Gdańsk is known mostly for its amber and torture chambers. It’s also known for being a cosmic billiard ball in the great international game of pool, with various nation-states and empires and suchlike seeking control of it for various reasons. It’s changed hands more often than a counterfeit dollar bill in a brothel in Saudi Arabia, and has even at various times been a “free and independent city-state under the control of Poland,” whatever the hell that means. It sounds to me like the political equivalent of house arrest, but my grasp of Polish history is, sadly, insufficient to reach the finer points of you’re-independent-but-not-reallydom.

Just beyond the torture chamber and amber museum lies the Gdańsk Old Town, which is prettier but a lot less interesting than Tallinn’s Old Town district.

The Old Town streets are wide, spacious, and straight, which immediately makes anyone who’s ever been to any ancient city suspicious, and rightly so. If there are three things that any legitimately old city’s streets are not, they are wide, spacious, and straight.

The suspicions were confirmed when we ventured down that suspiciously wide, spacious, and straight street.

For an ancient Medieval city that traces its roots back to around 900 AD or so, those buildings look awfully clean and bright. I went around behind them–on a route that took me down along the canal district–and sure enough, from the rear those lovely buildings are unpainted, new, and mostly vacant. The whole thing is about like Disney’s Main Street USA, only with fewer rodents of the dancing variety and more of the Black-Death-carrying variety.

In my trek down the canal district, I found this place advertising “In Our Shop Happy Day Half Price.”

To paraphrase Samuel L. Jackson in his seminal opus “Pulp Fiction,” and with a tip o’ the hat to zaiah: “Engrish, motherfucker! Do you speak it?”

There’s really only one part of the Gdańsk old town that seems genuinely old, the rest having been blown to Hell and gone in the War of 1308, the Thirteen Years’ War, the War of 1569, the Prussian War, World War I, World War II, and the Soviet occupation, and that’s the town hall.

Which, as town halls go, is pretty cool.

I don’t quite understand the over/under door, but it’d be a cool theme for a BDSM play space. Doms in the top door, subs in the bottom door, perhaps?

When I rule the earth with my iron fist, my secret lair will have a double-decker arrangement like this. Each door will be guarded by a sentry. One door will lead to the main control center of my lair, and the other to Certain Doom. One sentry will always lie, and the other will always tell the–

Oh, who am I kidding? Both doors will lead to Certain Doom. The actual entrance will be via a long secret tunnel, which comes up in the back storeroom closet of a nondescript Motel 6 a few miles down the road.

Like most town halls, the town hall in Gdańsk features a clock. Or, really, an exuberance of clocks. That’s not the cool part, though. The cool part is that the Gdańsk town hall, unlike lesser town halls in certain OTHER ancient Eastern European cities, is proof against the vagaries of the Clock Keepers and Tinkerers Union, well-known throughout history for holding many a town clock-tower hostage until their unreasoned demands are met. We modern folks with our wearable chronographs and digital time-keeping instruments that sometimes double as miraculous distance-speaking box and scrying oracle sometimes forget how it used to be, but in ancient times, he who controlled the clock in the tower controlled the universe. Without accurate timekeeping, early peasants had no way to know when it was Planting Time, Hymn-Singing Time, Witch-Stoning Time, Running From the Tax Collector Time, or Bending Over to Get Reamed By The Nobles Again Time.

That’s why the architects of Gdansk saw fit to include…

…a motherfucking sundial. On the side of the building. How freaking cool is that?

My secret lair will definitely include a sundial. With lasers or something.

(Footnote: In the interests of full disclosure, I was totally joking about Medieval serfs not knowing what time it was without a clock, by the way. Every time was Bending Over to Get Reamed By The Nobles Again time.)

Gdańsk, Poland, is one part working city and one part tourist city. As a tourist city, though, it lacks any obvious draw that other tourist cities have. Orlando, Florida has awesome weather and Disney World. Cozumel, Mexico, has awesome weather and Mayan ruins. Paris has the Eiffel Tower. Niagara Falls, Ontario has…well, you know.

Gdańsk has industrial decay, a frightening history, and fossilized tree resin.

If the key to success is in making the best of what you’ve got, Gdańsk is brilliantly successful. They have, in fact, built their entire tourist trade, as near as I can tell, out of their frightening history and fossilized tree resin.

Shortly beyond the bronze statue of the dude trampling a cannon while holding a long, hard staff with a knob at the end, we located some street signs in English, always a good sign when you’re looking for a tourist attraction. The signs advertised the Torture Chamber and Amber Museum.

Now, I have often seen a torture chamber without an amber museum, and I have even once or twice seen an amber museum without a torture chamber, so I can be forgiven, I think, for not realizing that these two things naturally belong together.

The Poles are, unquestionably, historical leaders in the fields of both torture and amber, so if they say that a torture chamber and an amber museum belong together, I’m inclined to believe them. In fact, when the dungeon here at home is finally finished, I think it may be necessary to include a display of amber of some kind, or perhaps to put someone named Amber on display in it.

I find it interesting that in Polish, “torture chamber” appears to be one word. Score one for linguistic efficiency!

On any vacation, you really can’t get enough torture chambers for my entertainment dollar, so the offer of a torture chamber and an amber museum was too good to pass up. We headed off in the indicated direction, and soon found the promised torture chamber.

The archway, through which Im sure many a soul was dragged kicking and screaming, marks the entrance to both the torture chamber and to the Old Town district of Gdańsk. I’m not entirely convinced their spacial proximity is completely by accident.

We tried to hit up the torture chamber first, but it was closed until later in the afternoon. The courtyard seemed designed for maximum oppressive effect:

I like a thoughtful, carefully-designed torture chamber, myself. One that shows the designers were really focused on detail. It shows a level of commitment to the craft that’s becoming more and more rare in our modern era. Today, the CIA might torture a suspected insurgent in an abandoned warehouse in Cairo, but back in the day, the people of Gdańsk paid a great deal of attention to the artistry of interrogation.

Little touches, like these iron shackles attached to a bar in the courtyard, count for a lot in a torture chamber.

I especially like that the shackles can slide along the iron bar, giving the person chained here the illusion that freedom might be at hand. I might just lift this idea for my own dungeon, once the remodeling is complete.

And what torture chamber can really be said to be complete without an oubliette?

Some folks might say that using both an iron grate over the shaft leading down into the oubliette AND a heavy oak door that can be barred shut is overkill, but I think it shows commitment. This detail-focused, spare-no-expense approach to torture chamber architecture is something we could all learn from.

While we waited for the torture chamber to open, a couple of guys tried, in broken English, to rent us a golf cart. I’m not quite sure what the idea behind that was, nor why they felt that a golf cart was what we needed to make our day complete, though I’m sure that successfully renting it to us might’ve helped to make their day complete. Perhaps that’s all there was to it.

When the torture chamber did finally open to the general public–which is a statistically improbable phrase if ever there was one–we climbed a narrow, steep flight of steps up the tower into the amber museum. The narrow, steep flight of steps turned out to be something of a theme in Gdańsk, about more of which I will write later.

