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Snapshots from St. Petersburg

Trish and I went through the formalities on our ship so we could leave it in St. Petersburg, before the cruise ended in Copenhagen. We then caught a taxi at the terminal (fixed price, paid in advance at a booth in the terminal, at probably double the metered rate — but at $30 for a 30-minute ride, I was satisfied), and went to my friend’s apartment. Here are various images, experiences, and tips I’d like to share from our time in St. Petersburg.

Enjoying four different private guides in four days, I experienced St. Petersburg as a city filled with discovery and meaning. With our first guide we walked…everywhere. St. Petersburg is exhausting on foot. This guide, Natalya, made sightseeing easy and instructive with a car and an iPad.
Enjoying four different private guides in four days, I experienced St. Petersburg as a city filled with discovery and meaning. With our first guide we walked…everywhere. St. Petersburg is exhausting on foot. This guide, Natalya, made sightseeing easy and instructive with a car and an iPad.
While distances can be great in St. Petersburg, I refashioned our guidebook chapter to feature sights based on subway stops. The subway in this city is a sight in itself. It is cheap, easy, and a fire hose of a people-mover.
While distances can be great in St. Petersburg, I refashioned our guidebook chapter to feature sights based on subway stops. The subway in this city is a sight in itself. It is cheap, easy, and a fire hose of a people-mover.
St. Petersburg’s subway system, like Moscow’s, is vast and treats commuters like VIPs with grand and stylish-in-Soviet-times halls like this. The system gives St. Petersburg a magnificent infrastructure that will move its workforce until the end of time.
St. Petersburg’s subway system, like Moscow’s, is vast and treats commuters like VIPs with grand and stylish-in-Soviet-times halls like this. The system gives St. Petersburg a magnificent infrastructure that will move its workforce until the end of time.
As the subway system was a triumph of the former Soviet Union, halls are decorated with Socialist Realism art like this bronze relief. Today, while the hammer and sickle are out of style, these souvenirs of the USSR era are kept as part of the culture’s heritage. This particular scene shows Lenin stirring up his masses with his right-hand (hench)man, Joseph Stalin, standing dutifully behind him. After Stalin died in 1953, he was purged from Soviet society, so this is a rare image of him that you can still see in public today.
As the subway system was a triumph of the former Soviet Union, halls are decorated with Socialist Realism art like this bronze relief. Today, while the hammer and sickle are out of style, these souvenirs of the USSR era are kept as part of the culture’s heritage. This particular scene shows Lenin stirring up his masses with his right-hand (hench)man, Joseph Stalin, standing dutifully behind him. After Stalin died in 1953, he was purged from Soviet society, so this is a rare image of him that you can still see in public today.
Russia is a dangerous place for your valuables. Throughout Europe, fast-fingered thieves can nip your valuables without you even knowing it. In Russia, the thieves are not so subtle — when they hit, you’ll know it. Being ripped-off here is somewhere between a pickpocketing and a mugging. Tourists can be targeted. While I don’t always wear my money belt these days (shhh, that’s a secret), I wore it in Russia.
Russia is a dangerous place for your valuables. Throughout Europe, fast-fingered thieves can nip your valuables without you even knowing it. In Russia, the thieves are not so subtle — when they hit, you’ll know it. Being ripped-off here is somewhere between a pickpocketing and a mugging. Tourists can be targeted. While I don’t always wear my money belt these days (shhh, that’s a secret), I wore it in Russia.
While probably not advisable for most travelers, locals take full advantage of St. Petersburg’s “unofficial” taxi system. Getting a ride is like fishing. You look for an old beater car (usually a Soviet-era Lada) driven by a man (usually a Central Asian), and hold out your hand. He’ll stop and you negotiate a price. Locals will pay 100 rubles ($3.50) and tourists will be lucky to get a ride for 200 rubles ($7). Hop in and pray you get to the place you agreed to be taken. We did this routinely with our local guides and I got pretty good at spotting beat-up Ladas driven by Uzbeks, saving us piles of walking. While hopping into a Lada on one occasion, I told my guide, “This is a good system.” He corrected me, saying, “No, this is a good lack of a system.”
While probably not advisable for most travelers, locals take full advantage of St. Petersburg’s “unofficial” taxi system. Getting a ride is like fishing. You look for an old beater car (usually a Soviet-era Lada) driven by a man (usually a Central Asian), and hold out your hand. He’ll stop and you negotiate a price. Locals will pay 100 rubles ($3.50) and tourists will be lucky to get a ride for 200 rubles ($7). Hop in and pray you get to the place you agreed to be taken. We did this routinely with our local guides and I got pretty good at spotting beat-up Ladas driven by Uzbeks, saving us piles of walking. While hopping into a Lada on one occasion, I told my guide, “This is a good system.” He corrected me, saying, “No, this is a good lack of a system.”
As my host was an ex-pat, we hung out with his circle of friends — a fascinating, hard-core ex-pat group — most of whom had been in St. Petersburg for 15 to 20 years and had seen lots of changes. It was fascinating to learn from them why they chose to live here, how things had changed, and how to work the system like locals. One ex-pat ran the Irish bar in town and owned a boat, which provided perhaps the group’s favorite diversion. To just motor around the Neva River and enjoy the city’s low and horizontal, Neoclassical skyline was a delight.
As my host was an ex-pat, we hung out with his circle of friends — a fascinating, hard-core ex-pat group — most of whom had been in St. Petersburg for 15 to 20 years and had seen lots of changes. It was fascinating to learn from them why they chose to live here, how things had changed, and how to work the system like locals. One ex-pat ran the Irish bar in town and owned a boat, which provided perhaps the group’s favorite diversion. To just motor around the Neva River and enjoy the city’s low and horizontal, Neoclassical skyline was a delight.
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Crashing with a Friend in Russia

