Saturday, 12 August, St. Petersburg: moving to the hotel, St. Petersburg by land and by sea (well, river and canal)

Written 28 September 2017

The entire back page of the previous days' Viking Daily was taken up by a chart reminding us of our disembarkation schedule. After the disembarkation briefing (days earlier, in conjunction with the "farewell dinner"), we returned to our staterooms to find, laid out on the beds, the color-coded luggage tags that would ensure that our luggage wound up the same place we did. Now it was time to deploy them. Our tags were grey, and the chart specified that our luggage should be packed, tagged, and outside our stateroom doors by 7:30 a.m. for our 8:30 a.m. transfer to the Hotel Angleterre, where 17 of us would be staying for our two-day St. Petersburg extension. Thirty-eight people (with light orange tags) would be leaving an hour later to catch the train for their extension in Helsinki. The remainder of the passengers would be taken to the airport at six different times, to catch 14 different flights—the earliest batch had to have their luggage outside their staterooms at 1:30 a.m. for a 3:00 a.m. departure! Breakfast was accordingly available starting at 1:45 a.m.

We got to have our breakfast at the usual civilized hour of 7 a.m. It was another good day for scrambled eggs (when it wasn't, I usually ordered eggs over easy from the omelet station). At the lower right is half of a large, slightly sweet, crescent-shaped poppy-seed bun. They were available most mornings, but way too large!

Then it was farewell to the Akun. Here's a last shot of it, berthed right at the quai on this occasion, through the bus window. After we vacated our staterooms, we proceeded to the bright red tent on the quai (visible at the lower left in the photo) to point out our luggage—an added precaution to ensure that no suspecious unattended luggage was loaded into the buses—and climbed aboard. At this point, it dawned on me why the Viking ships shuffled docking positions every day. The four Viking ships on this route don't travel up and down the river together, like a convoy. Their departure dates are staggered, a day apart, and because St. Petersburg is at one terminus of the route, a different ship each day is disembarking one set of passengers and embarking the next set just a couple of hours later. Often, new passengers start arriving before all the old ones leave. (As long as you vacate your stateroom by the stated time, you're always welcome to hang around in one of the ship's lounges or bars until time for you to travel.)

Anyway, this was our disembarkation day, so our ship got priority position, next to the quai. That way, the Viking employees shifting all that luggage from hallways to buses for those departing and from buses to staterooms for those arriving didn't have to schlep all of it across two or three other ships in the process.

Seventeen of us had chosen the two-day extension in St. Petersburg. The bus took us back to the center of the city and to the Angleterre Hotel, right across the street from St. Isaac's Cathedral (left-hand photo). Of course our rooms weren't ready at that hour of the morning, so Viking had arranged for us to have a walking tour of the city. Our guide started by taking us across the street to tour the cathedral. Peter the Great was born on St. Isaac's day; that's why he built St. Isaac's Cathedral in his new city. This St. Isaac lived at the turn of the 5th century in Constantinople and was no relation to Abraham or Sarah.

This evaculation map shows the typical form of a Russian orthodox church—still more or less cross shaped (at least if you include the porches, shown in lighter grey), but not like the catholic churches in western Europe. One end (on this map, the left-hand one) is walled off by the icon stand. The remaining space in St. Isaac's provides standing room for 12,000 people.

The building is not currently an active church (except for on elateral chapel, which is still an active church, and any Christian believer is welcome, morning or evening, for the service); it has served as a museum since the revolution. Recently, the city's mayor announced that he plans to give it back to the church in 2018, and the resulting demonstrations against the change were large enough to make the Tallahassee Democrat!

These huge doors are made of wood covered with bronze, and they weight 10 tons each. They show Alexander Nevski on the right and the archangel Michael, complete wth with flaming sword, on the left.

As the right-hand photo shows, the interior is lavishly decorated. Because the whole city is built on marshland, rising damp is a problem, so all the "paintings" below the cornice (at the level of the chandelier in this photo) are actually mosaics, because the paintings kept deteriorating. Above the cornice, only the last supper is a mosaic. The colors in the mosaics are made by "smolting," in which glass is colored with various minerals (notabley gorgeous blues colored with cobalt), which can then be used as mosaic pieces or ground up and used in painting pigments. When the decision was made to use mosaics, a group of students were sent to the Academy of Fine Arts in Italy to study the process; they came back and made up to 1100 colors of tesserae. The could produce about nine square feet of mosaic per year per artist. Some of the mosaics are just astounding; you can stand three feet away, and they still look like realistic paintings.