Gdańsk is, or so it’s claimed, one of the world’s leading producers and exporters of Baltic amber. And they make the most amazing things from it.

By “amazing,” I actually mean “creepy.”

The guy in the lamp on the left looks like he came from a Roger Zelazny book by way of a World of Warcraft boss in Icecrown Citadel.

I’m not actually sure the thing on the right is really a sculpture. It looks more like a homage to our new insectile space alien overlords, with the digital counter in the background counting down the days until they arrive to sweep the world clean of the unworthy and elevate the worthy to new heights of wickedness, or perhaps plant their eggs within the bodies of the unwary, or something. I won’t claim to be an expert on the subject of alien invasion, but my study of Hollywood movies has led me to believe that those are generally what one can expect after the arrival of insectile alien overlords.

The insectile theme is a popular one with the amber artisans of Gdańsk. According to various display signs posted throughout the torture chamber, the early Polish apothecaries believed amber to be infused with all sorts of magical properties, which careful research and the application of various potions to the raw essence of amber could bring out.

I actually suspect, looking at this thing, that it’s no accident amber and torture are so intimately entwined in the annals of Polish lore. It is my belief that the prisoners brought to this place were made, under the exhortation of scourge and chain, to craft small sculptures like this very one. Then, by the application of the alchemical processes, these sculptures would be brought to a kind of hideous life, whereupon they would be applied to the bare flesh of the condemned, to feast upon it in a ritual of agony until the prisoner broke and revealed all he knew. It was thought that by crafting the instrument of his own affliction, the prisoner could more readily be brought to reason, where “reason” was loosely defined as “saying whatever we want him to say.”

These apothecaries of amber are now all long gone, and the unholy secrets they coaxed from the brittle tree resin have gone with them.

Some believe, though, that they have not departed forever, but have merely perfected their dark arts to such an extent that they were able to preserve themselves perfectly within sarcophagi of mystically-charged amber, and so sleep a dreamless slumber, awaiting the day when they may return to welcome the arrival of our new insectile overlords, brought to us not from the stars but from the cunning craft of amber and metals, our destinies wrought with our own hands.

Back in the days when I used to work in pre-press professionally, there was one job I used to do every year that’d consume a month or two of my life, which was the cruise catalog for Royal Caribbean. The catalog was gorgeously produced–printed in CMYK plus two spot colors plus two metallic colors, with hundreds of pictures (all massively retouched).

The text for the catalog was printed separately from the rest of the catalog, so that they could print up a bunch of them and then decide how many to produce in each of the dozen or so languages they’re available in. US English, UK English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic…

The Arabic versions were the trickiest.

For the Arabic version, Royal Caribbean would run the book through the press again and print black squares over anything that the Middle Easterners would find upsetting. It was my job to go through every photo in the catalog and put little black squares over every building or object that represented any non-Muslim religion–church steeples, crosses, you name it. I also was required to draw a black outline over any woman shown in any photograph and fill her in as a solid black silhouette, and to black out any part of any picture that showed an alcoholic beverage or any form of gambling.

Now, there are a LOT of churches in the world, especially in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean.

After Tallinn, our next port of call was Poland, which seems, in the overall scope of history, to be a largely fictional country. We dropped anchor in the town of Gdynia, adjacent to Gdańsk in Gdańsk Bay and apparently the only port that could accommodate a hotel of our size.

This is the skyline of Gdynia, as seen from the port.

And here is the skyline as it would appear in the Arabic version of the Royal Caribbean cruise catalog.

There’s a lot of non-Muslim stuff in the world, and it seems there are folks for whom that’s most definitely not OK. I have great confidence, though, that right here in the US, Christian groups are working hard to become just as easily offended and sensitive as Saudi Arabia, and so to close the Sensitivity Gap that exists between our nations.

Gdynia is both a working town and a military port. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Poland has a military?” I thought the same thing myself. Like, when did that happen? Does the rest of the world know? Is it made of Legos?

As we were making harbor at Gdynia, I saw at least a dozen military ships, including destroyers (who uses those any more?), transports, and even a missile launcher.

Now, just one first-world aircraft carrier and its battle group could probably wipe out Poland’s navy in about…oh, fifteen minutes or so, but hey, if 1942 ever invades them, by golly, they’ll be ready!

The port of Gdynia offers the casual tourist much more of what we all have come to expect of Eastern Europe than most of the rest of Eastern Europe does: big machinery clawing its way over twisted scrap metal, surrounded by the ruins of civilization. There’s actually a scrapyard right there in the port!

And I love these cranes. Big industrial equipment is beautiful. I can just picture these things rising from their moorings and rampaging across the countryside, destroying all fleshy life in their path with their swinging steel balls. I know which side I’ll be on when the Rise fo the machines comes to pass…

We actually wanted to visit the town of Gdańsk, which is about 40 minutes by taxi or train from Gdynia. A line of taxis waited at the port, but none of the cab drivers actually spoke English, which led to an amusing misunderstanding that could easily have been taken straight from an episode of Friends:

Father: We want to go to the train station to take a train to Gdańsk.
Cabbie: Train? Gdańsk?
Father: Yes. We want to take the train to Gdańsk.
Cabbie: Oh! You want to go to Gdańsk! Okay.
Father: Yes. We want to take a train to Gdańsk.
Cabbie: Okay. Gdańsk.
Father: Train.
Sister: Train.
Cabbie: Gdańsk?
Father: Yes.
Sister: No.
Cabbie: Gdańsk?
Father: Yes.
Sister: No.
Cabbie: Gdańsk?
Father: Yes. We want to take a train to Gdańsk.
Sister: Train. Gdańsk.
Cabbie: Oh! You want to go to Gdańsk! Okay.
Sister: Take us to the train station.
Cabbie: Train station! Gdańsk! Okay.

The astute reader can probably figure out what happened next. It came as a bit of a surprise to the rest of my family, though.

He did exactly as he’d been told, or at least exactly as he thought he’d been told, which was to take us to the train station in Gdańsk. The trip itself, through the suburbs of Gdynia and the surrounding countryside was (I though) a lot of fun and (my father thought) was absolutely terrifying. Polish cabbies have, it seems, only an abstract and theoretical grasp of the traffic laws, and indeed of universal laws of physics, which worked out to our advantage, as he was able to hurtle through time and space at least twelve times faster than any reasonable person might have thought prudent, or even possible, for that matter.

Later, my father would say that he’d never been so terrified in all his life. Now, me, I’ve had scarier experiences in bed, and I’ll be talking about those later, when I get to the France portion of this travelogue…but I digress.

The train station in Gdańsk is quite lovely.

There were, however, no people anywhere about who spoke English. It was quite uncanny; you’d almost think we were in a foreign country or something. This caused no small amount of consternation when it came to mapping a route to explore the city, though we were eventually able to muddle it through by resorting to the “find something that looks interesting and head in that direction” technique.

Gdańsk was blanketed in movie posters for The Last Airbender:

I wonder if the movie sucks any less in Polish.

