Day 84- Tuesday, 26th July

Hi all, Ian here, (cough cough) in bed, (sneeze), at Burford, UK, (wheeze, cough!)

And we had been so well so far! But today I succumbed to a Russian cold and had to take to my bed to try and shake it off.  Damned man sat next to me on the plane from St Petersburg and sneezed and coughed all the way to London!

The front entry to the New Hermitage museum.

The last few days in St Petersburg were great.  We went to the Peterhof - the summer palace of the Tzars from 1715 onwards.  As Jane noted in the last blog, it was, like most of the big cities in Poland, completely rebuilt following the devastation of the War.  However in St Petersburg, (then Leningrad), the Germans never actually took the city - but the 900 day siege did mean half the population died anyway.

The authorities at Peterhof are recouping their rebuilding costs by charging the throngs of tourists a fee for every room/building you can look in - there were 20 different "sub-palaces" to see. 

And "no photographs inside" was the rule there too! But it was worth it in most of them - and the contents were generally original, all having been taken away and hidden before the Nazis arrived in their tanks.

Jane under a huge vase in the Winter Palace!

Secret photo in a Peterhof palace!

The no photos rule was a bit odd really as the Hermitage / Winter Palace and Russian Museums did not have the same ban, as you will see with the pictures of the artworks below, just "no flash".

Whist there I  bought a bit of light reading - "Crime and Punishment" by Dostoevsky.  Its a ripping yarn, but not a lot of laughs so far. It is set in St Petersburg, so you can trace the places he names - makes it all a bit more real.

Other highlights during this week were Russian Museum, mostly fabulous artworks from 12th C onwards, including 20thC Soviet Realism and well as the most fabulous Kandinskys and others artists like Kazimir Malevich, (think Black Square).

Do you think it is big enough for the dining room wall?

And other pictures so big you could live on them if they were laid on the floor!

Also a "small world" moment when I ran into Russell D, a colleague from Brisbane, in the Russian Museum, and then again in the square in the front of the Hermitage Museum the next day.  What's the chance of that!!!

Kandinsky -

An early Da Vinci, one of 2 in the Hermitage

We also visited the St Peter and Paul Cathedral in the original city fortress on an island in the Neva River.  Again, built 250 years ago - and home to the graves of most of the Tzars of Russia from Peter the Great onwards. It is now a post-Soviet shrine to the history of the Russian empire and its leaders, with thousands paying their respects each day to those buried there.

Peter and Paul Fortress from the River Neva. The Tzars are buried here.

They have even moved the remains of the last Emperor / Tzar, who was executed with this family by the Bolsheviks in 1918, to the cathedral in the last few years.

We did go back into the Hermitage Museum for a second time on the last day, as it is such a huge and wonderful place. On this trip we did a special extra tour of the "Treasury" which was wonderful - but no photos allowed there.  There were the most intricate Greek and Byzantine pieces of gold jewelry, not like anything I had ever seen any museum of those cultures before.  Incredibly fine and detailed workmanship, some only visible under a magnifying glass.  And then going onto gifts given and received by the Tzars and some pieces by Faberge - but no eggs - they are now all in Moscow - darn!

I loved St Petersburg as a place to visit, easy transport, even mastered the buses.  Car drivers seem to have precedence on most streets, and there were no particular  laws related to car parking that we could see, you could park anywhere, on pavements, double park on the side of streets, across pedestrian crossings.  The weather was fine for us - hot even a few days, and as Jane said before, life on the street continued to midnight and beyond. 

kerbside dining - Gastronome

We ate some good meals out too.  Russians love their meat as much as the Poles, but there was a curious lack of vegetables in the shops during the middle of summer.  However one of our best meals out was in a vegetarian restaurant, The Idiot.  Highly recommended!


But all good things have to come to an end - so after 9 days we again packed our suitcases and set off to the airport for the flight to the UK.

After battling our way out of Heathrow, surely the world's ugliest airport, we picked up a hire care and set off for a trip around the M25, that world renowned 125 mile long car park around London!  For what happened next see the next blog.

Monday 18 July; Jane's post

Our apartment is on left somewhere

It has been a lifelong dream of mine to come to St Petersburg, and I don't know why. Maybe the big angst-ridden novels I read in my teens, maybe the great music written here. Who knows, but here we are, and it's all I hoped of it.  After the accommodation glitch alluded to in the last post, all has worked out very well. In fact, we are possibly better off. The back of our apartment opens, via a courtyard, onto this canal.  And if I hang out of the kitchen window,  I can see the Hermitage, or rather one end of it, as it's an absolutely massive museum consisting of several vast palaces. We have had a day there with a private guide, and we are going back tomorrow for another day; might cover 50% of it.