The beautiful columns around the outside of the building weigh 300,000 tons. Each one is a single piece of solid granite 18 m tall and weighing 120 tons; some people still think the place must have been built by aliens.

In a way, it was, in the sense that the architect and the engineer who figured out how to stand the columns up were French and therefore aliens in Russia.

These two photos are of a model of the apparatus designed to stand the columns in the round recesses designed to receive them. Each column was slid endwise into the central slot, wrapped in fabric. Ropes were attached and run through pulleys at the top, and 128 men turned windlasses. Each column could be raised upright in its socket in about 40 minutes. (They used a larger structure on the same design to raise the much larger Alexander Column in Palace Square, but that took three hours.)

The left-hand photo shows a series of models of the various historical stages of the building. The original on the site was the small, plain wooden barn where Peter I and Catherine I were married. The stone church that replaced it subsided and cracked, so Catherine II hired Rinaldi to replace it. Catherine died half-way through; Paul I fired him and hired another architect, but Paul ruled for only four years. Alexander I went back to Catherine's plan. The largest model (at the left) is actually the one the architect used during construction; the others are modern.

The architect who built the current version was Christopher Montferrand, an interior designer who came from France at age 30. The bust of him in the right-hand photo is made from the varieties of stone used in construction of the cathedral. The exterior is faced in sandstone and the interior with marble. Our guide told us that St. Isaac'ss is also a museum of minerals because it uses so many kinds of stone.

Betancourt was the chief engineer and was a friend of Montferrand. Montferrand presented 20 different proposals before construction was begun. They had to start over a couple of times because the soil was so unstable that it took 2,000 wooden piles to build a stable platform for the construction. Betancourt specified a mixture of stone, potassium, and some other ingredients to go between the piles because it would harden into stone in a decade or so. It worked except for a corner where they hung a 30-ton bell; that corner subsided, so they took the bell away again.

The walls are 5.2 m thick at the thinnest points and up to 10 m thick elsewhere. Heating ducts were actually installed within the walls at the time of construction.

The building was finished in 1858 after 40 years of construction. About half the marble used came from Russia; the rest from Italy and France.

Here, at the left is a view down the "nave" to the icon stand. The saints in the bottom tier are those sharing the first names of the tsars. The top tier is old-testament prophets.

The door in the center is standing open. At the right is a nearer view of it, showing the spectacular stained-glass image of Christ behind the altar. Stained glass is extremely unusual in a Russian orthodox church, but of course this church was designed and by Roman Catholics. It was made in Munich and includes about 130 colors. Most unusual of all is that it's not a window but is lit from behind by electric lights bulbs and has been since it was installed. St. Isaac's was the first building in St. Petersburg to be wired for electricity.

More information about St. Isaac's:

• Montferrand proved that it would be much cheaper, lighter, and stronger to use metal rather than stone for the dome. Between the dome's layers, they put hundreds of clay pots, for insulation and acoustics. For the outer shell, sheets of brass were coated on top with a mercury-gold amalgam. Then the brass was heated from below until the mercury cooked away, leaving the gold welded to the brass. Each sheet got three layers of gold applied in that way. Unfortunately, a lot of workers died of mercury poisoning in the process.
• During World War II, the dome was painted gray to match the sky, but the Germans could still see it. They avoided bombing it on purpose, because it was such a useful landmark for their artillery. It took a couple of months with kerosene to get the gray paint off, but under it the gilding was still in perfect shape.
• Theodore Bruni painted the ceilings.
• In the main dome is the largest painting in the church, the mother Mary in her majesty, with a dove the size of an adult man with his arms spread. Karl Bryullov (originally Charles Bruleau) painted it (we saw his work elsewhere, notably in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow). It's 6400 square feet. He liked big canvases; said he wanted to paint the sky. But the job ruined his health; the cold winds and stone dust got to his lungs; so his student had to finish it.