I have often heard that travel to foreign lands is a great way to learn about the various traditions and customs that differ from those in one’s homeland. Travel, they say, broadens the mind.

Take commerce, for example. Now, if you’re going to engage in commerce, there are certain tools that you need for the job. Cash registers are useful, for instance. If you want to zap documents around instantly, as if by magic, a fax machine is good to have.

But within these common necessities lie significant cultural differences. Whereas an American office might have a neon “Open” sign or a portable PIN reader for debit cards, businesses in Poland, apparently, might find it useful to have a weasel or a badger on the counter. And fear not! You can, it would seem, get these things at any office supply store in Gdańsk.

I hear you can get the badgers with BlueTooth.

On our way toward the Old Town district of Gdańsk, about which I shall write more later, we passed this statue:

It shows a man astride a horse, which represents Truth and Reason, trampling a cannon, which represents Darkness and Ignorance, while in his hand he holds a scepter with a knob on the end of it, which represents…

No. I can’t. I just can’t. I mean, c’mon. It has a knob on the end of it!

One of the more interesting things about Gdańsk is its British influences, most likely the result of its close cultural ties with the United Kingdom. Why, you can even see it in the graffiti!

Not very many people know the central role that Poland played in the Gunpowder Plot. When Guy Fawkes decided that blowing hundreds of people sky-high with a gigantic bomb in remembrance of God’s Divine Mercy was a legitimate form of religious expression–an idea he wasn’t the first to conceive, and which remains in considerable vogue among people of all stripes today–he first traveled to Poland, where he attempted to buy enriched uranium from a shadowy Iranian figure whose name is not recorded in the annals of history.

When this attempt failed, thanks to the meddling of a bunch of teenagers and a dog in a van, he was forced as a last resort to use gunpowder, which he ordered in bulk from several mail-order houses under an assumed name. This proved his undoing, as we all well know, as the invoices were provided to His Majesty King James the Psychotic Bastard by the houses in question.

Nevertheless, to this very day, Poland’s support of Guy Fawkes’ noble services to the Catholic church is still remembered, which is why when the time came to choose a new Pope in 1978, the Catholic College of Cardinals finally saw fit to recognize Poland’s service, failed though it was, by elevating one of her citizens to Pontiff.

Or, er, something like that.

And speaking of the Catholic Church in Rome, we walked by a cathedral with this rather magnificent door in downtown Gdańsk.

Most people know that the Catholic Church is actually comprised of several different, but affiliated, branches of religious orthodoxy. The two best-known of these are the Latin Rite, which makes up most of the churches in the West, and the affiliated Eastern Catholic Churches, which make up many of the remainder in, naturally, the East.

This particular church belongs to the Congregation of the Han, whose sacred traditions extend back to 1977. Catholic churches belonging to this particular twig of knowledge on the Tree of Truth hold as sacred the Passion of Han Solo, which they believe parallels the passion of the Christ, especially as he was frozen in carbonite by the forces of evil and then, later, was resurrected to lead the people to grace. Churches in this tradition often construct the cathedral doors from solid carbonite, into which they place the bishop of the local synod and several assorted village children, in the hopes that one day they, too, will follow in the footsteps of Saint Solo.

A significant rift has occurred within the various churches of this tradition, following a new revelation in which, some say, Han Solo would never be the one to fire the first shot in any disagreement. This idea is branded as heresy by others among the pious, and it represents a thorny theological issue in which your humble scribe is reluctant to venture an opinion, lest I too be blown sky-high by a gigantic gunpowder bomb.

On the way back from Old Town to the cruise ship, I got distracted, as I often do. Just before the Port And Livestock Ranch of Tallinn, about a block away from the ultramodern naked lady sculptures gracing the Tallink Spa and Conference Hotel, I found a wide, decaying flight of stairs climbing up to what looked like a cross between a stadium and a fallout shelter, combined with the post-apocalyptic future nightmare in that one scene from the future in Terminator 2, all in that peculiar type of concrete that seems to start crumbling about fifteen minutes after it’s poured. (As P. J. O’Rourke famously observed, “Commies love concrete, but they don’t know how to make it.”)

Urban decay is my Kryptonite. Well, that and redheaded lesbians. And bacon. And kittens. And goth girls. But urban decay is up there, definitely, and even though my feet were sore and the ship was due to leave soon, I could no more resist checking it out than I can eat just one potato chip. Mmm, potato chips.

From street level, it looks a bit like this.

The thing that you can’t tell from this picture, though, is the scale of the size of the bigness of it. It just keeps going and going, on and on, in huge terraces and steps rising far above the landscape and jutting a startling distance into the water.

Commies really, really love concrete.

Above the flight of stairs you see here is a second long landing, this one adorned with rows of steel posts painted in peeling cyan paint, with white balls on top–a sort of Communist tribute to tall, erect poles with knobs on top, all thrusting skyward to commemorate the victory of the working man over the bourgeois elite, or something like that.

In the background, the spire of the Old Town cathedral rises behind the chimney of an abandoned factory or rock-crushing plant or something that’s slowly crumbling away outside the wall.

This is what I wanted to see in Eastern Europe. Acres of gray concrete surrounding the disintegrating ruins of industrial buildings. You can’t get enough of that for my entertainment dollar.

The Plateau of the Rods and Knobs, which I had mentally taken to calling on it, continues to another level of stairs and another plateau rising ziggurat-like into the air:

The whole structure is filled with these cutouts that plunge into unexpected rows of doors. Standing at the front edge of the Plateau of Rods and Knobs, atop the stars rising from the street, one finds this:

I went down and tried all the doors (they were locked) and looked inside (it was dark). By this point in my tour of Tallinn, I had exhausted my camera’s first battery and the second was nearly spent as well, so I didn’t want to try to use the flash to get a picture of the gloom beyond the doors, for fear that I would not be able to chronicle the rest of this magnificent, exuberant tribute to Soviet-era concrete.

Proceding along toward the other end of the Plateau of Rods and Knobs, and whistling the Terry Pratchett song “A Wizard’s Staff has a Knob on the End” to myself, I encountered another bank of these enigmatic doors.

Peering inside, through a second row of doors just within, I saw a faded round desk with the word “Information” above it in several languages. At least I believe it was the word “Information” in several languages; it may have said “Information” in English and “We welcome our stony, silicon-based space monster overlords” in Russian. At least if you can say all that in just one word in Russian. Which, for all I know, you can.

Beneath this row of doors, an unexpected stairwell plunges to a SECOND row of doors into the cavernous ziggurat.

The view from the weed-choked ground surrounding the Rods of the Soviet Worker with their Knobs of Triumph over the Bourgeoise is really striking.

Atop the next flight of steps runs a low concrete wall that has in the years since its erection been decorated with the most amazing graffiti. What’s most amazing about it to me is how graffiti everywhere in the world, even behind the rusted hulk of the former Iron Curtain, looks like it all belongs in New York City.

The structure continues out into the water, projecting toward the port like a great gray Stalinist finger of aquatic accusation at the imperious West.

