Travel Blog Day 2

St Petersburg, Russia

What a depressing place. As you drive through St Petersburg, all you see is huge dilapitated apartment buildings, overgrown and abandoned buildings everywhere. Nothing is upkept, other than some grassy areas that are constantly trimmed back by government workers in orange. Apparently 80% of people are still employed by the government, earning on average 7-8k a year. There are some small fenced enclaves owned by the wealthy, and everyone else lives in what appears to be abject poverty.

We went to see the gardens of Peterhof, and it was completely crammed with people. As opposed to the universal beauty of Estonia, things of beauty are few and far between here, so they're crowded. Every tour group in the area goes to the same few things. We shuffled through a large, empty, opulent building, approached at every turn by people selling mass produced, identical garbage. If you've been to tijuana, you'd recognize the feel. The whole setup was basically there to show you something halfway decent, and get as much money as they could from you. Instead of being part of an otherwise functioning economy, it was a tiny desperate island of tourism, and you could feel it. Thousands of people were walking single file through a massive mansion, not even able to leave a small roped off path. Everyone had to wear paper covers on their shoes, and not touch anything inside, for fear of causing any damage to what few quality relics there were.

We saw the same pattern as elsewhere of only women working in the shops, but they were tired looking, and not friendly. There was very little enjoyment in what they were doing. I was reminded of the descriptions that were given in Atlas Shrugged of what a world looked like when very little new production was happening, and people covet those items that were left, in this case from the opulence of hundreds of years ago. The tour guide told us that one of the major exports of the area was shredded scrap metal, which is obviously a short term cannibalistic setup, I'm not sure what they plan on doing after they've shredded and sold everything that's not nailed down.

The highlight of the day was definitely the folk show in the evening. It was held at the St Petersburg Hotel, and it was fantastic. It was full of joy and humor, the music was haunting and catchy, the performers were spot on, and the performances were really varied. They did gymnastics, dancing, jumping rope.. Rusty and I got a couple good movies of it. If any Russian folk shows ever tour in my area, I'll definitely catch them in the future.