• Guilding the interior of the church took 30 kg of gold; the dome took 100 more.
• Russia spent on this cathedral twice what they got for selling Alaska to the U.S.
• The bright green and blue pillars that flank the door in the icon stand are veneered with malachite and lapis lazuli. The veneer is attached with resin and beeswax, and the builders included a little myrrh in the mix, so that when the heating is on, you can smell it.
• During the Soviet era, the cathedral was made into a museum of ethism and the history of religion; they hung a Faucalt pendulum from the dove in the ceiling. During World War II, the basement was used to store all the precious objects they weren't able to evacuate. After the war, it became a musuem of mosaics (which it still is, sort of).
• The construction workers on the site served as models for the paintings and mosaics of saints.
• During the cholera epidemic, all the drinking water on the work site was boiled, so as to keep the workers healthy. The building was also heated in winter while under construction, but to such a degree that workers suffered heat exhaustion.
• Montferrand died of pneumonia, at 70, only a couple of weeks after the building was finished. He's buried in the Montmartre cemetery in Paris. When he was sent home for burial, they carried the coffin in a lap around the cathedral before sending it on.
• You can buy a ticket to climb the many hundred steps to the top of the church, for the view (we didn't).
• Montferrand also built the palace with the green roof just outside the cathedral for Prince Alexey Lobanov-Rostovsky, who was a diplomat, writer, art collector, and a noble figure close to Tsar Alexander I. Strapped for cash, the prince offered the palace for sale for 1 million rubles and couldn't find a buyer. So instead, he issued a million one-ruble raffle tickets (a ruble at the time would have bought a cow, but it was really cheap for a palace). The emperor declared the raffle "inappropriate" and instead bought the palace for the state for 1 million rubles. Now it's the offices of the Ministry of Defense and the Four Seasons Hotel.

From the cathedral, we started a long walking route to visit some of the city's historic buildings. The long yellow building with columns at the left is from the 1830's. It was built in what's called called Russian Imperial style by Carlo Rossi (presumably not the California wine maker). The senate and the synod were housed there; now it's the library (named for Boris Yeltsin) and the headquarters of the constitutional court of the Russian Federation.

The building at the right is the old riding school (you can always spot riding schools; they feature statues of horses). It's now an exhibition hall (most old riding school are, because they feature vast, uninterrupted interior spaces.) It's less than a block from the cathedral, and the clergy was very upset that the men wrangling the horse statues were (ahem) unclothed . . . . So for a while they had to be moved to the far end of the building, I don't know just what change of hear brought them back to the front.

Within blocks of each other, we encountered two statues of Peter the Great. At the left is the so-called Bronze Horseman—1782, by Étienne Maurice Falconet—commissioned by Catherine the Great and inscribed To Peter the First from Catherine the Second." Falconet's student did the head, and a Russian master made the large serpent that the horse is trampling underfoot. That's the senate building again in the background.

The statue's granite base is famous in its own right as the Thunder Stone. Two thirds of it are invisible, buried below ground, and it's supposedly the largest solid stone ever moved by humans.

The 1825 Decembrist uprising on the coronation of Alexander I took place here on the plain where the bronze horseman is. The Decembrists were officers of the army that fought Napoleon. They had seen how things were done in western Europe. They thought Russia should become a republic and make better progress. The other regiments didn't support them, so they were suppressed and sent to Siberia. The five leaders were hanged in the fortress. The rope broke on two of them, so traditionally they should have been pardoned, but the emperor disagreed and hanged them again anyway.

At the right is Peter protrayed in his youthful, ship-building phase on the quai in front of the Admiralty building. The Bolsheviks destroyed the original, but a copy had been sent to Amsterdam, and the King of the Netherlands had that one copied in turn, and in 1996 the copy was put here.

Speaking of the admiralty building, here it is, at the left. Note the anchors flanking the door and the dolphins coiled around the base of the flagpole.

At the right, the grey building between the green-veiled scaffolding and the dome of St. Isaac's in the background is the headquarters of the secret police. Most recently, it has been called the KGB, but in the course of its history, it's gone through half a dozen different acronyms, but the whole time, it's been ensconced here.

St. Petersburg's main street is Nevsky Propect, and here's the sign to prove we were there. In addition to the usual fast food places and Starbucks, it boasts a Pain Quotidien. The building that's now a Starbucks used to be the Bell building, the first phone switching station in Russia.

The faded flowers are at a memorial to the siege. The sign stenciled on the wall warns that this side of the street is the dangerous one, because shells are coming from the south. Apparently they were all over the city at the time, as an aid to people whose sense of direction couldn't always tell then where the fire was coming from.

The building with red awnings, at the left, is now Cartier but was once a restaurant. Tschaikovsky is said to have drunk a glass of unboiled tap water there in 1893, gotten cholera, and died of it (although some historians disagree).

The pale pink house at the right is the Stroganoff mansion.

At the left here is the cupola atop the Singer building (yes, Singer sewing machines; they had a building here). It's so art nouveau it looks like something out of Jules Verne.

