This week: Россия (RUSSIA!)

Hello friends!

This week, we're exploring the food of one of the most exotic places I've ever traveled: RUSSIA! About seven years ago (yikes, already?!), my mom, dad, and I took a tour of the Baltic states and surrounding areas: Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Russia, Estonia, Poland, and Germany. It was an unbelievable experience, and I'll never forget it.

Our time in Russia was incredibly interesting, albeit quite intimidating. Let me explain. I went to Russia when I was 16. With a 13 year-old Betsey's passport. If you don't think that things can change  drastically from age 13 to age 16, just ask the Russian customs agents. It took me about 20 minutes to pass into Russia (when everyone else just got a quick once-over and was let through), and by the time the ordeal was over, I had three severe-looking Russian female customs agents crowded around my passport, scrutinizing the photo, then looking back at me, then back to the photo. I was quite sure they wouldn't let me in.

But they did! I guess they figured anyone presenting a passport of a buck-toothed, acne-faced teenager with bottle cap glasses couldn't be too much of a threat. And no, I'm not going to post the photo.

Russia is such an enigma to me; everything seems more or less familiar, but with a very unique and mysterious twist. I remember visiting the Church of Our Savior on the Spilled Blood (yes, the place with the onion towers). Stepping into this Eastern Orthodox cathedral was like stepping back in time. Again, like my trip to the Vatican, I don't have any internal photos of the church because I wanted to be respectful of the holiness of the place. Even if I had whipped out my camera, I don't think I would have had the ability to process actually taking a picture. The church had a very thick atmosphere, like the weight of history hung in the shadowed coffers. Icons of saints and Biblical stories decorated the walls, and every so often the light would catch one and you'd get the whisper of gold underneath a century of dust.

If you're not familiar, the church was built on the site where Tsar Alexander II was assassinated in 1855. The patch of cobblestone road on which he died is still there, squared off by ropes. They built the church around it to commemorate the tsar, and it was completed in 1907. Super cool, huh?

The Church of Our Savior on the Spilled Blood

I vividly remember our trip to the Winter Palace and Summer Palace, formerly belonging to the Romanov family (for those of us little girls who grew up loving the movie Anastasia, this part of the trip was AMAZING). Although the Romanov story ended very tragically, I cannot deny that, while strolling along the manicured gardens of the Peterhof Palace and through the hardwood, gold-crested rooms of the royal homes, I felt a twinge of anger that this sort of wealth flourished in a time when Russia was in the throws of crushing poverty.

Gardens of the Peterhof Palace

View from the Throne Room overlooking the Canal of Finland. The Canal, it's said, was built that way so that the Tsar of Russia could always have an eye on his greatest enemy: Finland.

View of the back of the Peterhof Palace from the Canal of Finland.

Shameless photo of a teenage Betsey in back of the Peterhof Palace.

I hope you'll all get the chance to visit Russia someday. It's a bit intimidating sometimes, since the language isn't necessarily the most gentle-sounding and its buildings still show the decay of decades of communist rule. But it is a land of inspiring beauty and rich history, and I will never forget the time I spent there.

Until next time!