Europe @ 2.4 km/h Read Free

but on the border a sign announces that here, 148 km from St Petersburg, we are entering the district of Leningradskaya. Suddenly I find myself in one country but two universes, and they are evidently not parallel.
    1 km
    Half an hour of pushing myself around St Petersburg is enough to remind me why this civic gem appeals to the Russian imagination in a way that leaves Moscow for dead. Red, white and blue flags rest in holders yoked to light poles like troikas.
    Then, just as I’m reflecting on the power of Russian patriotism, I spot a Mongol face among the crowd swarming down Nevsky Prospekt, the city’s main boulevard, a vivid reminder that Russians are ethnically no ‘purer’ than that other glorious mongrel breed, the English. Students of English history know that the Danes and Norwegians invaded the Angles’ land towards the end of the first millennium. Less familiar is the fact that, ever since the sixth century, Vikings raided, traded, and invaded the lands of the Slavs, where from the ninth century onwards they founded a series of city states.
    Historians suspect that the name of the Viking clan that founded the mini-state of Kyiv (from which the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, derives its name) was Rus, the great-granddaddy of what we call ‘Russia’. 2 In 1223 the fiefs that would form the core of today’s state, foremost among them Muscovy, were overrun by the Mongols. Today, on Nevsky Prospekt, a face in the crowd has reminded me of that fact.
    2 km
    St Petersburg International, one of the few youth hostels in this city of five million, has a surprise or two in store. All the rooms are on the fourth floor, and there is no lift access. But the manager, a lateral or rather vertical thinker, arranges to bring a bed down from on high to the staff ‘common room’, which is generously vacated for the six nights of my stay. And — a bonus, this — the TV there has more channels than I’ve ever seen available on one set (300) so I venture into the world outside only after surfing from a concert in Kurdistan to a debate in Milan via al-Jazeera.
    3 km
    Meet Ivan Baranov, principal doorman at the Nevsky Palace Hotel, a five-star establishment on the boulevard of broken flagstones. All gold braid and broad smile, he greets me with a disclaimer, ‘I am not from here. I come from a small town in Belarus, far to south’.
    Introduction leads to revelation. ‘This is my duty, guarding the door, but in the deep of my soul I am happy to remain a peasant.’ And, once he learns where I am from, revelation extends to request. ‘I want to ask you about farming in Australia. Could I get work in your country fleecing the sheep? This is my dream.
    ‘From my early days I work on a farm. I know how to feed the pigs,’ he assures me with wide-eyed trust. At a loss to know what to advise, I suggest Ivan contact the Australian Embassy in Moscow but, several steps ahead of me, he proceeds to display an expert’s knowledge of Canberra’s immigration points system.
    4 km
    I see I’ve spent one hour 40 minutes pushing the chair, ‘progressing’ a dismal 4.1 km. This works out at 2.46 km/h: I don’t think I had any idea of how fast I would go, but this really is snail’s pace (if you can picture a snail on wheels).
    18 km
    Time to check those must-see lists. Paris? Eiffel Tower. Tick. The Louvre. Tick. Berlin? The Brandenburg Gate. Tick. Berlin Wall remnant. Tick. St Petersburg? The Hermitage. Tick.
    To see the world-famous museum opposite is no problem. Housed in the tsars’ 250-year-old Winter Palace, it would be infinitely more difficult to avoid. But to see the Hermitage collection? Now that’s impossible, for two reasons. You would need to visit every day for a month to see the fraction that is on display, and even then most of the treasures are locked away in storerooms. Still, nothing would have kept me away from following up my previous visit to its great galleries one bitter day 23 Februaries ago. And then, just as this