Nearby, I got this shot, through a wrought-iron fence, of "topiary" Perrier bottles, but I'm pretty sure the boxwood was fake.

Nearby we were shown a building (now housing Zara) that used to be the best furrier in the country; it was accordingly nicknamed "The Death of Husbands."

More facts from the tour tour guide:

• Dostoyevski lived in one of the buildings we passed (now the Ofk Bank) and was arrested there for conspiring against the emporer. He was sent to Siberia for it and served as a soldier after that; once he became an officer, he resigned and came back to become a writer.
• The art nouveau 1912 Astoria hotel (next door to ours) is most famous for a guest who didn't stay there. Adolf Hitler firmly expected to do so. He had already planned his victory party and issued invitations (they specified the month but not the day), but he never made it after all.
• The city used to be on 101 islands, but now only 42 remain because some of the canals have been filled and made into tree-lined boulevards.
• The history of the city records 300 floods; the worst was 13 feet in 1824. It figures prominently in a poem by Pushkin called The Bronze Horseman (the source of the statue's nickname), in which the main character survives the flood perched on top of one of the marble lions in front of what's now the Four Seasons hotel.
• The Neva is short—from Ladoga Lake to the Gulf of Finland is just 84 miles—but it's an improtant trade route, so Russia and Finland have disputed this area for a long time.
• The river freezes in winter. Walking across it is forbidden, but people do it anyway.
• The first first permanent bridge across the Neva dates from the 1850s. An Asian church next to it on the far bank was used during the war as an indoor skating rink. The Lutheran church, with tall square towers, was used during the war as a swimming pool.
• A large palace with a dark roof was pointed out to us as that of the first governor of St. Petersburg, Alexander Menchicov. He and Peter the Great had known each other since they were six, but Menchikov was also the godfather of Russian corruption and got sent to Siberia in the end.
• Looking across the river from the vicinity of the Bronze Horseman, the guide pointed out a whole row of notable buildings on the far bank. The Russian Academy of Science is yellow with white columns. To the right of it, a green and white building with a tower was the city's first museum, a chamber of curiosities collected by Peter the Great. (From Amsterdam, he brought home a skeleton of a 7-foot person, a stuffed two-headed cow, a collection of pickled human embryos, and a collection of teeth pulled by Peter himself—he was a part-time dentist, a real jack of all trades!).Some house the university. A statue between them commemorates a guy (whose name I didn't catch) who walked 600 miles to Moscow to study at one university there and founded another. His name translates as "nose breaker," and he was said to settle disputes by this method. At one point he Was mugged by three guys, but ended up arresting one of them. The miscreant seemed to be a sailor, so he dragged him to the admiralty and told them to discipline their guys better. Another building in that row is (or was) the seat of Russian government when St. Petersburg was the capital. It looked small, but we were looking at it end-on. It's actually 12 roofs united by a single facade.
• On the near bank, he pointed out the Zoological Museum, home of two baby mammoths found in the permafrost (named Dima and Masha).
• As the guide warned us, we heard a blank shot fired from the fortress; they do it every day at noon.
• Did I already write somewhere that the first prisoner held in the St. Peter and St. Paul Fortress was Alexey, the son of Peter the Great, who died there? Dostoyevski, Gorky, and many other famous prisoners were also kept there.
• And did I make clear why the Hermitage is called that? Catherine the Great collected paintings and cameos and kept the collection very private (i.e., in her little "hermitage"); she said only she and the palace mice could admire it. As the collection expanded, she added more buildings, and it retained the name even when she let others in for a look and even when it was opened to the public.
• The General Staff building, where we saw the impressionists, was also built by Carlo Rossi, again in Russian imperial style. The Alexander Column in front of it, in Palace Square, is the largest single standing column in the world.
• We never got to see the St. Petersburg metro, but the guide told us it takes two escalators to get to the bottom of the station nearest the hotel, the deepest in the city and one of the deepest in the world.
• The interior of the Church on the Spilled Blood (the only Byzantine church in the city) is all mosaics, but we never got a chance to go inside. The outside includes 9000 square meters of enamel, more than any other structure in the world.
• The Russian Orthodox church has confession, like the Roman Catholic, but it has no little booths. Confessions are made face to face with a priest in private.
• When Napoleon attacked Russia, he brought 600,000 troops with him, and only 10% got home (courtesy of General Frost).

Along the way, we stopped for banana crepes and tea at the Eat and Coffee House, included in the tour. Bottled water was extra. Then we were off again!

As we passed a small street market, the guide pointed out this statue of Gogol (left), but this is aw close as we got, so we never had a chance to get close enough really to see what he looked like.