Across from the wall with its Eastern European interpretation of thug-life gangsta art, the view gave a magnificent portrait of our cruise ship, the Star Princess, dwarfing a far lesser cruise ship from Germany.

When I got back home, I turned to Google Earth to try to get a sense of what this place was. There’s a great overhead shot of it, that shows the Spa and Convention Hotel just below and to the right, and the berthing for the cruise ships next to the flat grassland that kina sorta makes up the Port of Tallinn.

According to Wikipedia, the place is the Tallinn Linnahall, formerly the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Palace of Culture and Sport, which was built in 1980 to host the Olympic yacht races and renamed some years later after everyone realized what a douchenozzle Lenin was.

I found another Web site that claimed this place was used as a venue for concerts as recently as two years ago. Nowadays, it’d be the perfect place to film movies about the space monster zombie apocalypse.

Apparently, the CEO of Estèe Lauder has been trying for some years to get financing to renovate this place and turn it into, I don’t know, a secret fortified lair or a home for anorexic runway models or a Center For Kids Who Can’t Read Good And Wanna Learn To Do Other Stuff Good Too or some such thing. There was talk about getting the US government to underwrite a loan to do the renovation, on the grounds that the United States has a strategic interest in Soviet-era concrete ziggurats or something, but apparently the government said “Umm, no,” and that was that.

Which is too bad. If I were an evil villain or the CEO of Estèe Lauder, I would totally make this place my lair. It even has a helipad on the end!

Tallinn, as I said once before, is a city of contrast.

Now, I’m not dissing on all those other cities that come up when you do a Google search for “city of contrast.” I’m sure Scottsdale, Arizona, has lovely contrast. Why, I hear they have commercial buildings and residential buildings there!

But if you want some serious, mainline-quality, high-grade, industrial-strength contrast, Tallinn is the place to be.

As soon as we left the ship and made our way past the sheep, we found ourselves on one of Tallinn’s main streets. Following the road in one direction leads to the walled Old Town district, which its Medieval gateway and ancient town center. The other direction looks like this.

At the midway point on that road, right where the curious tourist comes out onto the main street from the port/sheep ranch/massage parlor, is the ultramodern Tallink Spa and Conference Hotel. It’s not “ultramodern” in that “nanotech and self-modifying metamaterials” sort of way, but in that stainless steel and brushed aluminum way that was popular, like, I dunno, ten years ago or something.

Why, yes, they are that magnificent, and thank you very much.

This is one thing I admire about Eastern Europe; they don’t have this weird and kind of freaky notion that the sight of a nipple will scar the brains of children for life, forever dooming them to a meager existence as a cackling, drooling pervert, trolling Chatroulette with an oversized trenchcoat with which to display undersized wares.

And ultramodern, stainless steel and brushed aluminum design brought with it, apparently, a knowledge of female anatomy entirely lacking in the day of Peter the Great, back when nobody had ever actually seen a human female up close.

The archway to the Old City is guarded by this place:

Unlike the Port of Tallinn Shack-o-Massage, this place actually did tempt me. I thought about it, really I did. In the end, two things stopped me: I am still not entirely sure that Eastern Europe is current with the hip new ideas regarding invisible things called “bacteria” and “viruses,” and I also wasn’t quite sure that Tallinn has the notion of money, as in things other than sheep or goats that you can exchange for goods and services.

The streets of Tallinn outside the wall look, and sound, pretty much like the streets anywhere else. Inside the wall, it’s a completely different world.

The first thing that really struck me in the Old Town part of Tallinn is how quiet it is. The thick stone walls are extraordinarily effective at blocking sound, so that the howling of the ice weasels and the clamoring of the barbarian hordes wouldn’t distract the ancient Guildmasters from the task of counting their money. (See? I kid, I do. I know Tallinn gets the concept of money. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if they invented it.)

Stepping between the Old Town and the modern part of the city is jarring. Even the air feels different; the walls block the wind, so the Old Town has a stillness to it that’s quite peaceful and lovely.

There are cars in the Old Town area, but they’re few and far between, and when one drives by you become acutely aware of how noisy and clanky they are, in a way that you don’t when you’re surrounded by them all the time.

What you do hear in the Old Town is the sound of people. People talking, people laughing, people calling out to other people. Cities like New York and Chicago have a lot of people, but the human noises are, day and night, almost entirely drowned out by the noise of traffic and machinery. In Tallinn, you are aware of the presence of human beings all around you. It’s a very interesting, and for me unusual, experience.

The Old Town district is home to an old cathedral that is to the exuberant, over-the-top excess of the Russian Orthodox houses of worship what Alanis Morisette is to Lady Gaga: they both do basically the same thing, but in such different ways you have to wonder if they came from the same planet.

The clock on the side of this church is made of wood. I think that’s pretty damn cool.

The inside is, when compared to the Church of Alexander II Was a Fucking Idiot, downright Spartan in its simplicity.

The door to the church is marked with this little round symbol. You see them all over parts of Eastern And Northern Europe; the symbol indicates a point of historical interest.

If it looks familiar to some of the folks reading this, it should. You know who you are.

It’s the same symbol Apple uses on the Command key for their keyboards. And that’s intentional; Apple actually copied the Command key symbol from this very marker. Which is also kind of cool. (According to Wikipedia, some Swedish Mac users refer to the Command key as the “Fornminne,” or Ancient Monument, key. Now, normally, I personally don’t trust Wikipedia to tell me the sky is blue, and this story sounds highly apocryphal to me, but it’s a fun tale anyway.)

But I digress.

The cathedral is just a stone’s throw from the town center, which I’m sure is no coincidence. Given the shackles adorning the pillars around the town hall, I have no doubt but that the folks who attended services here could, on a fair and sunny Sunday afternoon, get a bit of exercise and indulge in a little sport by flinging rocks and other small, dense objects at the faithless unbelievers shackled to the town center, in the interests of camaraderie and good spirit.

This is an ancient tradition almost entirely ruined by the invention of television; nowadays, folks would prefer to get their amusement by watching reruns of “Friends” on TV, and another custom falls by the wayside, neglected and ignored by the modern age.

(With props to Marnen on Twitter for the title)

Prior to this trip, everything I knew abut Estonia I learned from reading Dilbert cartoons about the fictional land of Elbonia, which is generally described as being waist-deep in mud and overrun with weasels.

Elbonia is loosely modeled on Estonia, so that’s generally what I expected when we arrived: mud, weasels, and Eastern Bloc squalor. And maybe some funny hats. The Elbonians in Dilbert always wear funny hats.

I got none of those things. No mud, no weasels, and definitely ixnay on the ats-hay. Instead, what I found was one of the most interesting, beautiful cities I’ve ever seen. Tallinn, the capital city of Estonia, was the hilight of the cruise for me, even though we spent only one afternoon there.

To be fair, the visit started inauspiciously. The Port of Tallinn isn’t so much a “port” as it is “a desolate wasteland with sheep wandering around in it.” Actual, literal sheep.

