Paul in Moscow was the precursor to Beyond Utah. At the time (2014), I was in my second year of university, and I needed to complete an internship abroad. Having never left the USA, I moved to Moscow, Russia to teach English with International Language Programs (ILP).

Original Post:

Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Guys, this weekend rocked. If you EVER get the chance to go to St. Petersburg, GO GO GO. Though, Moscow is still my favorite. 😉

Friday Night:
We met up at Maladoshnaya at 8:00pm. Jenn and I came straight from teaching with all our stuff. I bought two sandwiches and a big bottle of juice for dinner. Our train left at 9:20pm. It was a sleeper train. I was in a cabin with all strangers. 🙁 Everyone else had at least 2 other ILP teachers with them. But all of our cabins were next to each other, so it wasn’t so bad.

Saturday Morning:
We arrived a little before 5am. Yes, you read that right. FIVE AM. We wander out of the train station, intent on finding our hostel. However, the map on Alexa’s phone decided to not load so we really didn’t have a clue which way our hostel was. Luckily, I had downloaded an “offline” (without wifi) map of St. Pete’s and we used that to find the street our hostel was located off of. I say off of, because it was only accessible through a gated alleyway. Oh, and the only sign for the hostel was something spray painted on the sidewalk.

Picture this, there’s 8 of us standing in this completely empty side street (no street lamps by the way) in St. Petersburg locked outside of a gate to an even darker alleyway that the sidewalk says leads to our hostel. The gate requires a code which we didn’t have. There was a security guard for a parking lot just 100 meters or so from the gate. So Jordan (he speaks Russian) was nominated to go ask him if this was the right place. The guard had never heard of our hostel and it took him 3 google searches to find it online…

After a few minutes, some guy walked out of the alleyway, which required him to open the gate. So we get through the gate, and wander down the alleyway until we get to a courtyard. We walk up to the first doorway and see a sign that says our hostel is on the third floor. This door required us to call up to hostel so they would electronically unlock the door. We call, someone answers, we respond “american,” they unlock the door and we walk in. The stairwell was a little ghetto, but nothing too scary. On the third floor we were greeted by our host, Gallia. Who speaks no English. But who speaks fluent Spanish.

Anyways, we drop off our stuff, get changed, wash our face, and head back to the train station. Logan missed our train so he caught the next one. He arrived in St. Pete’s only an hour or so after we did. We went straight from the train station to a cafe to eat breakfast. Which we happened to eat at several times throughout our vacation. Oh and they had scones for 25 cents.

We decided our first stop should be the State Hermitage Museum. Little did we know that it was an hour walk. Haha but we enjoyed it! We got to see a beautiful sunrise. There’s canals all throughout the city. St. Petersburg is often called “the Venice of the North.” 🙂

We got to the Hermitage only to realize it didn’t open for another hour. So we doubled back to the Church on Spilled Blood. Which also didn’t open until 10:30. So we took pictures before heading once again to the Hermitage. Also, this is where I dropped and broke my iPod. 🙁

Since we’re students (and brought our Student IDs), we got into the Hermitage for FREE!!! Which is nice, because tickets are usually around $20. To take pictures also cost extra money, so I opted out. My favorite exhibit was “Russian Culture.” Although my favorite painting was German. “Childhood of Christ” by Gerrit van Honthorst. I’ve included a picture of it (from Google).

Also, not to confuse anyone… the “Winter Palace” is the big green building you see in the pictures. It houses the “Hermitage” which is the actual museum. The Winter Palace was built by Catherine the Great, who started the collection of the artwork that provided the foundation for the current Hermitage. Fun fact, the Hermitage will celebrate its 250th year anniversary this winter. 🙂

Saturday Afternoon/Evening:
After a couple hours, we decided to head out for some food. We went to this pizza place called “Any Pizza.” The food was good, and was fairly well priced. We all got our own 30cm (12in) pizza. And then proceeded to eat the whole thing. Haha! I ordered their “pepperoni” pizza, which apparently comes with salami instead of pepperoni.

Following dinner, the group split up. A couple people went to another museum, and the rest of us headed over to St. Isaac’s Cathedral. We paid $4 to climb to the top and get an amazing view of the city.

The rest of the evening was spent wandering around St. Pete’s. We didn’t stop by any more specific tourist locations. The following pictures are from these wanderings.

Sunday Morning:
We hit up the same cafe for some tasty breakfast before taking the metro to a train station. From St. Pete’s we took an hour train ride to this place called Peterhof. Which was basically the summer palace for the Romanov Family. Personally, I liked Peterhof more than the Winter Palace. I could have spent all day there… but it was cold. And I wasn’t prepared for that. Plus we all got hungry…

So I spent around $20 for two separate tickets. First, to enter the estate. And another for a tour of the palace. Overall, I feel like I only explored 1/3 of the total estate.

Sunday Evening:
After Peterhof, we took another train back into St. Pete’s. We then went to Any Pizza again. I got the same thing, mainly because I wanted to make sure it was something I would like. Our sleeper train back to Moscow left at 9pm. We swung by the hostel around 8pm, checked out, said goodbye to Gallia, and headed over to the train station.

Monday:
We arrived in Moscow at 5am. Followed by the 1 hour metro ride to get home. Then, I had to do an assignment for BYU-Idaho. Then unpacking. Then shower/shave. Then head over to one of the other ILP schools to have an interview with Casey. He’s one of ILP’s three directors. He was here to do “mid-semester visits.” Basically, every semester one of the directors visits every single school to make sure kids are learning and that the teachers are happy. I talked to him about all my various concerns (lack of host family, rowdy kids, etc). He offered me a lot of advice and encouragement. 🙂

After my interview, I headed to my school to prepare my lessons. Casey didn’t come to my 1st grade class, but he watched my Kindergarten class. We made “iPods” for our first activity, and for the second activity we rolled dice which different types of actions on them.

Overall, I think it went well. After we finished teaching, we met up with everyone and had pizza! It was a great way to end the weekend/start the week.

This is part where I usually end my blog post, but today I had something random that I wanted to talk about that doesn’t fit in anywhere else in this blog post. Hence, I just tacked it onto the end.

Peter the Great founded St. Petersburg. He named it after Peter the Apostle. He also built Peterhof, which he named after himself. However, Russians pronounce their version of Peter differently than we do in English. We say “Pee-ter.” They say “Pee-yo-tur” (spelled Pyotr). Whenever ILP has a “Pyotr” in our program, we have to be very careful to call him “Pyotr” not “Peter.”
Apparently “Peter” in Russian means pervert. Hahaha.

Today, I’ll sign my post with my Russian nickname.

-Раша
(Pasha)

Click here to read more posts from Paul in Moscow.