Across from the Singer building is the Kazan Cathedral (right), named for the capital city of Tartarstan. It was begin during the reign of Paul I and finsihed under Alexander I. In the 1870s the very first political demonstration in Russia took place in the little garden in front of it. The Kazan is still an active church. Our guide was not licensed to guide there, so he lowered the lollypop and talked quietly.

The church houses the portrait and tomb of Mikhail Kutuzov, one of Russia's greatest diplomats and soldiers under Catherine II, Paul I, and Alexander I. It's decorated with the keys he took during military campaigns from cities in Europe.

The faithful also stand in line here to pray to the icon of our lady and to kiss it afterward (no wonder they have cholera epidemics!).

A set of yellow buildings with red roofs that we saw only from a distance was originally an orphanage and hospital for pregnant women; any woman could go there to deliver, no questions asked, and leave the baby, which was given free citizenship. Now the buildings are is a teacher's college.

Finally, the guide pointed out a building, which I couldn't find again on a bet, in which Tchaikovsky, a famous ballerina, and a famous field marshall all lived.

It was a very comprehensive tour—we covered way more than I could effectively take in. Unfortunately, it was the occasion for another pickpocket attack—our friend Roger, which whom we often toured, lost his wallet. He said later than as he stood in line at the hotel, waiting to ask the concierge for help with damage control, four other people were in line behind him, for the same reason.

The lesson here is clear. Enough walking around with wallets in your pockets or—even worse!—purses in the form of backpacks! Get one of those hidden travel pouches that you wear between your underwear and your clothing. Put the important stuff—passport, driver's license, credit cards, cash reserve—in the pouch and stop worrying. As Rick Steves always says, when you get back from a day's touring, you don't even think to worry about whether your underwear has been stolen; you know it's right where you put it on that morning. I think they even make the pouches out of electrically shielded materials now.

Back at the hotel, I had planned to sit down and rest my feet for an hour or two before we hike off to our planned river-boat tour. We had consulted the concierge and had directions to the landing for the only company in town that did the tour in English. But Rachel needed to souvenir ship—the end of the trip was coming at us rapidly, and she still had many people to shop for. Since she and Ev were credit-card-less, I went along to pay for things. She had her eye on the gift shops in St. Isaac's, scoped out earlier during the tour, so she paid both our admissions, and we spent most of our remaining free time there.

David decided his feet had had it, so he opted out of the boat tour, but Ev, Rachel and I set out for "the bridge with the horses on it" (see earlier on our walking tour), where the boat was waiting. It took longer than we expected, and the line at the ticket office was long, but we managed to get the last three places and hurried aboard just in time for the boat to cast off.

The boat had a covered forward cabin with a bar, but no one chose to sit there (except the tour guide, who spoke to us over the loud-speaker from the comfort of the bar); we all sat in plastic folding chairs on the open-air deck behind.

As you can see in the left-hand photo, some of the bridges were pretty low. This is the "post office" bridge, the lowest on our route, with a clearance of just 2.2 m. We could have reached up and touched the underside as we passed through.

The photo at the right shows the star-studded blue of Trinity Cathedral. I tell you, cathedrals are everywhere in Russia! Tallahasee has one Roman Catholic co-cathedral; the other half of the pair is in Pensacola, a three-hour drive away. We also have a Greek Orthodox church, but it's not a cathedral. In Russia, a town the size of Tallahassee would have eight or ten cathedrals and as many noncathedral churches.

The green building with the wrought-iron porch is the Bolshoi Drama Theater of St. Petersburg. I think "bolshoi" just means "big" or "grand."

Along this section of the tour, the guide pointed out that the water mains connecting different sections of the city run under the bridges, from one island to another; she pointed out a set as we passed under an old pedestrian bridge.

The large curved yellow building with huge green letters on top is the University of Railway Engineering.

This lovely bell tower is associated with the St. Nicholas Naval Cathedral. The cathedral itself is in the same style, with the alternating bands of blue and gold with white trim.

In the right-hand photo, you can see both the old (green) Mariinsky Theater and new (very modern) one with glass corner is new Mariinsky Theater, on opposite banks of a canal, joined by an ordinary bridge as well as an elevated glass walkway, which is full of large potted plants.

This very gray building is (or perhaps was?) an apartment house for artists, especially those of the Mariinsky Theater.

Other buildings pointed out to us included the house of Gavrila Derzhavin (do I have that name right?), the great-grandfather of Russian poetry and literature. It's horseshoe-shaped, with the center open to the front and planted with a garden.

