Hermitage Museum
I began the day at the Hermitage museum, a former palace turned art museum. Art museums are not really my favorite things, but I make do. I like learning about art, but going to a museum in Saint Petersburg and learning about Italian Rennaissance paintings is kind of nonsensical. However, the museum itself, another former palace, is amazing. It’s beautiful and the walls and ceilings and floors are all covered in ornate paintings and carvings and stone inlay. The museum itself is way more fun to look at than the paintings. Why spend my morning elbowing tourists out of the way to look at a 12-inch tall Raphael painting of Madonna and Child when I can just look up at the amazingly detailed ceiling painting? The museum is very proud of its Raphael and Michelangelo and Rembrandt and Degas, but I mostly took photos of the floors and ceilings, not the paintings on the walls.
There is a cafe between the old museum and the new ‘Impressionist’ museum and my guide asks if I want to stop for a bit. So we order drinks and sit down. I’m not sure how long we’re planning to sit, but I’m looking at some very delicious looking meringues in the case. I just order a juice and we sit down. Then my guide gets up and orders one of those meringues. I do the same. Now we’re sitting at this table, 2 very sophisticated women who go to art museums, with meringues the size of baseballs and no utensils or napkins. Before long we look like we’ve torn into a bag of beignets covered in powdered sugar. Every bite results in shards of meringue flying everywhere. We just sit there and pretend this is normal. Perhaps it is.
Finally we head over to the new part of the museum which starts with impressionists and finishes with… black squares. Ugh. The Monets are beautiful. The Picassos are cool. There’s even some pointilism in between. But then we arrive at the abstract portion and you’ve lost me.
Finally we conclude our tour and I say goodbye to Sophia, beautiful space cadet. We had a great time and were equally matched at looking frazzled.
Cooking Class
Next I went to the courtyard to meet my guide for the cooking class. Irina is my new guide and translator as we drive to the outskirts of the city to a cooking school. We meet up with our chef Artem to begin preparations for the feast.
I have requested pelmeni, and we are also making borscht and pieroshki. I wasn’t super jazzed about the borscht because I hate beets and, while I was assured before I left home that borscht does not, in fact, taste like beets (dirt), the bowl I had on the train disproved that theory.
Irina is super fun, asks lots of questions about my trip so far and what I think of Russia. She says one day she also wants to do the trans-Siberian trip. She has never seen siberia. Artem doesn’t speak English, but is also super fun. I know enough to understand the ingredient names and when he says my dumplings are ‘otleechna!’ and then makes fun of Irina’s.
We made the entire meal from scratch, including the dough for the dumplings and the stock for the borscht. We boil some herbs and chicken bones and beef together to make the broth, then begin cutting up tons of vegetables. Irina is essentially taking the class with me to help speed up the cooking. We all have so much fun joking around. We chop vegetables and fry them and boil them and make pasta dough and roll it out and cut out circles for the pelmeni. The whole time Artem is yelling at me in Russian and then Irina is trying to translate and he just yells more things over her. It seems kind of fitting to learn how to cook Russian food with someone just yelling at you the whole time. We fill the dumplings and then the pieroshki and then everything goes into the oven or the boiling water and is finished at the same time.
Irina and I have a delicious dinner, and I take back everything I said about borscht. It was delicious and had zero dirt flavor. This is definitely the best borscht I will ever taste, as I can’t imagine making everything from scratch like this on my own. Eh, who am I kidding? I will totally try to make it again.
Mall
After we finish our dinner, Irina asks where I would like to be dropped off. I had read about a shopping spot earlier, so I ask to be dropped off there. She laughs a foreboding laugh and says, ‘Ok, if you’re sure’.
45 minutes later they drop me off at the Galleria shopping center and I have now found all of Russia. Everyone is here. It’s December 28th and everyone is rushing to get those last few New Years presents. It’s a stark contrast with the fancy malls I have found previously, as the stores are packed shoulder to shoulder. I had imagined finding a cute new outfit to wear tomorrow for my photo walk. Bug it is impossible to find a cash register. It is impossible to find a fitting room. It is impossible to shop at all. I have fun people watching and checking out the shops. It is as if all of the fast fashion stores have melded together and become sentient. There’s Zara, Reserved, H&M, and maybe 50 clones of those stores, selling reasonably priced ill-fitting clothes.
Dinner Show
After that exciting adventure, I decided to try to take the subway to the restaurant I had picked for dinner. Yandex and Google maps both wanted me to take a bus, so I couldn’t get either to tell me about the subway. So I went in and just figured it out. The ticket purchasing was pretty intuitive. And they use metal coin tokens instead of cards, so I bought a second one to keep.
I arrived and walked to the restaurant with plenty of time to spare. I ordered schi, roasted quail with wine poached pears, and a beer. It was a nice relaxing evening. The show was cute, pretty low key. I had a nice 5-person circle booth all to myself, so I enjoyed my space and the dancing.