The Winter Palace bit of the Hermitage

Us inside it

Then there's the Russian museum and a host of other smaller ones. And the churches! They just keep getting bigger and more lavish. This was a country that enjoyed great power and huge wealth for a while, and wanted to show it.

We have been on boats and buses with commentaries, we've taken the hydrofoil out to the Peterhof, the over-the-top Baroque summer palace, which is even more extraordinary for having been completely rebuilt since its sacking, bombing and burning by the Germans in 1944.

Peterhof with fountains starting

St Isaac's Cathedral

All of this has been wonderful, but there have been other, previously unplanned, highlights to this visit. We mentioned the Sacred Music concert. To that we have added a trip to the Mariinsky Ballet, formally the Kirov, and a concert of Opera excerpts by the State Capella that had us in raptures. The standards are so high, whatever we have seen. And, of course, some of the venues so evocative too. I have to admit to using not only my iphone camera, but my 'voice memo' feature, a lot on this trip. I'll bore some of you with sound bites!

Opera excerpts. Still light at 10pm!

Mariinsky curtain from 1920s

 





So, what else has surprised? The amazing metro stations which are vast, efficient and highly ornate, with the most spectacular light fittings and monuments to brave and fallen comrades. So clean too. London, eat your heart out.

Metro

And to finish now because it's bedtime....a note about just that! We have been amazed by living in this time of "midnight sun". We missed the really crazy week that they call White Nights, but even now, it's not 'dark' till 1.30am and it's fully light again at 3.30am. We find ourselves eating at 11.00pm, and then the night is puncuated by all sorts of shenanigens from drunken revelers to bike races to roller bladers and the aforementioned horses and carriages.

It's got a fun feel about it. I'll try and get to sleep now; last day here tomorrow. Then UK. That bit feels too familiar!

Day 73 - Friday 15th July.

Ian here.

What a few days we have just had.  After all the emotional excitement of meeting the family in Poland we have now come to Russia.  I can so well remember the fear that was instilled in us in the UK , (and presumably also elsewhere in the western world) in the "Cold War" days from the '60s to the '80s, by the propaganda about the mighty Soviet Russian State, and the perils of Communism.

Well with the hindsight of history, and from visiting firstly East Berlin, then Poland and now St Petersburg, it is clear that not many of the general population that had to live under those regimes was particularly keen on it, and most welcomed its demise in the early '90s.  But in Russia they did survive the Nazi aggression, under the dictatorship of that paranoid, Stalin, and in St Petersburg, at least some of the locals survived the 900 day siege.  Dogged  determination.  But then wait for the Warsaw story.......

Monika waves goodbye from Poznan 

So we left the new family in Poznan on Monday morning, taking a train to Warsaw, a few hours away to the east.  We arrived, took a taxi to the hotel, The Le Regina in the New Town (only founded in the 14th C!) and settled in.  Beautiful hotel, highly recommended, best bed I have slept in since I left home!  We went for a stroll around the New and Old Towns.

 They have both been completely rebuilt since the War, as, on Hitler's orders, the Nazis systematically blew up all of the buildings in Warsaw after the Polish uprising in 1944.  Mind you, the uprising started then because the Russians promised to help the Poles if they started an uprising in Warsaw....  and then they failed to turn up to help -- I wonder why?  So a pre-war population of 800,000 were reduced to half by the end of the War, including 160,000 Jews taken from the Jewish Ghetto to the death camps.  Warsaw was not a lot of fun in 1944......

The Old Town Market Square, totally rebuild after the War

But we did have fun. A bus tour and many wanderings through the New and Old town and the Jewish Ghetto, and past the magnificent '50's Soviet Realism style "Cultural Centre" showed that Warsaw is alive and well, and well worth a longer stay if we ever come back this way......

Ian's beer!

Jane had a massage, I swam for my first exercise for a week, we walked, and ate local food, including a huge meal of "farmyard kill" on the last night in a Czech "bierkeller" bar.

Half eaten!

We had our first travel hiccup, when the St Petersburg agency gave us 24 hours notice that our carefully chosen apartment had "a plumbing problem" and so they wanted to rebook us into another one, of unknown quality. Time lost sending emails back and forth, and some fretting, which has turned out to be unwarranted; we are probably now in a better location.

