Gullible's Travels: Russia

Showing posts with label Russia. Show all posts

Monday, October 3, 2011

The China Journals, What Makes a Trip a Success? Part One

Mexico

(This time last year I was on a Road Scholar tour in China and Tibet. I've been trying to figure out how to tell you about three things that happened during that trip. Today's news gave me the answer)

The China Journals

What Makes a Trip Successful?

Part One

Television news today has been full of reports about the Italian Court overturning the murder conviction of American exchange student Amanda Knox, who has been in prison there for four years.

Ready, set, go!

It reminded me of a couple things—the caning of an American who was convicted in Singapore of vandalizing automobiles by spray-painting them. Another American over-stayed his visa in Singapore and was facing caning.

How frightening, I thought, to be in trouble in foreign lands, unable to speak the language, dealing with unfamiliar legal systems.

The second thing I’ve been thinking about is Simon, our affable, talented, and knowledgeable tour guide in Australia. Near the end of our trip, Simon was talking about his version of a successful tour, which differed from ours.

We, of course, thought about hot air ballooning at sunrise in the Outback, riding camels, and Uluru (also known as Ayers Rock. We thought about Christy bungee jumping in Queenstown, New Zealand, to mark her 50^th birthday, and the fabulous Sofitel resort in Fiji where we stayed.

A perfect swan dive for her 50th birthday.

Simon’s concerns were more prosaic—no weather delays that would necessitate a scramble to find rooms for a large group, no illnesses, and so on.

And then he said, “I didn’t have to get anyone out of jail and there were no international incidents.” I looked at him closely. He wasn’t kidding. Those things had happened before, he said.

Russia

While Amanda scurries to get out of Italy, I think of a few instances where tour guides have cautioned about certain things.

In Russia, our guide told us not to ask a group of students about Chechnya. “They are students,” she said, “not politicians.”

In Tibet, our guide sternly warned us against taking photos of the multitude of armed Chinese soldiers that were everywhere. There would be consequences, she said. And, when we visited the Potola Palace, she stressed the importance of our entire group exiting the palace in sixty minutes or less. She would be fined if we went overtime.

Germany

But, unlike Simon, I look for other indicies to proclaim a trip successful. In the next three days, I will tell you about the three things that made my trip to China and Tibet a resounding success. Be advised: Those three things are not what you would think.

(to be continued)

Mexico

Monday, November 2, 2009

The Russian Journals, Part Sixteen, The Lecture and the Lecturer

Top of the eighth, Phillies leading 8 to 2. It’s do or die for the Phillies tonight in game five. I’m in the loft. The TV is on down below in the living room. I hear a roar. I go downstairs to see what’s happening. Pablo Parrot chooses to stay in the loft—he fears going downstairs means being put in his cage.

Commercials come on. I switch to Fox News channel. Greta Van Susteren is interviewing former President George H.W. Bush, who is in Germany to mark the 20th anniversary of the night the obscene Cold War Berlin Wall came down. They are discussing that night.

Now what? History or current events? My finger hesitates over the recall button on the remote. I can always find out the score later.

“You’re a rock star here in Germany,” Greta says to the former president, noting that he modestly refuses to take credit for his part in the world-changing event. She asks him who deserves the most credit.

Again I am faced with a decision. President Bush or the top of the batting order for Yankees, with men on base? Fox News or Fox Network? I stick with history. There’s a story I’ve been wanting to write that deals with this subject.

“Gorbachev, for sure,” he responds and then adds Helmut Kohl, the former German chancellor. He speaks briefly of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and French President Francois Mitterand, who feared a united, resurgent Germany. The horrors of World War II were fresh in their minds.

Greta goes to commercial. I go to the World Series. The Yanks have scored three runs in the eighth. Score’s now 8 to 5.

I stare into space. Remembering:

The time is twenty minutes to 9 in the morning onboard the MS Nikolay Chernyshevsky. The conference hall on the top deck is packed, standing room only, and little of that. No one wants to miss this lecture, and some people leave reluctantly. It’s hot in the hall, and getting hotter exponentially as tourists pack the glass-walled room. Chairs prop open doors for the cooling breezes to enter as the boat motors smoothly across Lake Onega on a sunny day. People, anxious to hear, stand in the doorways, blocking the air circulation.

A middle-aged Russian women, one of the tour guides for Vantage Deluxe World Travel, enters the hall and makes her way to the front. She wasn’t even supposed to be on this trip, but was hired at the last minute because more people had signed up for the cruise from Moscow to St. Petersburg than expected. She begins speaking, though it isn’t yet the appointed hour of nine o’clock.

“I feel I have to entertain you,” she says, and begins with anecdotes, segues smoothly into her prepared material. Her subject today is Modern Russia, a lecture on the leaders of Russia beginning with the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, and after the slaying of Tsar Nicholas II and his family that effectively eliminated the imperial Romanov (ro-MAH-nov) reign.

Fewer people attended her first lecture several days ago, the one that covered the Imperial Romanov leaders of Russia—the tsars and emperors. She blew us away that day, had us begging for more. Word got around the boat about this magnificent speaker who has lived an extraordinary life, lived in the middle of history, and has the skill to spell-bind an audience. Today, no one wants to miss her talk.

She tells us of the twelve prominent Russian leaders since the revolution, speaks of Stalin, Kruschev, Brezhnev, Yeltsin. She spends most of her time discussing Mikhail Gorbachev, who led Russia for six years from 1985 until the coup of 1991 that ousted him. It is Gorbachev we Westerners know best, Gorbachev with his policies of perestroika (economic restructuring to reduce government control over the economy) and glasnost (political openness, reduced control over media), Gorbachev we thank for reducing tensions between the U.S. and Russia.

