Strongly Pre-Gentrification Air

Another tour.  My older one bailed on this one.  Katrina, our guide, took my wife, may daughter and I through the Hermitage Museum.  It was lovely to be able to speak to a local person with excellent English about their city, as we took a get-taxi over from our place, where she met us on Sherplnaeva over to the mint colored palace. 

I had an epiphany listening to her talk about how much the city had changed.  How twenty years ago kids only wanted to be gangsters or cops and how rough and crude things had become and how even though she wasn’t a big Putin fan herself she could tell why people liked him and why he’d get reelected, because he’d delivered on order.  That was something I’d known but now I knew.  It was all very much like China, of course. 

“Now I travel, I think we are more and more like a “normal” country.  I don’t see so much difference between what we have and what you’d find elsewhere.  Here you if a cop pulled you over twenty years ago, you’d bribe him.  Now, that won’t work.  This city has changed." 

Flying passed the faded facades I now had a second epiphany that I’d seen all this before.  This was Dublin in the 80s or the Lower East Side in the 80s or Mission St. in the 80s, or Houhai in in the 90s, this was like any number of remarkable cities that have become gentrified, beyond recognition.  What had been dodgy and interesting has become safe and boring.  St Petersburg had a strongly pre-gentrification air about it.  I explained this to a few friends when I spoke to them and it was an easy idea to convey. 

The Hermitage was vast and bright and for the youngest of our team, all a bit much.  I think I most particularly liked the two huge paintings depicting the classic battles from "War and Peace" during "The Great Patriotic War:"  The one with the horses plunge into the river at the Battle of Austerlitz (I believe) and the other being the Battle of Borodino. The only person who I could share this with though, beside Katrina our guide would have been my older daughter.  But she passed on Catherine the Great and General Kurtozov and was back home with Youtube. 

Thursday 7/05/18