Oh, all the places a roll of 36 will take you.

St. Petersburg






Portland






Ontario





On the one hand it makes me feel like I wasn't shooting enough, but on the other hand there's something cool about three distant places joined together on one strip of plastic and chemicals.

Moscow and St. Petersburg are rivals. Stereotypically, a Petersburger doesn't like Moscow and a Muscovite doesn't like St. Petersburg. Petersburgers say Moscow is uncultured and the people are dumb and too focused on business. "Everyone's eyes are just blank. You can see it on their faces in the Metro," someone told me. Muscovites say St. Petersburg is boring, small. "Yeah so there's the city center, but... what else is there? Nothing, that's it. If you want to have any fun you have to go to the center. Everyone goes to the center for fun and that's it."

I got a very, VERY small glimpse of Moscow, but it seemed warmer to me. Less stern and suffocating. One of my profs told me it was the architecture in St. Petersburg. "Very serious," she said. "Very serious and very sad. It's a difficult city to live in." Moscow's city center seemed more open and organically grown. But again, I've been there for something like six days and that's it.






Moscow is full of all sorts of weird, Stalinesque, Soviet architecture. Buildings that symbolized ideals more blatantly than anywhere else I've been. This was some strange park, with buildings dedicated to different peoples of the Soviet Union. As far as I can tell from the ones we went in, now they are bottom-tier shopping centers, crowded with cheesy attractions and booths of sellers hawking souvenirs and other shit.

Socialism fell fucking hard, and there are reminders everywhere of the 180 degree turnaround.


















Moscow has a much more visible Soviet presence than St. Petersburg that's mostly evident in the architecture. But I guess I didn't spend a whole lot of time photographing buildings.




Soviet statues often made a point to show men and women in equal numbers, as equal workers and contributors. Yet feminism is not alive and well in Russia. I don't think I ever fully wrapped my head around the thinking there. By the way, this huge statue is the symbol of Mosfilm, the main film studio of the USSR.

The Soviet era's impact on modern Russian life is complicated and strange. Sometimes I think about it and it seems like it was just a thick paint lopped over the country. Soviet ideals from above, but down below, everyone kind of functioned as usual.










This trip warmed my little heart more to Moscow (considering I think I pretty much hated it after my previous trip). I walked around a lot more than last time and felt like I saw more stuff this time around. Though I did get absolutely fucking lost in this one park and wandered around alone for several hours in the middle of the night, finally finding a metro at around 12:30, by which point I was close to panic. I ran into my gay friend near the hotel. He'd been out on the hunt for gay bars (they do exist in Moscow and Petersburg), and I felt better knowing we'd both made it back from what could've potentially been disasterous situations.

St. Basil's gets its own post.



From what I've seen of Russian Orthodox churches, St. Basil's is weird, structurally. Most cathedrals are one open space, but St. Basil's was a lot of different rooms on different levels, connected by confusing, circular corridors and sets of stone stairs.















If people take too long to get out of my frame I just photograph them. I have the gift of impatience.

Let's take advantage of the snowy Sunday to look at my second visit to Moscow in, I think, April of last year.



The overnight train ride to Moscow involved Mini Russian Monopoly!









One of the buildings lining the Red Square is a huge mall full of high-end clothing stores. Wikipedia-ing it to find out what it was before I discovered it's always been a store. Well, apparently minus the years Stalin had it under his control.




















The cathedral in the distance is the Pussy Riot church.




See the man in the middle, trying to hand the leaflet to the couple? They are all over the fucking place in St. Petersburg and I hate them. See the bright red sign to the right of him? That's one of what I feel like is very few Wendy's in Russia.




People's blanket statements about cities have been proving true a lot of the time. Tallinn was quieter and calmer than St. Petersburg, and Moscow was the opposite: fast paced, both hustley and bustley. Before taking this photo I glanced down for a SECOND, and when I looked back up a man who was about to run into me was kind of motioning me aside so he could rush around me.



I got the impression that Moscow's got some really sweet bars though.

This post is from about a year ago, in Russia, but now seems like a fitting time to post it considering it's snowing here in Portland. And I'd like to add that I love the odd, almost apocalyptic effect when that several inches of snow has just shut the city right down.



Living in Oregon, I did start to miss snow. There's this certain lovliness to it when its falling. It's calming to watch big fat flakes drift to the earth in the light of a streetlamp, and everything is so wonderfully quiet once its blanketed the streets.

And when its all done falling, you walk around and notice that its glittering like there're motherfuckin' diamonds all over the ground. Motherfuckin' diamonds.

Let's continue the way-back trip with a post from St. Petersburg:

I am a total shit at getting around to doing things I've meant to do (which is why this is seeing the light of the internet* over a year after it happened). Especially when it comes to going places. Though I guess I made it to Russia alright.

Point is, I'd been meaning to drag my ass over to the top of this cathedral for for-effing-ever, and I finally did it on this day.





This day was actually the tail end of this day with the Russian photographers. After getting up at 6 and freezing and wading through thigh-deep snow and riding a mini-bus and climbing and descending the one-or-two hundred stairs of the cathedral, I was thoroughly pooped. I think at about 5pm I was like, "Okay guys, I'm calling it quits. Later." And then I went home and fell asleep immediately.















Restoration is eternal in St. Petersburg.

*the surface web, at least.