Perhaps it is Gorbachev she knows best also, though she seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge of all Russian history. She worked for Gorbachev as his translator for three and a half years. She escorted him to the Berlin Wall when it was being torn down. Her anecdotes about Gorbachev the leader, Gorbachev the person, are mind-boggling. And, obviously, as his translator, she was in the midst of historic conversations, bore the pressure of translating spoken words into a different language and holding those words to the veracity of their intent.

On a certain night in 1991, she was pregnant with her second child. Extremely tired, she had finally gone to bed at 2 a.m. The telephone rang at 4 o’clock. On the line was her husband, who worked for the government. He said only, “Turn on the radio.”

“I said some not very nice words to him,” she confesses. He said, “Turn on the radio.” She protested some more, explaining she was exhausted. Again, he said, “Turn ON the radio.”

She did. News of the collapse of the Soviet Union filled her room. Her husband said he feared he would lose his job. Suddenly she heard a disembodied voice from a loudspeaker in his office: “Stop spreading rumors.”

Her husband laughed, a cynical, fatalistic sound. “What are you going to do? Kill me?” he said.

“If the need arises,” came from the loudspeaker. She did not hear from her husband for several days. He was okay.

Her voice is almost gone. A gentleman offers her a bottle of water. She thanks him, but declines. “It would finish me off, for sure,” she explains. She hastens to conclude.

She speaks of current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin in a hopeful voice. His economic reforms have been exceptionally valuable for Russia. As for the future, she concludes with a quote, saying Russia will be fine “if we remember that no man is above the law, but that the law is above every man.” (paraphrased)

Her hour and a half is finished, and so is her voice. We would sit for more, much, much more. We are reluctant to leave.

Greta’s interview with former President Bush has concluded. The Yankees score another run in the top of the ninth, but three outs puts an end to their comeback. We’ll go to a game six.

(Professor Irene Nikolashina, the unparalleled history lecturer, teaches art history at the university level. She has written four books, but none are about Russian history. She occasionally lectures in the U.S.)

The Russian Journals, Part Fifteen, The Resolute Jewel on the Neva

Once upon an early eighteenth century, the man in charge decided that a mosquito-infested swamp would be a terrific place to build a new fort. It wasn’t the little vampires with the long, blood-sucking proboscises that enthralled him when he chose the place, but instead the site’s advantageous location adjacent to the Baltic Sea.

Here, he thought, would be the best place to keep those marauding Swedes out of his country, no matter that the Swedes had held this territory for a few decades. This spot would provide Russia with access to a warm water port in the Gulf of Finland.

Thus was founded a city that became known as St. Petersburg. (Also Petrograd, Leningrad, Petersburg, and Piter.) It was Peter I the Great, Tsar of Russia, who founded the city and named it after his patron saint, Peter the Apostle. Tsar Peter was enamored of all things European, and often traveling incognito through the countries and soaking up Western culture. Deciding that his city would be fashioned after the great cities of Europe, he hired a Swiss Italian architect and construction of the Peter and Paul Fortress commenced, the first brick and stone building of his fledgling city.

Three months later, wind and atmospheric pressure combined to create a phenomenon known as a “long wave.” Though the citadel was being built three miles inland, the long wave rolled in from the Baltic Sea, through the Gulf of Finland to the shallow Neva River Bay, and up the Neva River, where it inundated the construction site with six feet of water, washing away much of the building material.

Tsar Peter was said to be six feet eight inches tall, a huge man for his day. His head, however, was far too small in proportion to his massive body, and perhaps that had something to do with Peter ordering the construction to recommence. Thus began St. Petersburg’s long history of reconstruction. Since then the city has endured 207 major floods, fires, and a 900 day siege by German and Finnish armies during World War II that did massive damage to the city and killed hundreds of thousands of its residents and refugees.

The Peter and Paul Fortress with the bell tower spire, middle, and cathedral dome at left.

In 1713, Tsar Peter I moved the capital of Russia to St. Petersburg. It remained the capital until the 1917 revolution, when Moscow became the capital again.

Eventually the growing city covered a hundred and one islands in the braided delta of the Neva River, though construction through the ages has reduced that number to forty-four, spanned by more than six hundred bridges, many of them drawbridges. More than six million people live in the greater St. Petersburg area.

The Neva begins at Lake Ladoga, the largest lake in Europe, and flows forty-six miles to the gulf. Within the city are fifty rivers, streams, and canals, with a total length of a hundred miles.

Our tour group approached St. Petersburg on a morning so foggy the MS Nikolay Chernyskevsky was forced to lay by until navigation into the crowded city waterways was allowed. Along the way, we passed a number of exquisite country homes.

Eventually we tied up near the newest bridge in the city, and its first suspension bridge.

The first day in St. Petersburg was wet—very, very wet. Rained poured out of aluminum skies all day. Not very nice weather for touring, but it did make for some nice photos.

Upper portion of Smolny Cathedral

A couple of those long-legged Russian women

All the buildings are equipped with six inch rain drains.

The upper domes of the Church of the Savior on Blood, which marks the spot where Emperor Alexander II received mortal wounds from a bomb thrown by a terrorist.

The two Rostrums, which were once lighthouses, outside the former Stock Exchange building on the right, now a Naval museum. The spire of the Peter and Paul bell tower is in the background

By the time we concluded our first day’s tour, the clouds were parting and the rest of our stay was in warm, bright sunshine.