Saint PetersburgMap
February Pulkovo Airport. Our plane lands and parks on the apron; I prepare myself for a freezing bus ride to the terminal. But instead, everyone disembarks and walks over to one of the glass tumbler-shaped pavilions that have been here since Soviet times for the sake of decoration. Inside, we take an escalator down—and behold a miracle. There’s a moving walkway hidden underground. A real Soviet moving walkway built in 1973. I was convinced that nothing of the sort had ever been produced in our country. The most amazing part is that it actually works. Not very well, mind you—it feels like standing on a metal step with a bunch of potatoes rolling around underneath—but it works. I think Aeroflot got it fixed specifically so they could use it for their own needs. The endlessly long underground tunnel drops you off right at the airport exit. Pure magic.  No Entry / Enter The last time I was in Saint Petersburg was this past summer. The city has changed noticeably since then. Trolley buses with marquees across their foreheads have popped up seemingly out of nowhere.  A new generation city bus has hit the streets. Although it’s a Russian-Scandinavian joint venture, the font they used is straight out of China.  New Generation City Bus The traffic lights along Nevsky Prospect are suspended from pretty booms.  And the fixtures on the backs of the signs are pretty as well.  Cthulhu.  The police intercom is significantly more elegant than its counterpart in Surgut.  Police The wheelchair ramps are an insult to wheelchair users.  A completely impossible old Cyrillic letter yat (ѣ) in the shoe store’s name—this letter used to stand for a different vowel sound when it was still in use.  Shoѣ Salon Traffic light poles all have decorative plastic covers on the bottom.  That’s because deep down inside the pole isn’t round, and this fact must be concealed.  Bus route signs quickly become outdated.  They’re replaced with newer ones, which list all the stops on the route. The current stop is highlighted in red.  This looks like a total joke, because it’s completely impossible to make out even a single word in this string of diagonals.  The remnants of an old building number still hang on the wall.  I’d been yearning for a chance to check out the Kunstkamera for ages. What we beheld was a boring provincial regional studies museum, whose rightful place in the ranking of human achievements is directly below Ulaanbaatar.  The same stuff has been on display unchanged here for the past 50 years.  Women were gatherers Even the museum guards haven’t changed since those times.  The thing I came here to see—the collection of monstrosities—looks incredibly sad in real life. Jars with half-evaporated formaldehyde sit on boring-looking shelves. The contents of the jars are amazing: all kinds of two-headed infants, Cyclops, and various other freaks of nature (which came to exist without any Chernobyl, I might add). Yet all this beauty is surrounded by total stagnation and decay.  The basement of Russia’s first museum contains a gift shop. What will they amaze us with here? T-shirts with the logo of a fictional soccer team from a popular Russian comedy show; other T-shirts which say “St. Pete is stylin, bitchez.” The Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) boldly strides into the 21st century.  Champagne bottles have frozen into the Neva River, pointing towards the Admiralty’s spire (behind my back).  Saint Petersburg is full of excellent establishments, it’s almost like being in Europe. The coffee is crap everywhere, of course. But the coffee is crap everywhere in Europe, too (with the exception of Italy along with Sweden and Norway).  I visited a bunch of places over the course of three days, and almost all of them were good.  Moscow, as everyone knows, is a city of savages. This, on the other hand, is the cultural capital of the country—so even a corner plastered with flyers is elegantly adorned with a sculpted head.  Visitor registration. Russian Federation, CIS. Metal doors. Research papers, essays, dissertations Many of the city’s historical neighborhoods are being restored by skilled craftsmen.  China Construction * * * Wayfinding signs at the Leningradsky Rail Terminal in Moscow reflect beautifully in the ceiling.  Muscovites and visitors to the nation’s capital are ready for departure to the Northwest.  |
