St. Petersburg Reflections

One of the things that we love about the ship and one of the things that we encourage students to do is to watch sunrises. Each one is different.  It's also affirming to know that the sun has risen. We set our clocks back an hour and gained an hour of sleep, so this one was easier to get up for.  I rise by an internal clock, so mine didn't reset. 

That extra hour does give you time to reflect.  Some people on the ship like to meditate, so maybe that is what I am doing, but I like to call it reflection. Reflection is actually encouraged after a port with an open meeting for people to share and discuss the port they have just left.  Sometimes, they are disturbed by things they have seen and heard, or other times they have questions about something they just didn't understand.  Sometimes people just share what they did that left an impression on them.  So, it's important to take a minute to absorb and internalize a port before jumping right into preparing for the next place.

One of my reflections was that Peter the Great was really great.  I know 100 times more about Peter the Great than I did before which is still not much, so Peter the Great is now on my reading list. I think that Russia would be much different than it is today without his influence, which was influenced by a worldview kind of like Jefferson.  So, travel is good for great leaders.

I'm also seeing how much Russia was changed by the Boshevik Revolutions--something else to read about when I get back home.  While monarchs and czars in Russia enjoyed great privilege, it was a dangerous occupation. Many of them were killed in their palaces by relatives or upstarts or Bosheviks or rivals of their lovers.  The Revolution does make you think of long cycles of income differentials and what they could mean for the future of nations.  While many of the Russian monarchs are given credit for great things, it was easy to see that much of their wealth was built on the backs of the peasants who lived a hard life.

Just an interlude in this blog to show some of the decorations in the dining hall.  Nancy admired these yesterday, and our server said that he had made them from some of the fruits that we had for breakfast when they wee going to throw away the peels and outsides.  He saved them and carved these for us.
 

The Russians in St. Petersburg really like Putin.  Americans seem to see Putin as evil, but in the context of Russia, he is at least better than what they have had before.  He exudes strength, and they feel better about their country in the world.  Putin is a homeboy from St. Petersburg, and their citizens think they are receiving some of the benefit of that relationship in the form of more funding from Moscow.  What we perceive as posturing, when placed in the cultural context of Russia, is just showing the charisma  and health that they want of a leader.  The citizens are also concerned about the Ukraine situation, but more from knowing people who live there that are affected.

In St. Petersburg, there is much disdain for Russian cars, know to them as "buckets" or "rust buckets".  But, there is such a difference in wealth that many of them can only afford the buckets.  What we saw mostly were non-Russian made cars, including a large number of Fords (note to self: invest in Ford).

Hardly any one smiles in St. Petersburg.  We finally coaxed smiles from a couple of the immigration officials, and they are beautiful when they smile.  However, smiling for no reason is frowned upon (pun intended) because Russians think it makes you look like an idiot.  Clerks in stores have no customer service orientation as far as we are concerned, but this is cultural so we can judge them on our standards but must keep in mind that there standards are different for them.

St. Petersburg is an expensive place to live.  Most of the information we got was gleaned from conversations or presentations by our many guides. Teachers make about $1,000 US per month, and a very small apartment is $700 per month.  A soda at a kiosk sold for 70 Rubles or about $2.10.  It is a very viable city with lots of people rushing about and riding the metro, but not as many people are texting as they walk.

Still, I felt a little sense of paranoia, maybe from warnings about the city.  People here all know family members from other eras who have been jailed, and there are police everywhere--many of them very young.  Allegedly, the police like to stop drivers for infractions because bribes are an important part of their income.  There is disdain for the police by the citizenry.

I'll stop here because my head is still spinning.  It is a beautiful city, old and modern at the same time and bearing the scars from past wars.  The younger generation loves American culture and clothes--the older generation not so much, so we felt welcomed and not welcomed at the same time.