchief; beat 7, look depressed, dab cheeks with hanky.

Act 2 contained a surprise. As Onegin and Lensky prepared to duel it out a shot was heard in the wings. Now, we might all have thought it was part of the plot except Onegin and Lensky did a double-take, with the result that the audience began to titter.

During the second interval - yet another fifty minutes - we went backstage again, and this time we were allowed in the wings to watch the ballroom scene being set up. As you can see, we have some lovely photographs to remember it all by.

When we got back to the hotel we had a little too much adrenalin flowing through our systems to sleep so a nightcap seemed in order. The cocktail menu was very adventurous. We decided to pass on the Tequila Sunraze and the Blood Mary and ordered three Chilean Cab Sav's. Maybe we should have tried the Tequila Sunraze...

Night-night.

Mariinsky magic and an Idiotic interlude

Day two in St Petersburg began well. Gail woke up with one pink eye. The only legacy of a vodka-fueled night out and, truth be told, more likely to be a result of industrial use of shampoo.

We had our first breakfast in the hotel, which, unlike the Savoy, was well attended; in other words, packed to the gills with tourists, predominantly from Germany. There was a minor international incident over the toaster - not terribly efficient and probably a relic from the Siege of Leningrad - which meant that mutterings and glower-ings were exchanged across the dining room for a good part of the meal. (I have now moved on from salmon and black bread to smoked ham and cheese and rye. Could do with a few prunes though...)

We were due to meet our contact, Dimitri, at the stage door of the Mariinsky Theatre at 10 40, a little before company class. We were also lined up to meet an English Dancer, Alexander Parish, who had joined the ballet company in January, of whom more later. On the button of 10 40 a small man with a beaming smile appeared - could this be the fabled Russian leprechaun, we wondered? - and introduced himself as Dimitri. His full title is International Projects Co-ordinator and Ballet Interpreter, but as we were to find out later, his talents far exceed his job description. He speaks several languages, including Greek and Arabic and he regularly performs as an actor with one of the great theatre companies in St. Petersburg. After much form-filling (thank-goodness it was down to Dimitri to do the paperwork; the visa entry form was enough for us)  we were ushered into the labyrinthine world of backstage Mariinsky.

Part of the discipline of being a professional ballet dancer is attending class every day - usually in the morning. It is the preparation for everything that is to follow - rehearsals and performances. Since the company is huge (240 dancers altogether, although at least half are on tour at any given time) there is more than one company class each day, with some devoted to the girls and the others to the guys. We were to watch girls' class, given by Natalia Spizena.

In class, you're seeing dancers stripped of any vestige of artifice. It's the equivalent of watching people brushing their teeth and clipping their toe-nails: it's not something you want everyone to see. I'm going to leave the pictures to speak for themselves. Suffice to say, the Mariinsky has some fabulous dancers.

Stretching:

                                                            Barre:

Perfection:

Rehearsal: Lilac Fairy Attendants:









After class, Alexander Parish - Xander - came to collect us and take us on a tour of the theatre. Gail and Sue were already familiar with his story but for me it was something of a revelation.

Born in Hull, Alexander developed an interest in dancing at the age of eight.  When he was twelve, he entered White Lodge, the junior section of the Royal ballet School, and joined the company itself in 2005. Xander is not only gifted as a dancer with great good looks and a remarkable physique but at 6' 1 he is one of the tallest male dancers in the ballet world. Despite all this he languished in the corps at the Royal, and might still be there spear-carrying were it not for Yuri Fateev, now Acting Director of the Mariinsky. Yuri was spending a short time coaching the Royal Ballet in 2007 when he spotted Xander and asked him if he would be interested in joining the Mariinsky. Xander didn't take him seriously at first but three years later, here he is. The only English dancer in the company, ever.

                                                                                        Xander:

And it is clear he is thriving. The powers-that-be love him. Within six weeks of landing at St Petersburg airport he was dancing the male lead in Sylphides, the preceding Saturday he had performed the Pas de Trois from Swan Lake in front of Putin - a keen balletomane - and within hours of our meeting he was called to study the roles of Albrecht (Giselle) and Siegfried (Swan Lake).

Since the three of us are all mothers of boys, we quacked around Xander like old ducks, and made immediate plans for further get-togethers while we're here in St. Petersburg.

The Mariinsky Theatre is in a state of serious disrepair. Goodness knows how no one has broken a leg or done any major damage to themselves. Stone steps lead up and down the many and uneven levels of the theatre and there are metal trunks and scenery stacked in the corridors. Compared to Covent Garden it is a hovel. A beautiful hovel but a hovel nonetheless.

Penny snapped by Xander in front of the Mariinsky







We especially loved seeing the stage and taking in the auditorium from the stage. There's something very romantic about watching the drops and the scenery being put in place in the half-light of a dusty theatre.

                  Setting up for Sleeping Beauty:

  Ready and waiting.

                                                             More waiting...    





                                                                              

       Is this a tutu I see before me?

A cabbage roll and a new headdress, please.