Clumped together in the middle of this wasteland is a sprawling, ramshackle collection of little tents and huts, packed to the gills with people hawking all sorts of wares–kind of like a scene from a William Gibson novel or perhaps a low-budget, indie remake of Bladerunner. At the edge of all the stalls selling leather goods and little wooden boxes and sunglasses and small, inexpensive keepsakes of Eastern Europe, I spotted this place:

I was tempted, I must admit, but I battled with the temptations of the flesh, and…

Well, actually, I lied. I wasn’t tempted at all. Not even for a moment.

I kept going right past this shack and its really not very tempting offer, past the bored-looking guard at the gate to the port who was the closest thing we discovered to any sort of passport control, and out into the city itself. A few blocks from the port, we encountered the ancient stone wall guarding its center.

Tallinn is a city of contrast.

I know everyone who writes about traveling says that about some city or other at some point. A Google search for “city of contrast” gives you about 153,000 results. New York is a city of contrast. Scottsdale is a city of contrast. Anchorage is a city of contrast. Sacramento is a city of contrast. You know what? Those guys don’t know shit about contrast.

The heart of Tallinn is an ancient Medieval walled city full of narrow, winding roads. A modern glass and steel city has sprung up outside the wall, wrapping the Old Town in a busy hub of international commerce and high-tech development.

The streets of Tallinn are picturesque, like Stockholm is picturesque, but with at least 80% less essence “I loooooove my kidnapper” going on.

Commerce has long been the living, breathing heart of Tallinn. In the early middle ages, the city grew wealthy and powerful by trading textiles throughout the Baltic. A strong guild system developed here; at one time, each street in the town belonged to a different guild, and you had to be a member of the guild to work or live on that street. Guilds are a great idea when you have an illiterate population who can’t read instruction manuals or user guides.

The history of Tallinn is rich and turbulent, if by “rich and turbulent” one means “fucked up and weird.” If someone other than Michael Bay were to make a movie about Tallinn’s history, it would go something like this:

The Guildmasters of Tallinn: Let us become wealthy and powerful trading furs and textiles to our neighbors.
(They become WEALTHY AND POWERFUL by trading FURS and TEXTILES to their NEIGHBORS)
Peter the Great: Ho there! Tallinn is wealthy and powerful. I shall conquer it!
The Guildmasters of Tallinn: Nuh-uh. You have a silly hat.
Peter the Great: Uh-huh! I have a huge naval armada!
(PETER THE GREAT conquers TALLINN with his HUGE NAVAL ARMADA)
The Guildmasters of Tallinn: Um… Okay, we’ve been conquered. Now what?
Peter the Great: I will buy furs and textiles from you.
The Guildmasters of Tallinn: Uh, right.
The Guildmasters of Tallinn: Listen, you know you could have done that without conquering us, right?
Peter the Great: …
Peter the Great: What?
The Guildmasters of Tallinn: Never mind. Look, we can work with this.
The Guildmasters of Tallinn: Let us become more wealthy and powerful trading furs and textiles to Peter the Great!
(They become MORE WEALTHY and MORE POWERFUL by trading FURS and TEXTILES to PETER THE GREAT)
Vladimir Lenin: I have deposed the Tsars and become Supreme Ruler of Russia!
The Guildmasters of Tallinn: Whatever. You want some furs and textiles?
Vladimir Lenin: I wish to destroy the bourgeois elite and the notion of private capital in favor of a centralized economy that will eliminate free enterprise and bankrupt all of Russia, and then set us down the path of a ruinous, decades-long conflict with the West that will result in to complete collapse of all of eastern Europe!
The Guildmasters of Tallinn: Wait, what?
The Guildmasters of Tallinn: You’re kidding, right? That’s your plan?
Vladimir Lenin: Ha ha ha! Yes, I am kidding.
The Guildmasters of Tallinn: Whew! Because we thought–
Vladimir Lenin: No, I’m serious. That’s what I’m going to do. I was kidding when I said “I am kidding.”
The Guildmasters of Tallinn: …
The Guildmasters of Tallinn: Listen, we’re going to secede from Russia now, okay?
Vladimir Lenin: Okay.
The Guildmasters of Tallinn: We cool?
Vladimir Lenin: We’re cool.
Joseph Stalin: Watch, as I invade Estonia and conquer Tallinn as part of my empire!
Adolf Hitler: You will not invade Estonia and conquer Tallinn as part of your empire. I will invade Estonia and conquer Tallinn as part of my empire!
The Guildmasters of Tallinn: …
The Guildmasters of Tallinn: Guys? Listen, about that–
(JOSEPH STALIN and ADOLF HITLER invade ESTONIA. They DROP BOMBS and BLOW STUFF UP and KILL LOTS OF PEOPLE)
The Guildmasters of Tallinn: OMG what is this I don’t even AAAAUGH!
Joseph Stalin: You are now part of my empire. Henceforth you will be known as Estonia SSR.
Joseph Stalin: I will destroy free enterprise and plunge you into poverty and set you on a ruinous, decades-long conflict with the West that will result in the complete collapse of Eastern Europe.
The Guildmasters of Tallinn: What, that again? That’s a TERRIBLE plan!
Joseph Stalin: Wait, I’m not finished!
Joseph Stalin: I will also begin a disastrous experimentation in agriculture, based on pseudoscience and ideological orthodoxy, that will result in the deaths of tens of millions of my own citizens!
The Guildmasters of Tallinn: …
Joseph Stalin: And then I will become paranoid and start murdering my most loyal supporters!
Joseph Stalin: Also, I will execute anyone who says that this is a terrible plan.
The Guildmasters of Tallinn: *headdesk*
(JOSEPH STALIN executes the GUILDMASTERS OF TALLINN and DESTROYS ESTONIA’S ECONOMY and sets out on a ruinous decades-long conflict with the West that BANKRUPTS all of EASTERN EUROPE)
The Former Guildmasters of Tallinn: Man, this sucks.
(The Soviet Union COLLAPSES)
The Former Guildmasters of Tallinn: You guys suck.
The Former Guildmasters of Tallinn: Hey, European Union, can we join you? Because these guys suck.
The European Union: Your proposition intrigues us. We will hear your proposal. What do you have to offer us?
The Former Guildmasters of Tallinn: Um…we have…
The Former Guildmasters of Tallinn: We have conferred amongst ourselves, and, err… We have mud.
The Former Guildmasters of Tallinn: And also small, inexpensively-made objects which can be sold to tourists.
The European Union: Your offer is insufficient. If you wish to join our club, you must have something uniquely yours to contribute. The Germans make motor cars and Hummels, which are small, incredibly expensive objects that can be sold to tourists. The Italians make outrageously overpriced suits from gray yarn. The French are known worldwide for their elaborate weapons systems that don’t work and also for their bad attitudes. The Swiss make cuckoo clocks and enormous particle accelerators which create black holes that will doom us all. The British have blood sausage and desperation.
The Former Guildmasters of Tallinn: We can design microchips and software for cell phones. Do you like cell phones?
The European Union: Let us confer amongst ourselves.
(They CONFER amongst THEMSELVES)
The European Union: We have conferred amongst ourselves, and we have decided that we like cell phones very much. We accept your proposal.
The Former Guildmasters of Tallinn: Really? Cool!
The Former Guildmasters of Tallinn: Let us become rich and powerful, but not as rich nor as powerful as we were, by designing microchips and software for cell phones, and also small, inexpensively-made objects which can be sold to tourists!
(They become SOMEWHAT LESS RICH and QUITE A LOT LESS POWERFUL making things for CELL PHONES and also small, inexpensively-made objects for TOURISTS)

The city of Tallinn is one of the oldest and best-preserved Medieval cities in the world, but it’s not a museum. It’s an actual, living city. The line between the old part of the city and the modern part of the city is jarring; in one area, you have skyscrapers, and in another, you have this.

