I don’t know a better expression to describe Russia than “messed up.” This country is just messed up.

Before we left the ship the tour coordinator asked that we think of ourselves not as tourists, but as travelers. “Be prepared for anything,” she said.

Case in point: in all the other countries, we merely stepped off the boat. No passport control, no delay. In Russia, you need not only your passport, but a photocopy of your passport. You also need a visa, which is supplied by the tour operators. So there’s no on-your-own sightseeing here for us, who had no visas of our own; you have to go with a tour.

That’s just as well. Traveler or not, I wouldn’t want to be on my own here.

Passport control was very casual, to our surprise: two young Russian girls giggling as they routinely stamped every passport that slid across the desk.

St Petersburg is a big and sprawling city. By royal decree, no building can be taller than the tsar’s palace, and the palace height is limited by the marshy soil, so the city buildings are not very tall. Basically there are three types of buildings: palaces for the tsars; giant churches; and Soviet-style concrete tenements. There’s not much else to see. Fortunately one of the palaces was turned into a museum, the Hermitage.

We visited two summer palaces in the countryside outside St. Petersburg: the summer palace of Peter the Great (earlier, smaller palace of the two, fabulous fountains in the gardens); and the summer palace of Catherine the Great (much bigger and grander palace). Both were ruined by the Nazis in WWII, and are being reconstructed at a huge cost. It’s disconcerting, going through these palaces, thinking about the great wealth and power of a few people at the time these were originally built, and the terrible living conditions of the rest of the population. And to think that the government made the decision to spend millions reconstructing these palaces after the war.

The tours involved a fair amount of driving around, which gave one a sense of the city. Every place we went, zillions of other people went, too. The guides talked a little about the difficulties of daily life. For example, you buy a driver’s license (no test), and many people don’t pay attention to the rules of the road, cause accidents, and then bribe the judges to get off.

We spent a couple of hours at the Hermitage, supposedly one of the world’s great art museums. The building itself is fantastic. Tim, it’s still true that you can’t really see anything because of the crowds. It was an effort to try to stay with out tour group and maybe catch a glimpse of the paintings, etc.

An incident at the Hermitage illustrates my point about the country’s being messed up. A man in our group—granted, he was stupid, carrying his wallet in his back pocket—got his wallet and passport stolen. The guide’s response was nothing more than “I told you so.” When the man suggested that they report the theft in case someone found his passport and turned it in, the guide replied, “This is Russia. There is nothing that can be done. There are pickpockets everywhere. These women guarding the paintings, I don’t know what they do. They know the pickpockets. They see them every day. There is no security guard. There is no one to report the theft to. No one cares. If the thief were found, he would pay a small bribe and be back the next day. In this country, if someone wants something from you, they just take it. It doesn’t matter if it a a thief, or the government, or a rich businessman. You have lost your passport in Russia. I don’t know what you are going to do. I cannot help you. Nobody will help you.”

Perhaps the poor fellow is still there.

Traffic is St Petersburg is a mess. Drivers have no reason to obey traffic laws. Police make the situation worse. They will arbitrarily stop and block a lane of traffic until someone comes up and pays a bribe to get them to move. We spent hours sitting in traffic. Sights that our tour had scheduled as stops became mere drive-bys. I suppose we were lucky to see what we did. On the return from the town of Pushkin, we had to turn left from a small road on to a busy highway. I could not see whether there was a stop light or not, but it didn’t matter; we, and everybody else in a long queue of vehicles, simply had to wait for an opportunity to dash onto the highway. The drivers on the highway certainly were not going to let us in.

I have to say that I despised St Petersburg. It contains only buildings denoting extreme indifference to the populace—tenement hives where four or five families share a single kitchen and bathroom—or extreme opulence for the tsar. The guide did say that some people are now able to buy their own place, and get out of the tenements. The huge ornate church was for the use of the royal family only. Even the Hermitage treasures were collected for the tsar’s private pleasure. The mass of people lived in squalor while the tsars extracted every penny of wealth from the nation and squandered it on their own luxuries.

One point of interest: summer evenings are called the white nights. When we left the ballet at 11:30 at night, the skies were still daylight and the streets were busy with pedestrian traffic. This was on Monday night. I don’t know if ever gets completely dark; after a day in Russia, I was too exhausted to stay up and see for myself.