Monday, August 22, 2016

Russian women don't smile, except the glamorous ones


August 14-15, 2016 – St. Petersburg

Went on two day tour with SPB Tours, great young mother guide.  You just know there are a lot of Russians you could really like, and she was one of them.  Very well educated, good English and good sense of humor (i.e. We were telling her how non-smiling the women immigration agents were, and she said there are two types of Russian women, glamorous and Soviet.  Our overwhelming opinion is that Russian towns/cities are dull and drab.  Every once in a while you have one of these gilded Cathedrals or Tzar palaces, but the rest are old and drab architecture or new and drab architecture.  Their architects must be those that flunk engineering school.  Hard to imagine the living standards of the Tzar’s and Duke’s, which led to the Russian Revolution.  Katherine I had 15,000 dresses and changed them 7 to 8 times a day.  Learned a lot about the Romanov’s, Rasputin, and Pushkin.  Also about the struggles young families have today, medical care problems, and that young people are so involved in trying to make ends meet that they have little interest in politics.  At Hermitage we saw original DaVinci, Raphael, and Rembrandt paintings and sculpture.  Rode on a hydrofoil to St. Petershof and had a good bowl of borscht.

 Russians have fancy ships called hydrofoils...
 
 but ugly houses.

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