Overseas Briefing

Author: Alpheus Chan

RUSSIA - What a ridiculous place. Russia is every bit as weird as you imagine it to be, and it makes for great traveling and amazing stories. My recent 11-day tour started in St. Petersburg. Peter the Great invited famous Italian architects to help him build the city, which makes St. Petersburg look more like an Italian city than a Russian city. Behind the facade of the beautiful neo-classical buildings, however, is a city that is poor and ill-maintained. Looking past the initial illusion, you can still see the remnants of the devastating conditions that resulted from Soviet Rule. It is not hard to see why Dostoevsky called St. Petersburg the most artificial city in the world. Being in St. Petersburg is an eye-opening experience.

One of the most interesting features of St. Petersburg is its metro system. The metro in Russia serves a dual purpose of metro and bomb shelter. It is built extremely deep underground. In order to get to the platform, you need to take a giant escalator that takes about the minutes to get to the bottom. The platform itself is also beautifully decorated with columns and arches, and even paintings on the roof.

Although I try not to sound like a guidebook, I cannot help but comment on the Winter Palace and Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, which is now my favorite museum in the world. I think it is even more impressive than the Louvre - in fact, there is really no comparison. Just the building itself is so decadently decorated that it is easy to see why the Russian people wanted to overthrow the tsars. There are numerous rooms with gold-plated walls and ceilings, and nearly every room has giant crystal chandeliers. The "wow" factor in this museum is definitely a perfect 10.

Our tour organized local student guides to take us around St. Petersburg, which gave us a really cool, in-depth look into what living in St. Petersburg is really like. He showed us all the cool spots around town. We got to see St. Petersburg from a perspective that only a handful of foreigners have ever seen. So, on the roof we sat, just hanging out and drinking some vodka and cognac, enjoying the beautiful, freezing cold day in Russia. I never would've imagined being able to do something like that, especially in Russia. It was amazing.

My next stop was Moscow. Moscow is certainly a more built-up and prosperous city than St. Petersburg, although it is probably the worst-designed city ever. Whoever designed Moscow clearly did not have accessibility in mind. Moscow is formed out of giant concentric circles, with its center being the Kremlin and the Red Square. Walking away from the center in any direction, one hits the boulevard ring, the garden ring, the giant highwayesque road at the edge and numerous other rings circling the city. In between these rings, you have all these confusing small streets connecting everything together. Navigating around Moscow was a nightmare, and my inability to read Russian did not help.

We got to Moscow just in time to see its first snow, and seeing Russia in the snow is kind of mystical, the way you would imagine Russia to be. Maybe it was the snow, but I loved Moscow a lot more than St. Petersburg. It was amazing walking around the city and seeing the Kremlin and the Red Square in snow. Although Moscow may not be as extravagant as the Winter Palace, the sights are a lot more impressive as Moscow is the place where it all happened.