On one of the narrow, winding streets snaking along the edge of the Medieval wall, we found a local dining establishment.

I think it’s part of a chain. We saw these places throughout Eastern Europe. I bet the food’s pretty good, since they’re so popular.

The center of Tallinn’s Medieval district is the old town hall, which has functioned as the hub of Tallinn’s civic life for…well, for longer than the country I live in has been a country, really. The town hall is gorgeous, and is right smack in the center of the town square. I never really knew what a “town square” was until this trip.

Here, many of the most essential functions of Medieval society took place. Rules of commerce were established, guild and social matters were adjudicated, heretics and unbelievers were strung up for torture, townspeople were married, and gossip was exchanged. Some of the relics of these bygone functions are still apparent on the stone pillars that line the hall.

I kinda want a pillar in my basement that looks like this. I promise I will only use it for good.

I found this sign in a small shop just off the town square. I think it lies.

I’ve had days without wine, and I’ve had days without sex, and I can state with authority that they are nothing alike. All I can think is that whoever wrote this sign, probably doesn’t have sex the way I do.

I love this old house.

It’s run-down and collapsing now, and for some reason that only makes it even more beautiful I have no idea what the story of this house is, but I bet it’s fascinating. Were I to have infinite resources (which I don’t), and were I to move to Tallinn (which I wouldn’t, though I do love the place), I would want to buy this house and fix it up. It is, to my eye, heartbreakingly beautiful.

Plus, it would be an awesome place to host BDSM play parties, yo.

When Peter the Great first founded St. Petersburg, which it must be stated again he most definitely did not name after himself, so perish the very thought, it was a swamp.

Everyone said he was daft to build a fortress on a swamp, but he built it all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So he built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So he built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up! And from it, he was able to kick some Swedish spleen and establish control over the Baltics.

Well, not quite, but pretty close. I think the first one actually stayed up all on its own.

The fortress was built on an island close in to modern-day St. Petersburg. You can see it from one of the squares downtown:

The spire you see here is the roof of the Peter and Paul Cathedral (again, not named after Peter the Great, just to be perfectly clear on that point–it is the merest coincidence that he consistently chose saints who happened by the slightest chance to share a name in common with him when he went around naming things), and yes, that’s real gold. By this point in the trip, I was thinking “My god! Do you know how many iPhones can be made with that much gold?” But then, I’m a pragmatist like that.

The particular square from which this photo was taken is a popular spot for weddings in St. Petersburg. There were no fewer than three wedding parties there at the same time we were:

Pros of having a wedding on this spot: It’s picturesque, it’s scenic, the gold spire in the background is so tacky that almost any bridesmaid’s dress looks good in comparison, and there’s at least a 20% chance you won’t be rained on, hailed on, sleeted on, snowed on, or otherwise precipitated upon. Cons: It’s in Russia. You don’t want to be outdoors when the ice weasels come.

This particular square is guarded by brightly colored and elaborately decorated lighthouses, to warn passing ships of the treacherous shoals, swarming with ice weasels, that awaited the incautious sailor.

Now, I am not an expert on the design or construction of lighthouses generally. Nor will I claim to any depth of knowledge on the subject of maritime navigation; hell, I can barely drive to the corner convenience store without satellite GPS. So I may be displaying some level of my own naivety when I wonder about the choice of adornment for these lighthouses.

I don’t quite understand what led the architect to decorate these with images of ships projecting entirely through the lighthouse, as I thought that was precisely the eventuality that a lighthouse was intended to prevent.

I don’t know who this rather sad-faced mythic figure is…

…but the local fauna appeared to believe that she was the Patron Saint of Small Songbirds. Seriously, they were everywhere on her, adorning her liberally with their offerings. And by “their offerings,” I mean “bird shit.”

The boat which has rammed the lighthouse behind her appears not to know whether it’s coming or going.

After we’d properly soaked in the general overview of tacky from afar, we headed to the fortress so that we could get a chance to really appreciate the tacky up close. Peter and Paul Cathedral, the main structure in the center of the fortified island, was at one time a Russian Orthodox church and is currently a tomb for former members of the Russian aristocracy. Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Catherine the Not So Great As Catherine The Great, Alexander II the Not Very Bright, and Nicholas II the Illiterate (so named because of a stunning inability to read the writing on the wall, so to speak) are all interred here.

The cathedral is about what you’d expect from an ancient Orthodox Russian cathedral: zany in its excess, though with fewer icons of saints than I wold have expected.

The lack of religious icons of saints is more than compensated for by the plethora of gigantic marble tombs, each of which weighs many tons and contains the mortal remains of someone who believed he could do whatever the hell he wanted to do.

Russian society has a weird relationship with the Tsars. On the one hand, they venerate their old rulers, and entomb them in enormous cathedrals of gold. On the other hand, they keep them safely trapped beneath massive stone slabs, and surround them all with cold-iron fences–proof against the possibility of some sort of unholy return to life. Apparently, the only thing worse than being ruled by a tsar with an unquenchable thirst for power is being ruled by an undead tsar with an unquenchable thirst for blood.

The Romanians experimented briefly with undead autocratic rulers who had an unquenchable thirst for blood, back when part of Romania was still known by its old name of Transylvania, and the general consensus seemed to be that it didn’t work out so well. During the Convention of 1917, when Russia was still trying to work out how it would be governed in the future, the undead contingent lost out to the Bolsheviks largely because of the Romanian vote. Had they had it all to do over again, the Romanians might concede that perhaps their estimation of what was best for Mother Russia might have been in error, since shambling, blighted, inhuman monsters from the pit of Hell could hardly have done worse than Lenin’s peeps, yo.

But I digress.

Peter the Great’s tomb looks like this:

There’s a bust of him at the end of it, minus his appallingly silly hat, though I can’t help but think he’s probably somewhat the worse looking these days than the bust might indicate. There is a significance to, and a story behind, each one of the coins you see on his casket here. Our petite guide of the nameless name explained it to us, though I was too busy diverting my attention to the cathedral’s defenses against the shambling undead to catch it all.

Peter and Paul Cathedral, named before Mary joined the group, was our last stop in the fair city of St. Petersburg. After that it was back to the floating hotel to bid farewell to Russia. As we left the fort, we said goodbye to this adorable little calico cat, washing herself on the steps to the cathedral in apparent disregard of the slavering undead imprisoned by iron and stone within.