We left the Mariinsky around 2pm with a mission to find a place for lunch. (It was now some six hours since we'd eaten anything, and we were starving - something of an occupational hazard we were discovering.) We remembered passing a restaurant called The Idiot along one of the canal walks, which had been recommended to Gail by Julie Kavanagh (the author of a matchless biography of Nureyev). Sure enough the restaurant was quaint - yet another library setting - with an extensive menu, purely vegetarian. Sue had pancakes with caviar, Gail pancakes with lemon - now, becoming a firm favourite - and I had a crab and avocado salad.

I guess we were making rather a lot of noise because the couple at the table next to us introduced themselves in English. They were English. In fact, Jill turned out to be a Friend of the Mariinsky. Curiouser and curiouser, she and her companion, Norman, were all set to watch class at the Vaganova School the next day, as were we. Now, what are the chances of running into people you've never met in a randomly chosen spot who are set to be with you the next day.

Lunch over and four-o'clock, Gail and I admitted defeat in terms of being-a-fully-paid-up-tourist and returned to the hotel for rest and recuperation.

Sue took in the Kazan Cathedral, the Church on the Spilled Blood (closed) and the Mikhailovsky Gardens (not closed).

                                                         Church on the Spilled Blood.



However, our friend, the Energizer Bunny, had run out of battery juice by the evening and opted for room service while Gail and I had a less than magnificent meal in a restaurant near the Mariinsky, Teatro. If you go there, please don't order the chicken risotto. It turned out to be a plate of white rice with a tough old bird laid out on it.  (No comparisons, please.)

Night-night.

No vodka, please, we're British

Tuesday was a bit of a blurry day.

We'd had roughly four hours sleep on the train and hauling our bags to the taxi was about all our feeble minds and bodies could handle. We were too early to check into our rooms at the hotel so we left the luggage with the bellboy and asked one of the receptionists where we could have breakfast. "No, I know no cafes near here..." Then after conversing with a colleague, "Try the Literarti Cafe: turn right outside the hotel, right again and it's on the opposite side of the road."

So that's where we headed at a slow crawl, except we found ourselves in a back street near a canal with nerry a shop or restaurant in sight.

Fortunately, our hotel, the Petro Palace, is brilliantly situated at the heart of St. Petersburg and slap bang in the middle of all the museums, palaces and churches you would want to see. It is a hundred yards from the main drag, Nevsky Prospect, which we eventually  managed to stumble onto - and I mean stumble. Practically the first bright window we spotted was a little tea-room, where we hunkered down for a couple of hours, revived somewhat by croissants, ham-and-cheese toasts and hot chocolate. (We never ever found the aptly named Literati Cafe; I suspect the name is wrong and it's located elsewhere. If any of you know it or find it, let us know. Please.)

The Petro Palace may be well placed but it is not a patch on Moscow's Savoy.It looks great on the outside but inside it is a hotchpotch of narrow passages, barn-like open spaces, some bare-tiled and others covered with worn-down carpets. Gail and I were shown into a room that had something of the prison cell about it and immediately asked to be relocated, which to the hotel's credit it did, and we nested there for the rest of our stay in St Petersburg.

Where Sue got her energy from I have no idea. In the time it took Gail and I to unpack and shower, update the blog and make some phone calls, Sue, armed with Lonely Planet and a digital camera, had taken in the Admiralty, the Peter and Paul Fortress, Mars Field and the Marble Palace.

 It was becoming a bit of a pattern.
                                                                                   Griboyedov Canal, Bank Bridge.

We all showed up to dinner in the evening though.

One of our contacts was a TV presenter of a weekly current affairs programme, Roman Gerasimov. He had booked a table at a restaurant called, Teplo, which is hidden away in a small courtyard just off St Isaac's Square. He took over immediately, which was great because we were a little tired of making executive decisions and then not being able to carry them out because no one understood us. He insisted that we had vodka, and in the correct way: a small plate of pickles and bread (much nicer than it sounds) of which you must have a mouthful before you down your shot. Roman maintained, and he turned out to be right, that if you drink vodka  this way, you will not get a hangover. You might give your taxi driver 5000 roubles and leave your hand-bag in the cab but you won't get a hangover.

Roman was a proverbial mine of information. The conversation inevitably turned to politics. Despite being a so-called democracy not a lot has changed in Russia since Perestroika. There is still an enormous amount of corruption at the top, and a massive abuse of money and power. He mentioned that one of the news stories  that had kept them entertained for weeks was the so-called expenses scandal at Westminster. "Imagine a minister being called over the coals for purchasing a duck house on expenses! Millions go missing in Russia." Another issue he was particularly passionate about was the distribution of funds for restoration and preservation. Apparently, Moscow takes 80% of the budget, which means St Petersburg has a pittance with which to repair its damaged bridges, palaces, churches and monuments. And if you could see St Petersburg, the Venice of the North, with its elegant buildings and picturesque bridges that adorn the canals and hugging the shores of the Baltic Sea, you would despair at the crumbling architecture.

