The Hermitage, St. Petersburg continued
Saturday, 17 July
The day was mainly dedicated to the Hermitage, a world renowned museum/gallery housed in the over-luxurious Winter palace, one of the former homes of the royal family. Naturally it was also the first place Lenin and the Bolysheviks attacked at the beginning of their October revolution from a ship on the Neva river which flows just beside the palace.
While I am no proponent of the destruction of cultural heritage, I must say it soon became quite clear to me why this was the best place to start the revolution. All its humongous splendor and wealth was the symbol of what the nobility were enjoying while the population was left to suffer in horrendous poverty.
The wealth really is mind boggling. Every room is covered wall to wall in detailed ornaments of marble, wood, precious metals and stones, all shaped up by the top artisans of the era. As for size, it took us 6 hours just to pass by all the exhibits on the three floors and we weren’t by far the most inquisitive of visitors, focusing mainly on some areas that were of more interest to us.
Most of the exhibits could as well be titled: “Look at what we were able to steal throughout the centuries”. Beside some pots and prehistoric tools from Syberia, the 1st floor mainly consists of aincent Greek and Egyptian monuments, a lot of them. Perhaps more than in some museums in their countries of origin. 2nd and 3rd floor contain newer art from various European nations. Italian reinessance, baroque, Dutch and French painters, whatever you ask for. There’s such an embarrasment of riches that a Monet is stuck in a connecting corridor and Da Vinci’s Madonna With Child only grabs your attention if you know where to look. There was also a visiting Picasso exhibition an some other, more modern artists.
Russian artists are quite neglected, perhaps a tribute to the “wannabeism” of Russian nobility in the past centuries.
The administration is quite liberal with photo taking, more so than practically any other European art museum. Apart from some visiting exhibitions you can take a photo of pretty much everything.
Jasmina and Maja quite liked the idea of living in such a luxurious palace with all the spaciousness and glamor. I for one more marvelled at the possibilty to rollerblade through it. At the end we all agreed that a billiard room with human sized and half transparent billiard balls was an appropriate choice for such a palace. People would go inside the billiard balls and try to knock each other out to the holed corner o the room. The unusually large gutters outside the palace were an indication that perhaps someone else had thought of this before.
Thoroughly tired from the six hour walk, we gathered our last atoms of strength and headed over the Neva to Vasilevsky island. What immediately caught our eyes were a bunch of wedding photo-ops along with the traditional release of the white doves. Perhaps an even more amazing site was the trash container nearby. I’ve never seen one so full of empty champagne bottles.
What followed was a well deserved break on the embankments of Vasilevsky island, accompanied by some Baltika brew and overlooking the Winter palace accross the river. I’m writing this blog post on just such a break, but this time bathed in evening sun next to the Yekaterinburg pond.
We were quite taken aback then by a young man washing his face in the filthy waters of Neva. What doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger, I guess.
After dinner it was time to return to the hostel, get our backpacks and catch a train to Moscow. We got to the Moskovskii vokzal (train station) by metro, which is surprisingly deep. About 20 meters by my amateurish estimates, probably due to the marshy and watter filled lands of Petersburg.
We caught the train literally in the last second. We weren’t that late at the station, but when the platform is divided into 5 left and 5 right with very similar markings in cyrilic, some confusion is bound to happen. The train ride was surprisingly luxurious, with an air-conditioned coupe, slippers, lunch packet and morning sandwhiches, at least they somehow justified the otherwise steep 4700 rub (125€) price. In the morning we were well rested and in Moscow.
People’s palace and the long and winding road to Chisinau
Perhaps you’ve noticed I’m falling behind with my live blogging. By live I of course mean with a few days of delay. Energy/alcohol related reasons usually keep me from writing before going to bed, thus making me fall behind. I apologize to you, my cherished readers. Both of you. 
Saturday, 1. August 2009:
Still in Bucarest, previous night and the hardships of travel took a toll, extending our sleep almost until the early afternoon. We managed all the necesseties, grabbed a coffee at a bar full of locals. They could easily tell we were tourists. You might think that the cameras, Lonely Planet guide, lack of knowledge of the Romanian language or our inquisitive looks were a giveaway. No. We were the only ones not drinking alcoholic beverages at 12.00.
We split up with Jan and Ivor going to the national history museum, where, according to them, practically all the items were replicas and the biggest attraction was the massive neoclassical building the museum was housed in. Sanjin and I went to the Ceaucescu’s Palace of the people, where we first started with the part housing the Contemporary art museum. Since we didn’t get the right entrance right away we had to take a 5-10 minute walk to the other entrance. Yeah, it’s THAT big. The museum itself turned out to be a dismal experience for the most part, much of it comprising of 50-something year old “artists” discovering Photoshop for the very first time believing they have something to offer. While that might be just fine otherwise, the problem is that they are embraced by the “artistic establishment” and hosted in galleries accros Europe. There were some rare gems though in this sea of self-congratulating manure. Rare.
The teracce cafe on the top revealed the true vastness of the palace estate in the heart of Bucarest and the slight chlorine aftertaste of the Romanian filled Kinely Tonic. My outpouring of criticsm might not have gotten that message through but the visit was quite an entertaining experience in whole.
We signed up for a guided tour on the other side if the palace where the parliament is housed, but we were running a bit late, which we could not afford since it was the last one that day. We therefore took a taxi which brought us to the other side of the building. Crazy, I know. Ivor & Jan were already there, the guide led us through the tour. Just a few facts, read the rest on Wikipedia. 4 billion $ to complete, 10% still not finished, all the materials had to be from Romania, 400 architects worked on it, already falling apart in some areas due to shoddy work, maintenance, a looot of houses destroyed to build the boulevard in front of it, second largest building in volume – after Pentagon…
After that we met with Flavia once more, slowly got to the bus station where we booked a trip to Chisinau. It costs 65 Romanian Lei or 20 € (it’s a bit more in Euros) and takes app. from 20.00 to 7.00 in the morning to get there. It was a bit hot on the way, mostly because of the low powered air conditioning, but also because of the beautiful ladies which seemed to all have found a way on our bus (more on the reasons in later posts). The guessing which one of them might be a lady of the night during the stops, combined with tech/political/phillosophical debates during the drive kept us entertained throughout the journey. Black humor helped us during the unnecessarily long but otherwise uneventful border procedure. In the morning we discovered how wrong our preconceptions about Moldova really were, but more on that next time. Don’t you just loooove cliffhangers? 