We steamed away from port and headed past Kronstadt, an old sea fortress built by Peter the Great from preventing the Swedes from doing to him what he had done to them and kicking his ass with a huge navy, caliber of hats notwithstanding. It’s an island, frozen for part of the year, around which he built an impressive set of naval fortifications guaranteed to spell certain doom to anyone foolish enough to try to force a passage through it.

Today, it’s still used as a Russian naval base. There was a pair of nuclear attack subs in the port when we steamed by. Unfortunately, it had started raining heavily during our passage, and so I did not get any pictures of the subs that didn’t suck.

The old Imperial-era fortifications themselves are pretty cool, in a James Bond villain kind of way.

I’m not sure what the numbers mean.

Peter the Great reasoned, correctly to all appearances, that even a huge naval armada would find a series of narrow, walled channels with fortresses and gun emplacements all along them to be a tough nut to crack. Especially when you think of how many cannon it’s possible to stuff into a structure like this:

I totally want to live here. With a fluffy cat that I can stroke while hatching plans of unspeakable villainy. Or at least do a photo shoot here.

My visit to the Hermitage museum, formerly the winter residence of Catherine the Great, had left me with the impression that this was a woman of not inconsiderable accomplishment within the general sphere of astonishingly bad taste.

Nearly every part of Catherine’s winter palace is done in the style that modern scholars refer to as “neoclassical tacky,” with finishing details that drew from a wide range of influences such as Gothic Ugly, Baroque Repellent, and Early French Inelegant.

Catherine the First, however, was a woman of no small ambition herself, and was determined to leave an indelible mark on the world of architecture that could never be erased, even with flamethrowers, and would cement her legacy amongst the annals of history. To that end, she commissioned a new summer palace just outside St. Petersburg, which would be nowhere near as small, cramped, or frumpy as the old digs at Peter’s palace.

Her daughter, Empress Elizabeth, was not one to be upstaged by her mother, and upon clawing her way to the throne elected to have the palace entirely rebuilt, a process that required four years, 100 kilograms of gold, and nearly 3,450 metric tons of hideous. So Catherine the Great, when you get right down to it, was merely following in her mother’s and grandmother’s illustrious previous monarch’s footsteps.

We made our way out of the city toward this Altar of Awful, a trek that took us past a monument to the siege of St. Petersburg during WWII, Ford dealership, and a Wrigley’s chewing gum manufacturing plant. We arrived at last at the site of the palace, which is currently located behind a modern containment wall intended to help prevent the tacky from leaking out into the groundwater or contaminating the nearby environment.

The containment wall isn’t perfect, and a hint of appalling gold-plated onion domes can be seen beyond it.

When we stepped out of our Ford SUV, we were immediately beset by a small gaggle of street performers who asked us where we were from. Upon hearing the answer was “the United States,” they started playing the Battle Hymn of the Republic, and then demanding a tip.

Had we perhaps more time, I could have made this into a learning opportunity for these pioneers of Russian free-market enterprise in the history of American geopolitics by pitching an artfully staged fit at their choice of music; “We are from the South! The South! Do you realize what an insult it is that you present us with this abominable music of the northern aggressors?” But I was in a hurry to have my eyes burned out of my head by pure concentrated awful, so I hurried along after our guide.

The palace is surrounded by a gold-plated iron gate (and God help me, I hope never to have to say those words again) that gives warning to the level of tacky awaiting the luckless bastard who ventures beyond:

The careful observer will note the ornate double-headed eagle atop the gate. The double-headed eagle was long a symbol of the Russian royalty, a token of their goal, through generations of careful inbreeding, to produce a double-headed heir to the throne.

Which they would have done if it hadn’t been for that meddlesome Lenin and those meddlesome Bolsheviks.

Upon walking through the gate, the casual visitor is immediately struck by the scale of the bigness of the palace, which is quite large in the hugeness of its size. It’s also quite colorful, in the sense that a collision between a truck loaded with raspberry ice cream and a van hauling a shipment of paintballs is “colorful;” there is rather a lot of color everywhere, but one has to believe that there was never any sort of real plan behind it.

Yes, the roof really is plated in gold. I’ll be saying that a lot.

Viewed from afar, it’s difficult to get a sense of the scale of the place. Yes, it looks big, but everything about it–the windows, the doors, the columns–is oversized, so it’s actually far larger than the picture makes it seem. Here’s a closer shot, with some random folks in it for scale:

I suspect these folks are locals, just by the casualness with which they walk along; they have, through a process of acclimatization brought about by constant low-grade exposure to the tacky, developed a natural resistance.

All the windows along the front of the building had these unfortunate statues between them.

I imagine that if they could speak, they’d probably be saying something like “Watch, as we hide our faces in shame behind unfortunate hats, so embarrassed we are by our regrettable leglessness!”

After the zany, exuberant excess of the Winter Palace, I was a little surprised by the grand foyer of the Summer Palace, which seemed almost tame in comparison, with the perhaps arguable exception of the paintings on the ceiling.

I’m not quite sure what the painting represents, but I think it is intended as a depiction of the popular festival in Russia known as The Celebration of the Naked Lady Shaking Hands With Some Dude Before Devouring A Small Child. You can get postcards in the gift shop.

The walls along the stairway were tasteless, sure, but not hte kind of high-octane, weapons-grade tasteless suggested by the outside of the building.

I mean, sure, the wall decorations are a little over the top, and I would perhaps have refrained from putting a clock in just exactly that spot, but it could have been worse. I actually kind of like the candleholders.

It does get worse, though. Much, much worse.

This…is the door into the ballroom. There is, if you can believe it, nothing special about this door. Indeed, compared to most of the doors in this place, it’s downright restrained. There’s no gold on it.

Nearly all the doors are flanked by sculptures of half-naked women, or perhaps more accurately, sculptures of naked half-women. I’m not quite sure what happened to their legs, except perhaps that their breasts were designed to be of such royal magnificence that nobody ever looked down any lower than that, so the artists didn’t bother to finish the bottom bits in a cost-saving move.

Why Elizabeth and both Catherines preferred to be surrounded by naked half-women is a bit of a mystery to your humble scribe, who can only speculate that perhaps Peter the Great’s problems may have been hereditary.

At least these ones don’t squirt at you.

The true horror of the place doesn’t start to become apparent until you venture into the grand ballroom.

Before guests are permitted in, they are required to place little clean-room-style booties over their shoes. Otherwise, apparently, bits of the souls of the dryads get stuck to your shoes, and if you track them outside the containment structure…well, let’s just say it might cause an incident.

Yes, that’s gold up on the walls–a recurring theme past the foyer. I don’t know what that is painted up there on the ceiling. The guide said something about angels and chariots and the hosts of heaven anointing the Tsarina with the divine blessings of imperial monarchy, the better to sell herself to the peasants, or something like that. I’ve always been deeply skeptical by an omniscient, omnipotent divine creator of everything who seems to find it necessary to validate human sociopolitical structures, often to the benefit of the very people who tell you that the omniscient, omnipotent divine creator of everything is validating the current sociopolitical status quo, but I’m just a cynic that way.