Staying with a friend, you experience the real St. Petersburg — and for many, that means vast apartment buildings with dreary public spaces, elevators that are both scary and skinny, and personal spaces that are quite comfortable. Join me on this unforgettable Russian elevator ride as we meet our friend Steve on the top floor of his building. (Please feel free to share any scary elevator-style memories you may have from crashing with friends in foreign countries.)

If you can’t see the video below, watch it on YouTube.

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The Expensive Reality of Russia’s Tourist Visas

Unfortunately, Russia still requires a visa for tourists. It’s expensive ($250), you have to answer a slew of probing questions, and you’re essentially required to use a pricey visa service. Cruise ship passengers are welcome to tour the city without a visa, but only on a guided shore excursion from the ship. Also, some local guides are licensed to take cruisers who don’t have visas on day trips from the boat. (While this can be expensive and is rarely done, it’s a workable option — and I found several good guides to recommend for this service.) Only a few passengers actually go through the hoops to get a tourist visa (as we did), which allows them to come and go freely using the boat as a hotel.

The only port in Northern Europe where cruise ships routinely spend two (or sometimes three) nights is St. Petersburg. That’s because there’s so much to see and (I figure, cynically) there’s so much money to be made off the fact that in order to go ashore, thousands of passengers buy excursions. I understand that one big company has a lock on the cruise business in St. Petersburg, and the cruise lines make more money at this stop by far than at any other. That’s why the big players have no problem with Russia’s ornery visa requirements, and most local insiders anticipate no change in the near future.

It’s loosening up for some nationalities (for example, most Latin Americans don’t need a visa for Russia). But the world of visas is one of reciprocity, and until the US allows Russians in without visas, Russia will keep the same requirement of American travelers. It’s only logical in the sandbox of international relations.

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Jumping Ship in St. Petersburg

Rather than see Tallinn (which I had recently visited) and spend another day at sea returning to Copenhagen, Trish and I jumped ship in St. Petersburg to enjoy Russia’s most popular (and European) city for five days. I had second thoughts that this might have been too much time, but the city is well worth five days. While I’m always collecting ideas for future TV scripts, my immediate assignment was to update and improve our chapter on St. Petersburg. Now, with our Rick Steves’ Snapshot St. Petersburg, Helsinki & Tallinn guidebook, just out, and with this city being an important chapter in our Northern European Cruise Ports guidebook, we have a responsibility to offer our readers the best information possible on St. Petersburg. I enjoyed traveling in the footsteps of Cameron Hewitt and Ian Watson, who wrote the existing chapter. (In 1993, Ian and I wrote a little guidebook to St. Petersburg, Moscow, Tallinn, and Riga in an effort to help kick-start independent tourism immediately after the fall of the USSR. Now we’re ready to take that to a much higher level.) Photos by Trish Feaster, see her blog at The Travelphile.com.

