St. Petersburg

While in St. Petersburg, we stayed very busy, waking up fairly early every morning and staying up pretty late every night. Since I have a hard time keeping all the museums and palaces straight, I'm just going to write about my favorite/most memorable parts of the trip.

One of the days, we went to a "museum of curiosities" that was basically a museum of everything that Peter the Great liked to collect. The oddest, and by far the most interesting, part of the collection was an entire room of deformed fetuses. Some of the descriptions should be redone, in my opinion, so that they don't call any of them "monsters". Besides that, it was interesting to apply what I learned in Humbio core to what we saw at the museum. There were babies with a single eye, a ton of conjoined twins, and a lot of other developmental problems. A lot of people in the group were bothered by what they saw, but I found it very interesting. The creepy part was when some of the fetuses were dressed in clothes. Apparently that was so they wouldn't scare as many people, but I found it to have the opposite effect on the people that I saw.

One day it snowed really hard the night before. I keep getting reminded that Russians are not excited for snow like Americans are. When we saw the snow, we ran around in it, had snowball fights, and looked like little children. The Russians were much less excited, and continued about their days. While the snow was really fun, when it melted, it made walking on the sidewalks exceedingly difficult. I now understand what people were warning me about when they said the slush was terrible. It was really slippery and got everyone's shoes wet. I much prefer the snow.

On Thursday night, we went to see Don Quixote at the ballet at the Marinski Theater. I really liked it because it was more playful and a little less serious than Romeo and Juliet was when we saw it at the Bolshoi. It was still really good, though. At the first intermission, we went to get champagne and met another American student studying in Russia. He seemed really nice, but he tried to convince us that he was from Russia. That doesn't work too well when you have a very clear American accent. A couple people got caviar because it seemed like the place to get it, but I tried theirs and it tasted awful. I've only had caviar three times now, but i'm pretty sure I don't like it.

Mass graves

The hardest thing to visit was the cemetery for those who lost their lives in the Siege of Leningrad. There were 600,000 people buried there in mass graves marked only by the year and civilian vs. military. There was a wall with a very nice poem dedicated to those buried there. My favorite line was "Death would sooner be afraid of us than we would be afraid of death."

I left St. Petersburg a day earlier than the rest of the group in order to get back in time for the Marine Corps Ball on Saturday. When I got on the train, I was excited to be in the same compartment as a family with a little daughter because I figured they would go to bed early and sleep until we got into Moscow. But, when the father asked me if I drank Russian vodka, I knew I wouldn't be getting much sleep. As much as I wanted to sleep before the ball, I didn't want to be rude, so I joined the two Russian men in my compartment in drinking the vodka. It was pretty harsh, but after a bit, I realized they were sort of testing me to see if I could drink it without asking for juice. If I would have known, I would have just gotten juice at the beginning.

As for my general impressions of St. Petersburg, I don't really understand why everyone raves about it so much. I had a good time there, but it isn't as different from Moscow as I had imagined. The streets were wider and straighter so traffic was a little less horrible, the buildings were prettier, and the metro was nicer but not as well put together. There are definitely pros and cons to both St. Petersburg and Moscow, but Moscow feels like home at this point, so I'm inclined to say that I like it more there.