TRAVEL: Summer solstice in St Petersburg

We arrive in St Petes on the express train from Moscow.  It’s 11pm (exactly on schedule) on a June night and the sky is a clear light blue- it could be 2pm in the afternoon.  I’ve been dreaming of the White Nights festival for some time- ‘body clocks be gone!’ reads one of the tourist brochures.  This far into the northern hemisphere the sun only sets for a couple of hours.  I’ve given St Petersburg the difficult label of ‘most romantic city in the world’- it’s a lot to live up to, but having seen the city in the ‘Russian Doll’ and marvelled at the Hermitage in ‘Russian Ark’ I’m confident it will live up to expectation.  It’s difficult not to compare cities: the new Prague etcetera but I think St Petes requires description- so I’m going to say that it is a cross between Paris and Venice- two of my all time favourite places which means St Petes is a combo deal and in short, an explosive city.

We orient ourselves in the city by taking the famous ‘Peter’s walking tour’ – we’re lucky enough to get Peter as our guide. He is keen to show us a non-touristy version of his beloved St Petes, so with the tour group we board a local bus and head to an island.  Here we look across the canal and back to the picturesque main island, the golden domes of St Isaacs and the mint ice cream coloured Hermitage just some of the stand outs on the landscape.  Peter further guided us through the windy streets of the town where without the ornate facades of the tourist centre the buildings are cracked and dilapidated.  A highlight of the tour is lunch at a café called Stolle- where we enjoy what Peter refers to as pie, but is more like Strudel- delish!  On his website Peter the founder of the company refers to the tours as being “designed for a curious and energetic budget-conscious traveller, our walks cover all aspects of St. Petersburg’s life, from history, arts and social culture to everyday practicalities.”  And indeed he doesn’t disappoint as he gives a lively and personal commentary on what it is like to live in Russia.

My expectation is that St Peters is a romantic city and perhaps the most romantic thing that you can do there is to take a boat ride at midnight during the summer solstice. For a small price we board the boat, which is more like a water taxi than a cruise ship.  It’s 11.20pma and it feels like 4 in the afternoon.  The boat manager supplies us with blankets to cover up from the ever so slight chill of the night air.  As we chug along the canal the modern pop music dooshing out of the stereo seems more than a little incongruous to our fairy like surrounds.  We reach the main broad canal and marvel at the soft cocktail of pinks and purples in the sky.  The arced bridges are illuminated in neon and as the clock strikes 12 a smattering of fireworks erupt into the twilight- now that’s a city turning on the romance!

The piece de resistance (pretentious moi?) of the city is undoubtedly the fabulous Hermitage.  The queue to enter the mint green masterpiece snakes for what feels like forever.  We’re forced to take it in turns holding our place in the queue as the weather is uncomfortably hot.  When finally we make our way into the building we wander through marvelling at the opulent rooms and what feels like 100 exhibitions all in one place- Monet, Rembrandt and Renoir are all in abundance.  We twirl through the rooms until the opulence exhausts us.  And so we seek out more coffee, more jam drops (the corner store biscuits are amazing), more of this charming city.

There is so much to do in St Petes and even the mundane feels like a lark.  The only laundrette we can find in a city that’s not really equipped for backpackers, is a groovy place called 40 degrees with just 3 washing machines. It’s a bar that just happens to have a laundry at the back.  The cheap beer and corn chips on sale soothe the wait and you get to take in dj mixed dance tunes (yes a dj in a Laundromat!) and wonder what all these grungey 20-something Russians are discussing.  It’s hard not to decide when you are travelling that everything is that little bit cooler than home but in St Petes I think it just might be true.  Just as I’m beginning to think that St Petes might by the coolest place in the world to live I ask an English speaking ex-pat on the bus how he finds it – he sighs, “the summers they are great…but the winters are just awful”.  I guess logically there has to be a flip side to the enchanting summer solstice.