Gross Stuff

Saturday, March 15, 2014

Russia Trip: Wrapup and Table of Contents

I am back home, and recovering from jet lag. I wanted to wrap up my blogging about my amazing trip to Russia in two ways:

1) Here's a Table of Contents, listing all my posts in order, which is an easier way to access them than the most-recent-at-the-top way they appear in the blog. I have also added a link at the bottom of each post to the next post in the series, to make it easier to just read them in order.

2) Here are more photos that I had trouble inserting into blog posts while in Russia. I was taking photos with my iPhone, syncing them to the cloud using Google+, and then inserting photos into blog posts from my iPad. For reasons I still do not understand, not all photos were visible from my iPad, which was frustrating. I had brought along a separate device that was intended to solve this problem (it provides a local wifi network and memory keys can plug into it), but the software for it didn't seem to work with my iPad either.

Sochi:

In each city I visited, I saw these pipes snaking around,

along and over streets. They are gas lines,

which often tend to run above ground instead of being buried.

It lends a Brazil-like atmosphere.

Canada Olympic House (COH) at Olympic Park.

This is where the famous Molson beer fridge is located

- the one that opens only with a Canadian passport.

Unfortunately COH was open only to accredited athletes

and their families, so I could not get in!

There were swarms of volunteers everywhere, and they were very friendly!

The bear mascot sat down in an empty seat beside me at one game.

This is one of the funniest things I saw at the Games.

Once I had a photo with the bear, I had to try to complete my mascot collection,

so when the Snow Leopard came near, I grabbed a photo.

Sadly, I did not see the Rabbit at all during the Games.

The competing countries' flags were displayed each game

on the top of the Bolshoi Ice Dome, with the scores added after each game.

This is after the Canada-US semi-final.

As close as I will get to riding a bobsled.

The Canadian Elvises entertained at every game

at the Bolshoi Ice Dome, and they were a row ahead of me

at the men's gold medal game.

Moscow:

Tributes to cosmonauts outside the Cosmonaut Museum

Approaching Red Square

The Bolshoi Theatre

A piece of the Berlin Wall, outside the Sakharov Museum

Statue on the platform at the Revolution Square (Плошадь Революций) Metro station. There were dozens of these lining the platform.

Sign above metro station platform, indicating which stops can be reached

by the trains arriving at each side of the platform.

The metro system maps in the trains had station names

transliterated in Roman characters, but these signs,

and all the directional signage to various exits from the station,

were only in Cyrillic.

St Petersburg:

Dosteovsky Museum, just a few blocks from my hotel.

The tend to transliterate without translating isn't limited to English words;

this says "Rive Gauche" (french for Left Bank), a trendy store.

The circus.

I kept seeing stores called "____ World" in Russian. This one is Art World.

Butterfly World

Apartments World

Flavour World (A liquor store)

World of Leather and Fur

I'm not sure whether to translate this as
"Rose of the World" or "Rose of Peace".

Bag World

Fruit World

The New Mariinsky Theatre

The New (left) and Old (right) Mariinsky Theatres

I love the logo on this truck.

The lettering on the truck says Хлебтранс,

which translates to "BreadTrans".

The slices in the loaf/van roof are the nice touch.

The old Mariinsky Theatre.

The cruiser Aurora, whose firing of a blank round
signalled the start of the 1917 revolution.

At the СКА/ЦСКА playoff game; free T shirts for everyone!

The SKA arena

Frozen canals (these were all thawed by the end of my trip).

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Russia Day 23: Last Day in St Petersburg, The Hermitage and more

Woke up at around 4:30, good practice for tomorrow when I'll need to be up a bit earlier than that to get ready to head to the airport. Read a bit until the restaurant downstairs opened for breakfast at 6:30.

I headed out to the Hermitage when it opened up for the day. It's a massive museum and I didn't expect to really see it all. What I did see was pretty great. I saw most of the Palace Rooms, which were spectacularly built and decorated halls, including some impressive wooden floors. In one room the wooden floor pattern mopstly matched the design of the gilded ceiling. And I saw a lot of great paintings, including a lot of Matisse, Picasso, Monet,, Gaugain, Pissaro and my favourites: a few of Van Gogh's paintings.

From the Hermitage I walked to the nearby Cat Republic Cafe, where I had a light lunch, and then went in to the adjoining room (entering through a wardrobe) to play with about 20 cats. The cats were all very friendly, and included a few unusual looking ones. They were pretty lazy for the most part, but it was nice to get a cat fix after a few weeks away from my kitties.

Back to the metro, and then on my walk back to my hotel, I stopped at the Dostoevsky museum, set in the apartment where the author lived with his family, and where he died. The English audioguide was extremely informative (actually, it went on and on a little much at each of the 20-odd locations), and I learned a bunch about his life, and saw how his apartment was set up.

Rested up before dinner. Today was a light walking day, only about 5km, not including whatever I covered within the Hermitage as I walked through dozens of rooms for a few hours.

Here are some questions to things I've been asked:
Q: Are Russian women as beautiful as they say?
A: Well, like at home, people here come in all shapes & sizes, but on the whole I would say Russian women are quite a bit more gorgeous than average.

Q: How much did my Russian lessons help; can I speak to people or are there a lot of regional accents?
A: The Russian lessons helped a lot. Being able to read Cyrillic, even if I don't understand the meaning of every word I can read, makes it much, much easier to navigate, especially in Moscow where most of the signage in the metro was only in Russian. I can say enough to manage at stores and restaurants (all that drilling on numbers has helped a lot; I can bargain in Russian at markets). But I am very very far from being fluent, and I often get completely lost when others speak to me, especially if the context hasn't prepared me to expect what they might say next. I think most people appreciate that I have made an effort to learn some Russian, and they're nicer to me because of that.
At the same time, they must be immediately recognizing my foreign accent as I mispronounce words, because when they can speak English, they often quickly switch to English when responding to me.

