Putting the "Putin" in "Rasputin"

First impression of Russia: This place is cold!

Second impression of Russia: This place is most definitely not Europe.

Long version:
After a very short turnaround in Copenhagen between my week with Andy and my tour to Russia (including a scant three hours of sleep), I managed to make it to Kastrup Lufthavn in fine time to catch the group flight to Russia. This earned me (finally!) a passport stamp--a first for this break, excluding the one at the tourist place in Liechtenstein. Silly Schengen Agreement...don't they know American students want the extra hassle if it means proof that they made it to eight different countries in less than three weeks?

After we settled into the Hotel Azimut of St. Petersburg, we had the rest of the afternoon free to explore. I teamed up with a few architecture students and a fellow European Politics girl named Monica and ended up at St. Isaac's Cathedral, a gold-domed (not onion) church with a great view off the top despite the ongoing construction. The architecture kids were a bit caught up, but Monica and I wandered off towards the Dane-owned restaurant where the group was to meet for dinner. On the way, we got our first (albeit snow-obscured) look at the Church of Our Savior on Spilled Blood, which is one of the few amazing cathedrals with "candied" onion domes-- the bright colors and three-dimensional shapes that you've probably seen in pictures. The increasing snowfall limited visibility (as well as dryness) for most of the walk, but man, was it great to get to the restaurant! Our tour guide, Jon (pronounced "Yohn"-- he's a Danish teacher at DIS), had arranged for English-speaking Russia students to join us, so we got to spend a little while trying to elicit views on Putin and Medvedev (Russia's president-elect) from an engineering student. (He thought they were pretty much the same thing, but he was okay with that.) By the time our four-course meal was done (I swear, DIS is trying to fatten us all up for something), most of us were so tired from the early morning on top of two weeks straight of traveling already that we figured out the St. Petersburg metro system well enough to get home and collapse comfortably.

Monday morning dawned as all of our mornings in "Peters" did-- cloudy with a chance of (not meatballs, but rather) snow and serious wind. We started out at a stature Catherine the Great had built to honor Peter the Great, and Jon explained about the latter's determination to great this city he named for himself as part of a major effort to open up Russia to Western influence and culture. You can see the results of that all over town. Our next stop was the Peter and Paul Fortress, which, among other things, demonstrates its non-Russianness through a church with a major spire and a clock on it: such things are more or less unheard of on traditional Russian Orthodox buildings. We wandered through the chapel and along the water; sights included a roomful of Romanovs, more untraditional church sights (including a partially see-through dividing screen-- they're supposed to be solid, and only the priests can go behind them), and a very unflattering statue of Peter the Great.

We next got to see our first real Lenin statue-- the iconic one in front of the Finland train station, with his arm extended in oratorical gesticulation towards the people. I liked that he wears an overcoat-- you need it!

After lunch, my new friend Nadine (a Jewish vegetarian journalism major from New Jersey, so we had to be friends) and I went to the recommended souvenir market, where we spent an hour or so haggling with a couple of the zillion sellers of nesting dolls, Soviet-encrusted memorabilia, and so forth. I ended up with a gorgeous set of matriyoshkas for myself, as well as presents for a few people. You know who you are. We tried to go to a couple of museums, but the first one was closing, and Nadine realized outside of the second one that she'd left her camera at the first. Fortunately, a kind security guard understood just enough gesticulation and English to return the camera, no bribes necessary (we'd been warned).

With most museums around closing time, we instead bought tickets to see the inside of the Church of Our Savior on Spilled Blood. I was worried any interior would be a letdown after its incredible outside, but apparently its architects anticipated this and made sure that the inside was covered in spectacular mosaics on a gorgeous blue background with just enough geometric shapes about for me to sneak a few clandestine photos without incorporating too much New Testament.

We ended up at the trendy Café Zoom for dinner on our own, which was delicious and fun, minus a pair of Russian girls roughly our age who kept taunting us from the other end of the room for speaking English. Kind of rude. We decided we didn't care if their country ever got a democratic government, so there!