Moscow and St Petersburg

We’ve just had a fantastic few days in my new favourite city Moscow, and a pretty good few days in St Petersburg (where I spent quite a lot of my time trying to forgive St Petersburg for not being Moscow).

To do St Petersburg justice, it is a beautiful, grand, aristocratic city with lovely buildings in pastel shades and picturesque canals and bridges. Even the sky looked a sophisticated shade of grey. And there were quirky cafes and restaurants and some frankly crazy concepts (like the gym in a large mock pirate ship across the river from the Winter Palace).

But it was all just not quite Moscow! A bit less quirky, a bit less cool, a few less potential secret service agents for Ben to follow round…

Moscow’s architecture was spectacular. The Kremlin is amazing, especially with the large numbers of military uniforms wandering around. And Stalin did some terrible things (and we spent a stomach-churning, heart-breaking hour at the Gulag Museum learning exactly how terrible they were…) but he certainly had a way with towers and the ‘Seven Sisters’ are spectacular!

And best of all is St Basil’s, which is the most insane, fabulous example of religious architecture, and surely the only cathedral in the world to take it’s primary inspiration from an ice-cream sundae.

And everywhere you go there are quirky bits of graffiti and art, and wacky shops and cool cafes. We spent a brilliant few hours at the Art Muzeon where, alongside the modern statues there are a lot of old Soviet statues of Lenin and Stalin and general Communist propaganda!

The sculpture park was overlooked by an incredible statue of Peter the Great dressed as a pirate, which is described in the guidebooks as controversial but which is actually quite wonderfully hideous and truly in the ‘worst paaassible taste’ (But you couldn’t help but love Moscow for it. No half measures. If it’s going to be tasteless, it’s going to be The Most Tasteless. And huge. So huge. At first we thought it was a Gorky Park ride. It is so much bigger than everything else it has aircraft warning lights on the top).

And last but not least, there were brides and weddings everywhere! This goes for St Petersburg and in fact Irkutsk and Ulaan Baatar too, but Moscow takes the lead because it has the most brides, the biggest dresses (although this was a tight contest and all the dresses were enormous) and the brightest red stretch limos. The newly-weds go on photo tours around the city in their red stretch limos, sometimes with entourages including accordion players, stopping at a range of city locations. Some of were quite normal – St Basil’s, the Kremlin – but they also included statutes of revolutionary heroes and The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Moscow (which has a giant stone soldier’s helmet and a three foot flame on it).

Here’s a St Petersburg bride:

Best of all was the padlock bridge, which we stumbled on as we were walking to Art Muzeon. Overlooked by Peter-the-Great-as-Captain-Hook, the happy couples attach a padlock with their names on to the bridge or to a metal sculpture of a tree and throw the keys in the river. Then they have photos, drink champagne and drive off in their stretch limo. At one wedding we saw the bride’s older sister and her husband posing for photos with their padlock, which was buried under layers of new padlocks.

We’re now in Helsinki, which is pretty good so far because it’s the only place where we’ve splashed out on a decent hotel!