Warsaw's 2nd favorite son, Chopin.  Pope John Paul ll was the first!

So we flew in on Wednesday lunchtime, setting foot in "enemy territory" for the first time.  Impressions so far, we love it! Another cultural heritage - different,  again.

Just 'cos they can now buy Coca Cola and Subway does not make them any less Russian than 200 years ago when they bought in Italian and French architects to design their buildings and they married Prussian Princesses and so became mostly a German royal family, (interestingly, just like the British monarchy about 50 years later with Queen Victoria and Albert Saxe Coburg ....).

Sitting on the Neva River embankment at 11.00pm

And so to St Petersburg.

 Oh, this could be a long blog.  It's now midnight, just getting dark (we are 60 degrees north here, about the same latitude as Iceland)  and I hear a horse and carriage passing in the street below, and hundreds of cyclists seem to have taken to the streets outside, I know not why.

The Church on Spilt Blood at 10.30pm

Every square inch of wall and ceiling is covered in mosaics in the Church - and fabulous acoustics,

Highlights so far are the strolls along Nevsky Prospect, the Oxford Street of St P, with thousands of tourists and locals out for the shopping and the sights, a boat trip along the river and canals passing sights such as the Strogonof Palace and the Winter Palace, and last night a "to die for" concert of sacred choral music in the "Church on the Spilt Blood", built on the spot where Tzar Alexander ll was assassinated in 1881.

Today was a full day in the Hermitage museum, which has one of the finest art collections in the world, housed in a fabulous Palace, built for Catherine the Great in 1745 and extended many times thereafter to house her ever expanding collection.  AND a night at the ballet tomorrow, the former Kirov, now the Mariinsky. More photos will follow....

Tomorrow the Kirov Ballet!

Day 68 - Sunday 10th July. Poland.

Poznan, Poland, with family found

Ian and Jane.

From Germany, we (Ian, Jane and Tom) have travelled to Poznan in western Poland, from where Ian's father departed for the U.K. in 1939, at the outbreak of the 2nd World War, never to return.

For reasons that even now we do not fully understand there was not very much communication between the older generations of the families in Poland and England for most of the last 50 years.  But now we are here, and have had a wonderful reunion with 2 half nieces that we knew of, and their mothers, their partners and some children we had no knowledge of! It's been a wonderful 4 days full of introductions and sign language and marvellous shared meals.  The traditional Polish hospitality has been very generous.  We have spent many hours (and bottles of wine) going through old  photographs recovered from parents' bottom drawers and sharing family stories.  Many new friendships made. A emotional time for Ian too, as he puts into place the Polish half of his family tree that was missing.

Poznan, Old Town Square

Poznan was Ian's father's home, and where he, at the age of 15, along with the entire top class at his High School, enrolled in Polish Army for the uprising of 1918, which resulted in keeping this city within the borders of the reformed Poland, on the carve up after World War One. We now have a great picture of him with his first medal pinned on his youthful chest. As a reward the boys were allowed to smoke in class when they were sent back to school!

One morning was spent traveling to three different local cemeteries to see the tombstones of some of the family.  And Simon will be pleased to know there are at least three generation of actors in the family.  Great Grandfather and his(more acclaimed) wife are buried in the "Distinguished Persons Cemetery". And we hope to see the great great great grandfather - Jan Krolowski's statue in a park in Warsaw.

The husband and wife actors tombstone.

Poznan was badly damaged by fighting during the Russian advance during World War Two, so, rather like Berlin, there is a mixture of the old, the rebuilt to look like the old, and the new side by side. We saw the Old Town Square, some beautifully restored medieval churches and the 15th C. Town Hall, with butting headed goats appearing from the clock on the tower, making the city a tourist centre, as well as being famous for universities and international trade exhibitions.  The churches also contained treasures recently returned from Russia to where they "disappeared" after the war.  A familiar story, like the museums in Berlin.

Medieval and Baroque churches, fabulous interiors, and treasures recovered.

And so after 5 full and rich days we are packing our bags and preparing to move to Warsaw for a day before flying to Russia, the 9th country we will have visited for more than 45 minutes (and 2 for less - very tight flight transfers!).

The Krolikowskya  (but not all of us!)

We have had such a warm welcome from the new family here in Poland. Thank you all. And best wishes to those in the family who are currently facing some health challenges, we send you our best wishes.