Russia is not people-friendly in so many ways. The scale of things seems designed to create a deep-seated feeling of “I’m not worthy.” St. Petersburg’s massive new Marine Facade cruise facility has five giant terminals to serve a fleet of mammoth cruise ships in a massive horseshoe-shaped port built to accommodate the growing cruise industry.
Russia is not people-friendly in so many ways. The scale of things seems designed to create a deep-seated feeling of “I’m not worthy.” St. Petersburg’s massive new Marine Facade cruise facility has five giant terminals to serve a fleet of mammoth cruise ships in a massive horseshoe-shaped port built to accommodate the growing cruise industry.
Because I spent the money and went through the hoops to get a Russian visa, I’m was just one of a handful of cruisers out of the 3,000 on our ship who could come and go through the stern customs station at the terminal.
Because I spent the money and went through the hoops to get a Russian visa, I’m was just one of a handful of cruisers out of the 3,000 on our ship who could come and go through the stern customs station at the terminal.
St. Petersburg’s Marine Facade cruise port can host a fleet of cruise ships at the same time. From here a city of five million awaits exploration.
St. Petersburg’s Marine Facade cruise port can host a fleet of cruise ships at the same time. From here a city of five million awaits exploration.
About 99 percent of the passengers on our ship toured St. Petersburg by cruise line excursion. On these guided shore excursions a bus meets you at the terminal and takes you to see the major sights. Those I talked to thoroughly enjoyed their excursions. By my estimate, they saw the famous sights efficiently and had good guides. But they didn’t really experience — and certainly didn’t feel — the actual city and its people.
About 99 percent of the passengers on our ship toured St. Petersburg by cruise line excursion. On these guided shore excursions a bus meets you at the terminal and takes you to see the major sights. Those I talked to thoroughly enjoyed their excursions. By my estimate, they saw the famous sights efficiently and had good guides. But they didn’t really experience — and certainly didn’t feel — the actual city and its people.
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Tallinn: I Cut the Forest

Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, is the only part of the former USSR that I include in my guidebooks and TV series. I put it in our Scandinavia guidebook because I love it — it’s so easy to reach from Helsinki (ferries leave hourly, it’s a 2-hour ride, no visas, and they’ll be on the euro in just a few months), and it provides a great contrast to the rest of Nordic Europe.

The Old Town — with the best-preserved medieval center in all of Nordic Europe — is quite comfortable now. In fact, it’s almost too comfortable. It’s Muzak hell: Billy Joel melodies done à  la Kenny G are everywhere. At the same time, there’s an edge I really like. I ate dinner under rusty barbed-wire lampshades in the first pub to open after communism fell.

Its Russian-ness sharpens Tallinn’s edge. Estonia is one-third Russian — a leftover from when the Soviet Union planted Russians here in an attempt to do to Estonia what China is doing to Tibet. While China is succeeding, Russia did not dilute Estonia into oblivion. Today Estonia is strong — but with a tough Russian minority that resists assimilation. Strolling through the Russian market, you feel tension. They are clearly the poor minority. And young Russian men can often make me uncomfortable. Their lives are tough. As I was passing a group of young Russians with heads nearly shaved bald, one of their phones rang. His ringtone was the sound of gunshots.

On my visit last year, I was charmed by the Estonian tradition of burying loved ones in forests. Wandering in a dense pine forest with well-cared-for tombs scattered all around, I thought this would be great for our TV show, and included it in our script.

This year, I returned with a script that read, “You feel the connection to their land and heritage at the forested Estonian cemeteries. Estonia is a thickly forested country and, for many, they see trees as almost spiritual.” Then I planned for my guide to say, as he’d told me last year, “This is our forest cemetery. Since ancient pagan times, we Estonians have buried our loved ones with the trees. We are people of the trees. This is one way we are still connected with our pagan past…still uniquely Estonian.” But it felt a little forced. While he could say it to one tourist, looking into a TV camera, he hedged and squirmed. I decided to leave it out of the show.

Still, we ended up with a great new show called “Tallinn and Helsinki: Baltic Sisters.” As I figured last year, each one is not substantial enough to make a blockbuster script individually, but a show split between these two fascinating cities is very full and strong.

Finishing our work in Estonia, we wrapped the last show of our new series. It’ll air this October.