I'm sorry - it turned out to be a long day......

It has taken me this long to recover from the trip home.  I always come home sick from a long trip.  This time, it seemed worse than most - I have been hacking and wheezing for 10 days, and am barely starting to sound - and, more importantly, feel - human.  I have, between bouts of coughing and sleeping, been working on the pictures, so I guess it is time to start passing them on to you. 

So, without further ado, let's start at the beginning, with Beijing...

......starting with the much to be desired signs awaiting me at the airport and the hotel respectively....

...the excellent breakfast buffet at the hotel....

...and, of course, the infamous wall...

.....even the Chinese are becoming environmentally conscious....

.....indeed, Mr. Liu, our local guide, says the air quality is better than he has ever seen it, as you can tell by the blue sky in the pictures....

However, I can tell you for a fact that the Chinese food is better in Vancouver....

.....This is Helen (with yours truly - I'm the one with the hat, don't you know), my roommate in Beijing (we had our own compartments on the train and subsequent hotels...)

Our first cultural outing was - surprise, surprise - the Chinese opera....

.......it is really not so different from the Western kind, full of angst and melodrama and unhappy endings...

Another outing was to a park, where patriotic singing )pro-Mao, apparently)...

 ...and exercise were featured.  Here are some of my fellow-travelers trying the equipment...

.....the card game (below) is called Fight the Landlord!

......and this is the exquisite Temple of Heaven...

We visited an old hutang, the neighborhoods rapidly being torn down in the name of urban development.  Some people still prefer to live here, though, including middle class people of reasonable means...

.....Here is our local guide, Mr. Liu.  He was a font of knowledge, and incredibly funny...

We had lunch with one family in the hutong..

It's one of those things that sounds incredibly hokey when you read about it in the brochure - Really?  We're having lunch with a local family is a hutong?  Really?  But it turned out to be great fun,  That afternoon, we went to the famous Bell Tower, and were treated to a tea ceremony/tasting.  I don't seem to have memorialized it with any pictures, although I certainly spent a great deal of money buying tea....

As those of you who have visited China know, toilets are a big issue.  So we all chuckled when we saw this sign....

...and it was, indeed, 5 star, meaning there were at least a few Western toilets, and, wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles, toilet paper.

Of course, no trip to Beijing is complete without a visit to the Forbidden City...

Tamara, our chief minder, never met a camera she didn't like.  Here she is with her ubiquitous yellow umbrella.....

Our visit to Beijing ended with the obligatory Peking Duck dinner.  That, I have to say, was delicious, and something one rarely indulges in in Vancouver.....

Well, that's all that I will bore you with tonight.  But now that I am back in the land of the living, I will try to post pictures regularly until we get caught up....

She's Back

But not by much.  The trip home was uneventful, but it was 24 hours long.....

If I have recovered, and if I can solve my technical difficulties, I will be back at you tomorrow.  For now, suffice it to say, it was a wonderful trip...

Warning - this space will be going dark for about a week

Apparently we are headed for the boat tomorrow evening, and the boat has no internet connection.  I'm tired - it has been another long day - but I will at least try to bring you up to date on the last three days.

Wednesday, I hoped to use my newly honed skills on the public transit.  I waited and waited - together with what seemed like half of St. Petersburg - and no buses.  I started walking - and walking - and walking - and still no buses.  And then there were no cars.  And then, at the Kazan Cathedral, a religious procession filling all twelve lanes of Nevsky Prospect - for miles.

Well, it put paid to my  tourist plans, but a religious procession in St. Petersburg is not bad.  And I did get to sneak in a visit to the Stroganov Palace, a part of the Russian History Museum.

And I did get to experience some of the infamous wind off the Baltic Sea.  No rain, but the wind certainly howled...

I managed to get buffeted back to the hotel, and met with my new group, with whom I'll share part 2 of my adventure.  At first blush, they don't seem as lively as the train bunch.  The composition is certainly different.  On the train, only three couples, two assorted pairs (one pair of sisters and one of friends) and nine singles, five women and four men.  Of course, the fewer the number of couples, the more overall mingling.  The next leg, there are only two singles, a man from Utah and myself, and ten couples.  Everyone is nice enough, of course....  Well, it is early days yet...

Yesterday, we went as a group to see the infamous Fabrege Museum.  I have always been fascinated by the eggs and it was lovely to see them live - those that are back in Russia (8 in all).  The story is that the Soviets sold them all to (as they still say here) pay for building a new country.  However, one of the oligarchs (they call him the Russian Rockefeller) bought as many of them back as he could, together with a lot of other Fabrege works, restored an old palace, and, voila.....

The group was doing the impressionists in the afternoon, so I broke off and managed to knock off two of my personal agenda items - The Pushkin House and The Dostoeyevsky Museum.  I was worried that there would not be enough English signage for me to make heads or tails out of anything.  Instead, both had the best audio guides I've ever experienced in a museum, and I came away touched, really, and with a much deeper understanding of both authors' lives and works.  I will certainly have my reading cut out for me when I get home.  Certainly two highlights....worth the trouble finding them - it was not easy - and the long walk back, which included a demonstration (yes, in Russia) about Putin's proposed increase in the retirement, and a street rock concert (America's gift to the world - rock concerts!)

