so, in my career as a professional student, ive managed to take 3 courses on russian
history... two from good ol' doc warner at mary wash and one, soviet history taught by dr. ruane at tulsa. i never really thought i'd go to russia, but then, one day this summer, i just decided, i'll go to russia. so i went to the consulate and got a visa and here i am, in russia. its alot like europe only everythings in russian. so on to the city.
my hotel is between saint isaacs cathedral and the admiralty which means that im about two blocks from the hermitage/winter palace. now everything is in cyrillics which at first was kind of bewildering, but like when i was in beijing... after awhile you start to associate certain characters with things... CAHT is saint which means that the next word is probably petersburg... and if the first letter is pi then it is. st petersburg sort of reminds me of stockholm and helsinki. helsinki makes sense because most of the central part of t
he city was built by the russians... and before the russians took control of sometime between 1808 and 1812... so yeah, saint petersburg looks like helsinki and stockholm... stockholm is similar because theyre both built on several islands, and they both claim the title the venice of the north (along with hamburg)...
so yeah, this entry has pictures of the hermitage, which i'll talk about more in another entry, the Alexander column, and some triumphal arches behind it. its cool because the alexander column and the triumphal arches face the winter palace and when the revolutionaries stormed the palace during the october revolution they ran through this square, also when the people got massacred in 1905...
it was in this square, so its
got alot of history. at the naval museum there was a model showing the storming of the winter palace... and i just loved it, so i took some pictures of it. it gives a good diea of what the scene looked like to see all these poor people charging across this very posh rococco square. i like those pictures of the diorama...
next up is the bronze horseman. a statue of peter the great that won fame after pushkin, the great russian poet wrote a
poem about the statue pursuing him during a flood. peter the great is huge in st petersburg for the simple reason that he built the
city. he was the great westernizing tsar. he built st petersburg, made russia a european power by defeating the swedes in the great northern war, and built the russian navy. peter was a giant of a man for his age, and still is today. at one of the museums at the peter and paul fortress they showed an imprint of his hand, and it would rival any NFL player's hand... it dwarfed mine. but i have dainty little hands. so he's big in the burg, so you have at all the major sites men dressed up like peter the great in big cavalry boots, green officer's coat with red facings and gold lace and a tricornered hat.... along with him is a woman dressed up as catherine the great or just an 18th century lady. and you can have your picture taken with them if you desire to spend the money (similar to the gladiators in front of the colosseum in roma) also for posing with pictures i saw two hot chicks dressed up like Hussars from the napoleonic wars (hussars were light cavalry, originally hungarians in the 18th century, but by napoleon's time, just another type of light cavalry for scouting and harrassing the enemy).
to end this generalised talk of st petersburg, i have to thank texpat andrea for showing me around my first two days, without her, im not sure i wouldnt have freaked out. she took me around to the peter and paul fortress and up and down nevsky prospket, and helped me understand the city's layout. st petersburg might share some architectural similiarities with stockholm and helsinki... but it's quite different because of the people being russians and not swedes. it's full of history, its a city of contrasts, the absolute wealth and power of the romanov tsars compared to the crushing poverty of the workers and peasants who rose up against the inequities of the system. it's interesting that many of those wealth inequities are returning. some russians wallow in fabulous wealth. men like roman abramovich own premier english soccer teams as well as fleets of megayachts while people in st petersburg cannot drink their tapwater and have their hotwater turned off regularly. theres nothing wrong with wealth, but in 1989 most of these fabulously wealthy men were not fabulously wealthy...
history... two from good ol' doc warner at mary wash and one, soviet history taught by dr. ruane at tulsa. i never really thought i'd go to russia, but then, one day this summer, i just decided, i'll go to russia. so i went to the consulate and got a visa and here i am, in russia. its alot like europe only everythings in russian. so on to the city.
my hotel is between saint isaacs cathedral and the admiralty which means that im about two blocks from the hermitage/winter palace. now everything is in cyrillics which at first was kind of bewildering, but like when i was in beijing... after awhile you start to associate certain characters with things... CAHT is saint which means that the next word is probably petersburg... and if the first letter is pi then it is. st petersburg sort of reminds me of stockholm and helsinki. helsinki makes sense because most of the central part of t
he city was built by the russians... and before the russians took control of sometime between 1808 and 1812... so yeah, saint petersburg looks like helsinki and stockholm... stockholm is similar because theyre both built on several islands, and they both claim the title the venice of the north (along with hamburg)...
so yeah, this entry has pictures of the hermitage, which i'll talk about more in another entry, the Alexander column, and some triumphal arches behind it. its cool because the alexander column and the triumphal arches face the winter palace and when the revolutionaries stormed the palace during the october revolution they ran through this square, also when the people got massacred in 1905... 
it was in this square, so its
got alot of history. at the naval museum there was a model showing the storming of the winter palace... and i just loved it, so i took some pictures of it. it gives a good diea of what the scene looked like to see all these poor people charging across this very posh rococco square. i like those pictures of the diorama...
next up is the bronze horseman. a statue of peter the great that won fame after pushkin, the great russian poet wrote a poem about the statue pursuing him during a flood. peter the great is huge in st petersburg for the simple reason that he built the
city. he was the great westernizing tsar. he built st petersburg, made russia a european power by defeating the swedes in the great northern war, and built the russian navy. peter was a giant of a man for his age, and still is today. at one of the museums at the peter and paul fortress they showed an imprint of his hand, and it would rival any NFL player's hand... it dwarfed mine. but i have dainty little hands. so he's big in the burg, so you have at all the major sites men dressed up like peter the great in big cavalry boots, green officer's coat with red facings and gold lace and a tricornered hat.... along with him is a woman dressed up as catherine the great or just an 18th century lady. and you can have your picture taken with them if you desire to spend the money (similar to the gladiators in front of the colosseum in roma) also for posing with pictures i saw two hot chicks dressed up like Hussars from the napoleonic wars (hussars were light cavalry, originally hungarians in the 18th century, but by napoleon's time, just another type of light cavalry for scouting and harrassing the enemy).
to end this generalised talk of st petersburg, i have to thank texpat andrea for showing me around my first two days, without her, im not sure i wouldnt have freaked out. she took me around to the peter and paul fortress and up and down nevsky prospket, and helped me understand the city's layout. st petersburg might share some architectural similiarities with stockholm and helsinki... but it's quite different because of the people being russians and not swedes. it's full of history, its a city of contrasts, the absolute wealth and power of the romanov tsars compared to the crushing poverty of the workers and peasants who rose up against the inequities of the system. it's interesting that many of those wealth inequities are returning. some russians wallow in fabulous wealth. men like roman abramovich own premier english soccer teams as well as fleets of megayachts while people in st petersburg cannot drink their tapwater and have their hotwater turned off regularly. theres nothing wrong with wealth, but in 1989 most of these fabulously wealthy men were not fabulously wealthy...
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