Another was the Yusupov Palace, which I don't bother to show a photo of, because it was almost completely covered with scaffolding. Rasputin was killed there, in the cellars.

Yet another group of yellow buildings was pointed out as a prestigious university. The palace of Rasumovski forms part of it, and over its bright yellow entrance arch is an image of a pelican pecking at its breast as a symbol of the love teachers have for their students. (Pelicans are known, in times of famine, to peck their own breasts so as to feed their young on their own blood.)

We passed a tiny, triangular, wooded island—the smallest in the city—called Little Holland. Three centuries ago, it was dedicated to ship building. Peter the Great spent time there because he loved ship building and had been happy during his time in Holland.

Most of the small canals that crisscross the city meet at right angles, and each turn from one into another involves passing under a low, short bridge (because a street paralleling one canal must pass over the one branching off from it). Leaving Little Holland and heading out toward the the Neva, we made one such turn, and the captain cut it a little close, with the result that the stern of the boat struck a concrete bridge abutment, and pretty darn hard, too! The guide paused for two beats and then said, "Oops." The boatman hurried aft to check for damage, and the boat didn't sink, so I guess everything was okay . . . .

Once out on the Neva, we crossed in front of the spit with the two huge rostral columns and then sailed around behind the island occupied by the St. Peter and St. Paul Fortress. The island was originally called Rabbit Island (because rabbits abounded there), and the guide pointed out, below a small pedestrian bridge connecting the island with Petrogradski Island beyond it, a little 2-foot statue of a rabbit. The rabbit has always been a symbol of the fortress. Petrogradski Island has an artillery museum, but we never had time to visit it.

The views of the Palace Embankment and the Hermitage from the river were beautiful, but the guide apologized for the cloudy sky. She assured us it was much more beautiful in sunshine, but what can you do—St. Petersburg has only about 30 sunny days a year.

We also got a good look at the Trinity Bridge, the first permanent bridge across the Neva, which I had already noticed bore a great resemblance to the Alexander III bridge in Paris (named for Alexander III of Russia and completed in 1900). The Trinity was a gift to the city from Paris for its 200th anniversary in 1903.

On the far bank of the Neva we could make out the St. Petersburg mosque behind the trees. Just at the right-hand edge of the photo, you can see a bit of the stern of the White sailing ship I showed a photo of earlier, the one I wasn't sure was a restaurant.

The tour was quite long and thorough—I would recommend it. But it dropped us off where it had picked us up, a good long way from our hotel and from the restaurant where we had dinner reservations—the Stroganoff Steak House. The plan was to get a taxi from the boat landing directly to the restaurant, but we didn't have a phone or see a taxi stand. The hotel concierge had blithely assured us that the boat's ticket office could call us a taxi, but it was mobbed with people buying tickets for the next tour. Finally, we asked our tour guide to call us a cab, which she graciously did.

On the way to the restaurant, I got this shot of a little ornamental horse-drawn coach (with St. Isaac's in the background) you could rent rides in.

The restaurant was quite good, although by no means cheap. (Only after we sat down and started studying the menu did it dawn on me that, aside from the banana crepe, lunch had gotten entirely lost in the shuffle!) After some initial communication difficulties, Ev managed to convey his usual drink order (a 50-50 mix of vodka and kahlua) to the waiter. We started with a baked liver pâté to share, then I had the "salad with grilled farmer quail" (left), and Rachel chose the traditional cabbage soup with veal brisket (right).

I don't remember whether Ev had a starter.

For the main course, both Rachel and I had beef Stroganoff (of course). Like all the beef Stroganoffs we had in Russia, it contained only a little sour cream, but sour cream was always provided to put on top, at the table. We shared a serving of pan-fried new potatoes with porcini mushrooms.

I think Ev had a steak.

Then, as a digestif, both Ev and Rachel had shots of vodka.

The restaurant wasn't far from the hotel, so we walked back, but when we were about 2/3 of the way, Ev realized he had left his jacket at the restaurant and went back for it. Rachel and I continued on to the hotel, promising to wait for him in the lobby. He finally turned up after so long a delay we were getting worried. He had emerged into St. Isaac's square from an unfamilar direction, and couldn't spot the hotel—the huge letters on the roof, quite prominent during the day, were almost invisible at night, and the cathedral looks almost the same on every side. So he set out to circle the whole vast space, looking for the hotel and by bad luck guess wrong on which direction to take first . . .

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