Factoid - Peter the Great introduced potatoes to Russia (prior to that, they ate turnips.  Turnip pancakes?  Doesn't have quite the same ring...).  Did you know that?  I didn't know that.....  He also brought coffee, to which Catherine the Great later became addicted.  And yes, before you ask, there are, indeed, Starbucks here....

Today, we went to the Peterhof, Peter's summer palace on the Baltic, 29 km from the city.  He wanted it to be the Versailles of the East, and the grounds and fountains are pretty spectacular. 

The day ended with a five course Russian dinner (Russian salad, a mushroom dish from the time of Napoleon, borscht, chicken Kiev, and cake) followed by a concert of Russian folk music in the hall of yet another restored royal palace.  It was actually a pretty spectacular concert, music, singing, dancing and costumes all first rate - and bubbly and nibblies at intermission!

A few more factoids and I will call it quits.  The population of St. Petersburg is about 5 million.  And apparently the 5,000 square kilometers of the center city have been designated as a UNESCO heritage site, hence the 18th and 19th century architecture and the lack of skyscrapers.

We still have another few days, but the jury is back.  St. Petersburg wins over Moscow by a country mile....

If I was misinformed, you will hear from me sooner rather than later.  Otherwise, ta ta till Moscow...

St. Petersburg, continued....

I'm not doing so well on my own, so I thought I would try the Hop On/Hop Off bus to get the lay of the land.  It is, of course, only as good as the input.  For example, It didn't stop at the Pushkin House, or the Dostoyevsky Museum, or the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral, where the likes of Tchaikovsky are buried.

I did see St. Isaacs (he was apparently the patron saint of Peter the Great, the battleship Aurora of revolutionary fame (beautifully preserved) and the Kazan Cathedral.  (There is no shortage of churches; those that did not survive the revolution have been - or are being - rebuilt.)

Out with the red star and hammer and sickle and the double headed eagle!

The next day was decidedly better.  I learned to negotiate public transit (just the buses - I haven't yet dared the metro here on my own), admittedly with the help of the concierge.  It is cheap - about the equivalent of 50 cents US - frequent, and flexible (by which I mean the buses will stop at places not designated as a stop, and open already closed doors for a late arriving passenger).  Polite, too, and I no longer refuse a seat when it is offered.

In one case. a conductor, who spoke not one word of English, was so concerned that I wouldn't get off at the right stop, that she rousted out an English speaking kid, whose phone translated for me - get off at the stop after mine, she said.....

And what did I see after all that?  The Grand Choral Synagogue, apparently the biggest (but not the only) one in St. Petersburg.  It is a huge and lavish building - apparently the Jews were important in St. Petersburg in the time of Nicholas II - well kept.  It is, of course, Orthodox, and, while not filled, certainly full enough (probably because we are in the High Holy Days.  There is a Kosher restaurant attached, but it was closed, so I was unable to confirm the Lonly Planet's high praise.

And in the afternoon, I finally went to see the Impressionists at the Hermitage.  They are housed in a separate building, and while the Hermitage itself was chock-a-block full of people (I stopped counting after 22 huge tour buses), there was almost noone visiting the Impressionists.  I spent four hours with them, and only stopped because it was closing, and my feet were giving out.

Interesting fact about the collection.  It came mostly from two German industrialists.  What is not mentioned is that they had all been looted from rich German (and Austrian and Hungarian and Polish) Jews before they were killed.  Whether the Russians ever tried to return them to the descendants, who knows?

Even found that one (of the many, I must say) book stores on Nevsky Prospect had some books in English, so I stocked up for the upcoming boat ride....

I managed to negotiate my way through a nice meal at a Greek restaurant near my hotel (assisted by a very handsome young greek orthodox man) before falling exhausted into my bed.  All in all, a good day touring!

First Impressions

Not good.  My hotel is steps away from the infamous Nevsky Prospect, and I was very much looking forward to strolling on it.  Very sad - it reminds me of nothing so much as Times Square pre-Disney.  The whole place needs some paint, not to mention a street sweeper.  And I've found the homeless and beggars.

Then there was the issue of the ballet.  The music to Swan Lake, of course, is glorious, but it was a second rate production with second tier dancers, apparently put on for tourists.  The tourists were all Chinese, pushing and shoving and coming late and talking through the production and taking pictures throughout.

I left at intermission.

Then, to add insult to injury, a cab driver tried to rip me off big time, and I had to rely on the kindness of strangers to call a cab for me, wait till he came, and negotiate the price for me.   (Apparently that's what they do to tourists....)   It would have been worth it to have a phone just for the Uber app.

We'll see if I have better luck tomorrow at the opera.

On the bright side, the hotel is great, and I will have clean clothes tomorrow.  And I needed an early night!

Safe in St. Petersburg

...and just so you know, not only do they have Macdonalds, KFC and Subway, they have Uber too.

Negotiated the airport, flight, and taxi to the hotel, and have already scored a ticket for an opera at the Marinski theater for tomorrow night.  I might even go to the ballet tonight.

But first, shower, laundry and a nap....