St Pete Trip - November 2003

On Thursday evening (November 6^th), we got on the train at 11:55pm and immediately started celebrating with a jar of black caviar, brie, crackers, and a few bottles of our favorite Abkhazian red wine. We arrived in St Pete at 8am on Friday morning, where we were met by our driver at the station and taken to the apartment I had rented for our stay. The apartment was really nice, very big and open with a loft bedroom. Some of our friends from the office had come up on an earlier train and were staying with us, so they showed up and we all got showered and ready to go back out touristing. The weather forecast turned out to be a bit optimistic, as it was about 10^o (Fahrenheit) cooler than predicted, so we spent the first 2 hours trying to find a winter hat and a sweater for a couple of them.

That Friday was a Russian holiday, Reconciliation Day and formerly Revolution Day, commemorating the Russian Revolution. As we made our way along the main street of downtown St Pete, Nevsky Prospekt, we met up with a march of demonstrators who were commemorating the holiday. Pretty cool, overall, but one sad aspect was the amount of senior citizens marching, folks who grew up under the Soviet Union and Communism, believing that one day they would be taken care of. So whenever they're marching in such parades or demonstrating in front of the Russian White House with Communist flags waving, they're protesting for a way of life and a system that has pretty much hung them out to dry. I'll leave off the commentary at that, look for the pictures of this particular march later.

We continued on, and after lunch at a great restaurant we've eaten at on previous trips, called Sverchok, we took a city tour boat ride through the city's many canals. Froze our asses off in the process, but the tour was enjoyable nonetheless. After the tour, we went back to the apartment to change clothes, then went back out for dinner at a Russian brewery restaurant called Tinkoff.

This place was absolutely incredible!!! First the beer...I drink beer NOT to get drunk but because I really and truly enjoy the taste. Tinkoff beer, at least the stuff they were serving us at the brewery, is apparently very low in alcohol because at the end of the evening, after drinking 4 liter-sized "glasses," I was barely buzzed. Nice to be able to enjoy beer taste that much (and to that volume) without having to deal with being shitfaced. The food there was incredible as well, both in terms of quality and variety. I started off by having (insert drum roll here) oysters on the half-shell!!!! Tinkoff's were some sort of French variety, and were quite delicious, and they even serve them with a bottle of Tabasco. Woo-hoo....just like being back home in Louisiana with my dad and little brother, gathered around a few trays of those glistening little boogers (metaphor intended) and a round of beers! We also had escargot in garlic butter, baked mussels, and vobla (dried fish) to go with our beer. They also serve a meter (just over 3 feet) long German sausage, which our friends ordered and we shared - you'll see the picture later.

After dinner, we all went barging around looking for this pool hall Vika and I went to the last time we were in St Pete, called From Dusk Til Dawn. Turns out it has since closed, so we ran around looking for a phone booth from which the phonebook hadn't been stolen, finally found one and looked up another nearby pool hall called Panda. Pretty cool place, definitely a garden-variety, smokey, noisy pool hall, just like what you might be used to in the States. Vika, our cousin Tanya from St Pete, and I shot pool there until 4am. The other girls had split off from us, and ended up crashing at a friend's house elsewhere in St Pete.

On Saturday, Vika and I woke up around noon, stumbled bleary-eyed downstairs and showered, then went out in search of "breakfast," which we found at a little cafe nearby. The other girls had already been up and about, and came by just to get the key to the apartment so they could shower, then they were planning to go to a museum. We had planned to visit a few museums ourselves, but because the weather was so absolutely gorgeous, decided to walk around the city instead. We walked along the Niva river, all the way to the battleship Aurora. The Aurora is the ship that fired the opening shot of the Russian Revolution, and it has been anchored in St Pete since 1948 as a monument to the revolution. We payed for a guided tour from one of the sailors, and got to view the Captain's Bridge up close. One interesting thing about the Aurora is that there is actually an entire crew of sailors and officers assigned to it, who live aboard it in modernized crew quarters, and who maintain it and provide the tours. I didn't ask, but I got the impression it's sort of a "special duty assignment" much the same way we have soldiers guarding the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington, and other ceremonial duty assignments. The young man who gave us our tour was very knowledgeable, and answered all our questions without batting an eye. Given the hazards of other potential military assignments (serving as cannon-fodder in Chechnya comes to mind), a tour of duty aboard the Aurora is a gravy one indeed for these guys.

We left the Aurora and walked back along the opposite side of the Niva from which we had come, cutting through Petropavlovsk Fortress. On the back side of the fortress, there is a little enterprise offering 15-minute helicopter rides over the city, so we decided we were brave enough and went on one. The ride took us along the Niva up past a former convent, then back down all the way to the Naval Museum, then back to the fortress. Unfortunately the battery in my camera had already died, so there won't be any pictures to show you, but believe me - St Pete from the air is a helluva sight! After our ride, we walked through the fortress back to the river, then strolled along the river to the next bridge, met the girls to get our apartment key back, then back across the river to our apartment to get ready for dinner. That night, at least for Vika and me, was basically the same as Friday had been - Tinkoff again, oysters and beer again, then shooting pool (just the two of us) until 4am...again!

Sunday was pretty relaxing, since we had stayed out late and slept late as well. We met up with Tanya and her mom Elizaveta for lunch at Sverchok, after which we took them to an internet cafe so I could log on and show them Maria's pictures here on the site. We said goodbye to them, went back to the apartment to pack, then met another friend, Lyudmilla, for dinner at, yet again, Tinkoff. We also took Lyudmilla to the internet cafe and showed her Maria's pictures, and of course she oohed and aahed over our little darling, just as everybody seems to do. We said goodbye to her around 10:30pm, went back to the apartment to change clothes for our train ride back to Moscow, got picked up by the driver and taken to the station, got on the train and fell asleep just as soon as it started moving and slept clear until we arrived into the station in Moscow.

Now for a few impressions....first of all, immediately upon boarding the train for the ride up to St Pete and sitting down to our wine and snacks, both Vika and I felt a palpable sense of relief and relaxation at being able to enjoy a meal without having to jump up to attend to Maria. That feeling was followed closely by a sense of guilt for being "happy" to be away from her, which is something I understand nearly all parents go through, especially new ones.

Another thing that sticks out was how weird it felt to go out without a curfew. Whenever we're home, we get to go out at least once every couple of weeks, thanks to grandma, but we always have to be back by midnight, 1am at the latest. The reason is less due to grandma having her own time limit, and more due to the fact that regardless of what time we get home, be it 1am or 4am, that baby is still going to wake up around 8am asking for a bottle. Again, it felt really strange to be able to stay out as late(early) as we wanted, and we both noticed the strangeness from the very beginning.

The third thing to slap us both in the face was that no matter how much fun we had, no matter how well we relaxed and played "off the leash" while we were there, neither of us stopped missing Maria! It really came home to roost the first time I logged onto the site and showed the ladies those pictures - seeing my daughter's sweet, smiling face just made me miss her so badly, I could have given up the entire weekend of fun just to be next to her again.

All in all, it was a great trip, relaxing in all the best ways, and something we both really needed, both as individuals and as a married couple. Though we won't do it excessively often, I do think we'll make it a specific point to break away at least a couple of times a year and go off somewhere together to be ourselves.