Q: Does everyone there look sad all the time, since they are being repressed and surveilled?
A: Nope. People here look and act like people anywhere. They laugh, they kiss, they joke around. It's true that there is little to no eye contact on the metro, as I had heard, and in the streets in Moscow and St Petersburg there's no interaction with strangers (that was an anomaly during the Olympic party in Sochi!). But people here are just people, and I see no signs that they are suffering from living in a repressive state. I do believe that their government is undemocratic and dictatorial, and lying to them about much of what is going on in the world, but that doesn't seem to have any impact on their ability to enjoy life day to day. I know that the rest of the country is not as well off as what I see in Moscow and St Petersburg (perhaps the richest places in the country).

Other differences I've noticed:

Women often walk arm in arm down the streets. I have not figured out the protocol for who grabs whose arm (age? the side closer to the car traffic?). And when a bunch of them say goodnight as they head off in different directions at a subway station, there's a frenzy of kissing each other in all combinations.
There's a lot of smoking here! Google tells me that about 40% of Russians smoke (60% of men and about 22% of women). That's about double the rate in Canada, and it's one of the reasons why Russian life expectancy is about 10 years shorter than ours.
Racially, things are much more homogeneous here; almost everyone is pasty white. It feels weird.
There are flower shops everywhere, like we have Tim Hortons or Starbucks on every corner. And I don't think they all sprang up just for International Women's Day.
I've seen some beggars on the streets and in metro stations. It's been almost always old women, often holding/praying to an icon. I saw one young pregnant woman begging
In each metro station, there are either 3 or 4 escalators, and as I mentioned earlier, they are very long escalators. I timed a few rides today, and they were between 2-3 minutes each. That's why people turn around and ride backwards so they can chat with their friend or make out with their partner; you're on the thing for a while! The middle one or two of these three or four escalators are almost always turned off. There is a woman (almost always a woman) in a tiny booth at the bottom of escalators, and I have been trying to understand what she does. Some times she has a video display showing escalators so I guess she is monitoring them. She could perhaps turn on another one at busy times, but often there is a line of 30-40 people waiting to get on, while another escalator sits idle. Another example of very suboptimal crowd management.
I've seen an interesting variety of subway platform and interchange experiences. At most interchange stations there is a long walk to switch lines, like at Spadina station in Toronto. The two lines have nearby stations and they just built a pathway between them. At some it's just a short stairway (like Bloor/Yonge). At one station I used, they had cleverly arranged one direction from each of the intersecting lines to share a platform, so for half of the transfers between those lines you just crossed the platform to await your next train. Pretty cool. At a few stations there are doors built into the platform itself, that open only when the train has stopped in the station. I guess that eliminates jumpers.

I'm heading home tomorrow. It's been a fantastic trip and it seems to have gone by so fast, but I'm ready to go home (and start planning the next trip!).

I'll post some more photos when I get home, and set up a little table of contents post to make it easier to gather all the posts from the trip in one place, instead of having to scroll back to the start.

Last post of trip: http://mrjohngross.blogspot.ca/2014/03/russia-trip-wrapup-and-table-of-contents.html

Monday, March 10, 2014

Russia Day 22: A Little Shopping and a Climbing Gym

It's Monday, which means many of the museums and galleries are closed. That's good timing for me, as my left knee is quite sore, and I need a day with less walking to see if it gets a little better. So today was a quieter day, including catching up on recent blog posts, reading and relaxing.

I had been thinking about hitting the flea market at Udelnaya, but after reading some online reviews, it wasn't clear how much would be going on there on a weekday, and whether it was worth a lot of walking to find out. Instead I headed over to Gostinny Dvor, a large shopping centre on Nevsky Prospekt. I had heard there were some good souvenir shops there, with reasonable prices, and that's what I found. I'm staying vague about what I bought, as some of it will be gifts for family and friends, but I was happy with what I found. Now to see if I can fit it all in my suitcases! The one thing I have not bought is old Soviet-era souvenirs. Most of what I've seen are pins, badges, military uniforms, knives and cigarette lighters, and none of those things appeal to me at all.

After the shopping, I took the metro to one of the climbing gyms in town. I've been meaning to check out a gym here all trip, but I keep forgetting to do it in the midst of everything else I'm doing. It wasn't hard to find this gym or its entrance (maybe I'm making progress on the entrance thing?). I had to press a button to unlock the door, and then found myself in a very dark stairway; I had to wait for my eyes to adjust before I could see anything!

Sign leading to entrance of the Tramontan Climbing Centre

Bouldering area

Top-rope/lead area: 9 top ropes. The lead anchors were spaced about 3 feet apart,

closer together than I'm used to seeing.

The gym is one of three that call themselves the largest climbing gym in St Petersburg. They all seem to be about 10,000 square feet, so I guess they're all telling the truth. There was a good-sized bouldering area, along with a smaller roped area with 9 top ropes in place and lead draws on the walls. It's a Walltopia-built gym, and the roped area was all heavily-featured construction (i.e. the wall had lots of permanent features built into it, rather than being a smooth blank canvas for routesetters to work with).

I have been collecting a set of photos that I call World World - the common use of the Russian word Mир ("Mir", meaning both "world" and "peace") in business names. I see it everywhere, and a few days ago starting taking photos of each business I saw using the word. But I'm still having trouble getting at all my photos on my iPhone from this blog, so that feature may need to wait until I get home.

Next post: http://mrjohngross.blogspot.ca/2014/03/russia-day-23-last-day-in-st-petersburg.html