So, it is now mid-night and the end of our first day in St. Petersburg. I have a feeling we're going to love our stay here.

Night-night.

Boats, boat people and not the Orient Express

Hate living out of a suitcase, especially when it seems to have shrunk in the five days since we’ve been here. It’s not the only thing that’s shrunk. Our clothes have too. (I tell you, come to Moscow and see the sights: with museum cafes as rare as a blue moon, you’ll drop a dress size.)

We organized a late check-out for 3 pm and decided to ‘do’ GUM and a boat trip. Here is a photo of GUM.

It could run the entire length of Red Square. You pass through two time zones as you go from Dior to Cartier. All right, that’s another exaggeration but it is the longest, largest department store I’ve seen. 

 If you’re anything like us, you’ll think of GUM as it was in the Cold War days: a place where never-ending queues of women with head-scarves and large bags waited outside a bread shop with no bread. Well, fast-forward forty years. GUM is more of an up-scale mall, with scores of high-end boutiques we’re all familiar with in the west. We were stopped from taking photos in the wine and spirits department but we had already managed to get a couple of shots elsewhere. A pair of Woolford tights will set you back £39 ($52) but a small jar of average caviar will cost you only a fraction more. We should have bought some because the caviar on the train was double the price. But that’s another story...

Making up for the lost years in the fashion wilderness:

It took us an hour to get from GUM to the pier. It was half an inch on the map but four underpasses, a bridge with no steps to the walkway underneath and an entire block off-limits due to construction turned it into a safari. But it was worth the hike.

It wasn’t so much the basilicas and the palaces that made our trip so worthwhile but the people on the boat. Have a look at this beautiful face. We christened her Su-Bo...

She was with six or seven baboushkas, all very jolly and keen to take our photographs. Maybe they have a blog...

Seeking refuge from the wind and the occasional blast of eau-de-bateau (Gail insisted the boat was fuelled on cabbage soup) we took ourselves to the canteen below . I have to tell you the coffee (Americano – espresso with hot milk) was top notch and 80p, which made it taste even better.  Not long into our pit-stop we encountered our new best friend – a Kiwi from London, teaching English in St Petersburg.  Rochelle had been in Russia since April and was, frankly, very homesick for London. She was taking her guy, Simon, sight-seeing - it was his birthday and he had flown in from London for a couple of days. Rochelle had some very different views of Moscow having lived here for five months, and they were not flattering. Outside the inner circle of Moscow central she talked about the rampant poverty and crime - she herself had narrowly missed being attacked on a morning jog in her local park. She also told us that she no longer bought food from local shops such is the dirt and contamination. We were also beginning to see beyond the bright lights of Moscow...

Our boat trip was Moscow's adieu to us. Some hours later we headed to the station, all set for our romantic train-journey to St Petersburg in the Red Arrow.

It occurred to us, as we staggered like pack mules up the stone steps of one of Moscow's main-line stations, that there were no facilities for the disabled. We couldn't find a ramp or an elevator. It then dawned upon us we hadn't seen anyone in a wheelchair since we'd arrived in Moscow. We just take health and safety as a given in the west - can you think of a public building that doesn't feature ramps and facilities for the disabled? Not so in Moscow. It's the survival of the fittest and the wealthiest.

Moscow Leningradskiy Station at 11 pm on a Monday night is not a place to be on your own. There was not a friendly face in sight; it was poorly lit and ultra depressing. There were even drunks, one of whom was covered in blood and being shepherded out of the station by the police.

What a total surprise it was to find no information in English about where to process our E-tickets. There were straggly bunches of people around ticket desks - everybody elbowing each other out of the way, waving papers and being generally unpleasant. We joined one of the lines - if you can call it a line, it was more of a scrum - until Sue established that we should be in an entirely different place.

Thankfully we had allowed for plenty of time to catch the train - we had no idea we’d need so much of it simply to walk the length of the platform to our carriage. We couldn’t see the end of the train from the barrier. The Red Arrow is Russia’s most famous train. It used to carry the elite of the communist party between Moscow and Leningrad. Five minutes before the grand opening of the carriage doors, a uniformed guard stepped out onto the platform – no, please don’t cross the yellow line – and at a given signal we were allowed to board.

I have to tell you that this is not the Orient Express. It is romantic in the sense that you’re travelling across Russia in the dead of night gently drifting away to the hypnotic clackety-clack of the ‘wheels’ and the swinging gait of the train but the beds are hard and narrow and our meal came in a paper box. And we were in business class. A cheerful attendant brought around some duty-free – how do you feel about an open sandwich of salmon and salmon eggs for a mere 900 roubles (about £20) and a small jar of caviar for £100? Anyway, we did sleep, sort of, and awoke to early morning drizzle in the outskirts of St. Petersburg. Oh, nearly forgot... We pulled out of Leningradskiy station to the sound of a brass band playing the Red Arrow theme tune. It took me straight back to Dr, Zhivago. Oh where oh where are the balalaikas...