Saint Petersburg

Well, that was fun. I can heartily recommend St. Petersburg to adventurously-minded travellers with open minds and deep pockets.



The first surprise was the sheer size of the city. St.P is enormous, around five million people at a fairly low average density. The city achieves an almost North-American degree of sprawl, helped by the many inner-city acres of derelict and rusting smokestack industries that closed down after the end of Communism. (Gorbachov is not a hero in Russia, they see him as the man who took away their cosy lives and dropped them into the present political chaos and economic misery.) The "doughnut effect" of new suburbs surrounding a rusting, dying inner core (as seen in many American cities) is in full flower here.



It didn't even look particularly "Russian". One looks in vain in St.P for silvered onion domes and colourful wooden churches. Peter wanted a modern city, and hired in architects and craftsmen from France, Italy and Germany. The Cyrilic writing is in many places the only clue that you are not in a large, moderately prosperous, Western city. I shot hundreds of photos out the bus windows: gas stations, parks, the queue at the bus stop, taxis, trams, advertising hoardings, street-corner kiosks. Many of these were unfortunately out of focus or marred by reflections in the window, but I'll be posting quite a few on Flickr.



But the most surprising thing about St.P was how little of it was truly unusual and unexpected. The streets are full of European (and American) cars, the grocery stores sell Danone and Nestlé and Coca-Cola, the kids wear Adidas and Tommy Hilfiger (though I wouldn't wish to swear that these weren't knockoffs). There was a wonderful supermarket around the corner from our hotel (12 km from the city centre, near the airport, at exactly the point where the German siege of Leningrad was broken after 900 days) where I bought yoghurt and candies and bottled water, and where one could buy just about anything from vodka (obviously) to freshly made salads to current DVDs (many western films dubbed into Russian). I was too polite to take photos there, though I would dearly love to have done so.



There were of course things that were specifically Russian and different. Shoes, for example: Men and women wear extravagantly long, sharply-pointed-toed shoes (the Leningrad Cowboys were only slightly exaggerated). An astonishingly high percentage of Russians have blue eyes, but there are vanishingly few redheads. There are also very few fat people; either the Russians are healthy or they can't afford to eat enough of the bad stuff to become obese. Probably the latter, to be honest: according to our guide, the average old age pension is around 80 to 100 US dollars a month. The cost of living is lower, but not by that amount.



I realized once I had returned to Stuttgart, that the Russians walk differently: they have a (comparatively) erect posture and a businesslike stride with relatively short steps, where the Germans slouch and lounge. Perhaps it's a status thing: High status there is having places to go and things to do; high status here is having time to waste. Or maybe it's the shoes.



We were there in pursuit of culture, attending the White Nights festival. The name derives from the amazing fact that the sky never gets dark in high summer. Sunset was at around 11:30pm, over the next hour the sky became a darkish blue, then started brightening again and by 3:00 the sun had risen. The sun also remains relatively low in the sky, and really does seem to roll around the horizon. In southern climes, the sun starts out on the western horizon, mounts rapidly overhead, then sinks into the east. In St.P the sun moves around you on a flat course just above the horizon, like an egg rolling on the edge of a plate.



Yes, there was culture. We saw Mazeppa by Tchaikovsky, a story of ambition leading to the downfall of everyone involved. Unusually (for western tastes) it ends with the death or madness of all innocent bystanders; the eponymous villain lives to darken other lives. It was performed in Russian (with surtitles in English) by the orchestra and stars of the Mariinsky Theater (known to some readers by its revolutionary name: the Kirov Theater). The singers were uniformly very good; we had previously seen Mazeppa in the role of Alberich in the Mariinsky Ring Cycle at Baden-Baden in 2004.



That was followed (also at the Mariinsky = Kirov) by the ballet Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky, which had been given a happy ending (the Prince defeats the evil Swan King and lives happily ever after with his Swan, raising a daughter named Hope). I'm not a big ballet fan, and this did not change my general opinion, but it was marvellously done. I was surprised and amused by the sheer noise of ballet: when 28 swans all touch down at once, their feet drown out the orchestra. Nobody ever talks about this aspect of ballet, the constant tap-tap-tap-THUD of many feet. It put me in mind of the Japanese puppet theatre, where everyone pretends not to see the black-dressed mummies moving the puppets around. Just by the way (the Lioness would call this a testosterone comment) the ballerinas were much "larger" than is usual in the west. Our ballerinas are typically stick figures, even scrawnier than Laura Flynn Boyle, you would take them home not for sex a romantic evening but to feed them; these Russians were good healthy girls.



The second opera was Rigoletto by Verdi, sung in Italian so the surtitles were in Russian; but hey we all know Rigoletto, right? Quite good, very moving. The productions (this and Mazeppa) were very different in style and staging: M had been realistic and classical, R was abstract and modern in the "bare stage with one large Thing" mode.

That will have to do for now. I picked up a nasty cold and/or sinus infection on the way back and now need my beauty sleep. More anon.