The gold-all-over-the-walls motif continues as a theme throughout the palace, even in the state dining hall. Which, in case you were wondering, looks like this.

Now, I can’t speak for the fashion of the time, but…eating in the presence of royalty who found it necessary to decorate the dining hall with paintings of dead animals would quite likely put me right off my lunch. PETA could build an entire Web site around this place, to go along with their Web sites suggesting that all household pets should be replaced by robots and campaigning to rename fish “sea kittens”.

It’s hard to get a sense of the real horror of the paintings–again, flash photography was forbidden, so I had to make do with what I could get–but the one on the right is a dead deer, and the one to the left of that shows a dead duck with its neck broken flopped over on the ground next to something–an albino peacock? I’m not sure–that seems quite indifferent to its presence.

These paintings line every wall, so the only place one can look without losing the will to eat (or indeed, the will to live) is either up or down.

Of the two, I suggest down. If you look up, you see this.

It seems Elizabeth and the Catherines really, really liked their ceiling art. Of half-naked whole women, wholly naked half-women, and/or any combination thereof. This particular piece is called “Cherub, go to your cloud.” Or that’s what I call it, anyway. It’s noteworthy as being one of the finest existing examples of a particular artistic style called Baroque Cthulhu; that frame, during certain times of the year near the winter solstice, can crawl along that ceiling into a dark corner and do awful things. Unspeakable things. Things to drive a strong man mad, and a strong woman long for dark sapphic pleasures.

Elsewhere in the palace, the ceiling art generally returned to the winged-beings-and-chariots leitmotif so often favored amongst royalty and despotic monarchs of all stripes.

I think this one is called “God Says I Can Do Whatever I Want and M. C. Escher Agrees, So There.” Apparently, violating certain normal conventions regarding perspective is covered by the “whatever I want” part.

A random niche in the side of a wall on a cupola or bell tower or something in back of the palace. Why, yes, they really are that magnificent, and thank you very much. Plus, as you can see, I have legs. Which puts me a leg up on those tarts inside by the doors. Get it? A leg up? Ah, I slay me.

Whenever I’m in a new city for the first time, one of the things I really like to do is walk the streets. I find that I can get a much better feel for a city when I can…err, you know, feel it.

So when our tour guide of the name that can’t be heard offered us a choice of yet another cultural center or an opportunity to walk around downtown St. Petersburg for a while, I voted for the latter. Since I seemed to be the only one with a strong opinion on the matter, I think I won by default.

St. Petersburg is a strange city. It’s kind of like what might happen if you took Detroit and gave it a real history. It’s a strange mix of palaces, soaring cathedrals, urban shopping malls, and squalor. The result is a weird and jumbled juxtaposition of things, almost as if some space alien had taken a number of architectural works from all over the world and set them down in the middle of Newark in an attempt to create a terrarium for its pet humans.

“See? It’s just like their native habitat! They have little roads to drive on, and little signs to read, and even a little church where they can pray to their gods or saints or whatever they call them!”

And statues. Lots and lots and lots of statues. You don’t often see a whole lot of statues in American cities, but St. Petersburg loves its statues, oh yes it does. Statues everywhere. Statues in the roadway. Statues on the bridges. Statues in little niches in the buildings, even.

In Soviet Russia, justice is not blind. Justice sees you quite well, Comrade. Justice knows exactly what you did last summer, and has even seen the videotape on YouTube. Justice does NOT approve. Justice thinks you should be ashamed of yourself. The gulag for you, Comrade! As for your family, Justice knows what to do with them, too.

Have a nice day, Comrade.

Why yes, they are that magnificent, and thank you very much. (At least these ones look reasonably natural, as if carved by a sculptor who has actually known the touch of a woman.)

This statue, according to our diminutive guide of the statistically improbable name, is the world’s largest bronze casting that’s only supported at two points.

Every town in the world can claim to have something that’s unique. Darwin, Minnesota has the world’s largest ball of string. St. Petersburg has the world’s largest bronze statue that’s only supported at two points. Juarez, Mexico is the murder capital of the world. Tampa, Florida is the lightning capital of the world. Newark, New Jersey is home to a record-breaking number of smells, whereas Seattle, Washington holds the title for the most shades of gray in any one sky. Coeur d’Alene, Idaho has more violent white supremacists per capita than any other city. And Portland, Oregon is home to more cute bisexual Subway sandwich makers with tattoos and facial piercings than any other city.

Some of these claims are, I think, more significant than others. For example, I prefer Portland, Oregon to Juarez, Mexico, on the grounds that (a) I have a fondness for cute bisexual women with tattoos and facial piercings and (b) I can’t indulge my fondness if I’m dead.

It is a cool statue, though. I’m not sure what the thing on top of his hat is.

St. Petersburg is also home to an enormous statue of Vladimir Lenin, erected before everyone discovered what a douchenozzle he was and then never taken down.

According to our tour guide, this particular pose was quite popular in images of the Great Douchenozzle. He’s supposed to be delivering a stirring lecture to the working class or inspiring the underprivileged or ordering someone to be executed or seizing control of an independent newspaper or something. Apparently, most folks think it looks like he’s hailing a cab.

Lenin wants you to be inspired. Not being inspired is treason. Treason is punishable by death. Are you inspired, Comrade?

The fall of the Soviet Union opened the doorway to Western-style street advertising in the Eastern bloc. It’s really only a matter of time until ClearChannel moves in, and then it’s curtains for the free world.

If Lenin were alive today, he’d be spinning in his grave.

Spinal Tap may be big in Japan, but A-Ha is huge in Eastern Europe. Huge, I say! And now I have that one song stuck in my head. You will too. Such is the malignancy of my evil.

I saw this spray-painted in a bunch of places all around St. Petersburg. It’s interesting to see graffiti in a language I don’t recognize. I kept wondering what it was asking.

For all I know, it says “Do you want new car? Check out Vladimir’s House of Cars!” I know there are at least three folks on my flist who can read it…

St. Petersburg was intermittently wet and rainy while we were there. I actually quite like the way a city looks after a rain. I think it’s a consequence of being a child of the 80s and watching all those episodes of Miami Vice where they would wet down the roads before they started filming, just because they liked the texture.

I particularly like the Coca-Cola logo in the foreground. Lenin wept.

We stopped for a while in front of this rather stern-looking building, which apparently was a government office under Peter the Great, then was converted to a government office after the Communists came to power, and now in the post-Soviet era has become a government office.

Government offices all over the world seem to share a similar architectural language. This building wouldn’t really look that out of place in Tallahassee or Seattle. (Well, the landscaping is a bit nice for Tallahassee, but you know what I mean.)

One look at the people who were patrolling in front of it, though, and you know you’re not in the United States.

Check out those hats. These guys mean business, and no mistake. Don’t let the jovial expressions fool you–those hats are all business.