Back on Track

All aboard for a train ride from history-imbued St. Petersburg, Russia, to dazzling Helsinki, Finland.

NATALIA WANTS A RICH HUSBAND, and she wants him now. “Look at me,” says the 55-year-old widow with a shake of her tousled blond hair. “I can cook. I can sew. I am still . . . blooming!”

She sets bowls of cabbage soup and homemade pickles in front of her American guests, six of us, balancing on footstools around a foldaway table that almost fills her living room. She pours vodka into stem glasses, harmonizing on a Russian folk tune with a bald-headed San Franciscan, who learned the words in the Army. “You would be perfect, but for your wife,” she laments.

The irrepressible Natalia lives in the heart of St. Petersburg, in a fourth-floor walk-up packed with family photos, tasseled lamps and mounds of silk pillows, including one that says MICHIGAN. A well-used dartboard (she has a teenage son) hangs near an Oriental rug. Over plates of brown bread and herring, potato salad and stroganoff, we promise to keep our eyes out for Mr. Right.

After days in palatial Russian museums and Tsarist-era cathedrals, it is delightful to glimpse everyday life in the former Soviet Union, where habits change at a grinding pace and old suspicions linger. This is why private flats are lovingly cared for, but common stairwells sag with neglect and paint peels from the outside walls. Historically, the buildings have been property of the state; apartment owners are wary of spending hardearned rubles to maintain areas the government might someday reclaim.

St. Petersburg, built on 42 islands, abounds with puzzlements and contradictions: brooding and dark as Dostoevsky in winter; a poet’s dream in the White Nights of summer, when the sun winks at midnight and a lavender twilight gleams on hundreds of canals, banked in red Finnish granite. Barely 500 miles below the Arctic Circle, the city was wrested from brackish swampland in 1703 by Tsar Peter the Great, who envisioned a Window on the West. Soon, the meandering Neva River was brought under control, and fortresses and palaces began to rise beside it, inspired by the finest in Europe.

I arrived in Russia by bus from Estonia, after two weeks in the Baltic States, a journey organized by Odysseys Unlimited, the small-group specialists. Our wait at the border stretched to five hours because all traffic had been halted during the G8 summit, at which Vladimir Putin, a native of St. Petersburg, played host to President Bush, Tony Blair and other world leaders.

Anticipating the spike in global coverage, Putin spruced up his hometown. He rounded up hundreds of the city’s homeless and bused them off for holidays in the country, complete with government shelter and food. Streets sparkle from nightly scrubbings; direction signs have been posted in English. Along the 3-mile-sweep of Nevsky Prospekt, domed churches shine with freshly bathed icons and polished silver, malachite and gold. The lighting is noticeably improved on masterpieces at The Hermitage museum (1,000 rooms; 40,000 visitors a week), although windows are still cracked open, playing havoc with temperature control and security.

Nevsky Prospekt pulses with top hotels, sidewalk cafés, the principal bookstore Dom Knigi, old-line shopping arcades and flashy boutiques like Versace, where, in July, window signs offer 50 percent off and young trendsetters scramble from limos in designer jeans, halter tops and slick magenta hair. Under the awnings of the Hotel Grand Europa, the lunch crowd could be in Prague or Ljubljana or Milan. Our waitress—it is her first day on the job—speaks four languages.

Still, Russia is Russia. Rumors spread that there is no wine to be had in the whole city. Sommeliers shrug; retail shelves stand bare; room-service operators suggest beer or vodka.

“It’s something to do with the labels,” a hotel bartender tells me. “Some bureau decided it wanted more information on each bottle, so they sent the wine back where it came from—to France, to Italy, to South Africa. They say we should have wine again in two months. Maybe.”

IT IS NOT EASY to rouse at 5 o’clock in the morning, even in the sun-neverquite- sets summertime of St. Petersburg, a city as far north as the tip of Greenland. Especially after a heavily toasted farewell dinner. But the lure of traveling by train from Russia to Finland, from one side of the old Iron Curtain to the other, proves as irresistible as an Agatha Christie mystery. I do not expect a murder, exactly, but am on the alert for dropped clues.

Our train—the blue-and-white Repin— pulls out of Finlandsky station before 7:30 a.m. The shimmery palaces of Peter the Great disappear, as if a lavish, coffee-table book has been slammed shut and replaced by a broadsheet for drab housing. The train is far from full. Four of us settle into a compartment for six, switching lightbulbs from above the empty seats so each will have a reading lamp that works. The windows are clean and the end-of-car bathrooms only mildly perplexing. We have been warned that Soviet officials will come around at the border to check documents and ask how much money we are carrying—both rubles and dollars. Only two of us are awake when officers rap on the door, but we produce all four passports and earnestly vouch for the others.

The ride reveals scattered dachas, where stocky men in rubber boots and women in aprons and babushkas are puttering in weekend gardens; a trestle bridge; a distant smokestack. I see no birds or animals in what used to be a no-man’s-land between East and West.

In need of a stretch, two of us walk through six jiggly coaches to the dining car. Only one linen-covered table is occupied. We order cheese blinis and beer. Most passengers, I notice on the way back, are digging into bountiful sack lunches.

After days of high-octane sightseeing, the train provides time to reflect. I smile at recalling our guide’s tale of how Peter the Great, well-traveled in Europe and a voracious collector of “oddments and curiosities,” sold the then-unknown concept of museumgoing to wealthy, party-mad residents of 18th-century St. Petersburg: “He offered imported tea to the ladies and a drink of the Tsar’s best vodka to the men—but only at the museum exit.”

I remember the cheery faces of matryoshka— the Russian nesting dolls, which are sold on street corners and, it seems, everywhere else—and learning that this most beloved of handcrafts was inspired by a Japanese doll that a Russian toymaker brought back from his travels, more than a century ago.

I see a golden Sunday at the Grand Palace of Peterhof on the Gulf of Finland, a Versailles rival with a galaxy of fountains, where we had to wear paper slippers over our shoes to protect the parquet floors. Except for a retired member of the U.S. diplomatic corps, whose Nikes were too big to fit. “They say you will be allowed to wear your shoes,” a guide translates, “but you must carry the slippers in your hand so they will know you have paid.”

And much more.

A rousing evening of ballet in the ornate Mariinsky Theatre, better known elsewhere by its Soviet name, Kirov. Spindly chairs in the balcony were so tightly packed that we grew to know our neighbors intimately, especially during the rhythmic handclapping that follows each performance.

The flamboyant explosion of onion domes —swirls of aqua, kiwi green, lemon yellow— that crown the Church on Spilled Blood, built where Tsar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881. The cavernous interior glows with Biblical-theme mosaics made of jasper, rhodonite and other semiprecious stones. An ATM, tucked into a shadowy alcove near the entrance, is paying 27 rubles to the dollar, a slightly better rate than the hotel.

Soon I am rocked to sleep.

SHORTLY AFTER NOON, Helsinki suburbs appear: fresh, tidy and framed with green willows. Bicycles and spiraling kites. Glints of bright water. From the vaulted masterwork of the Central Railway Station (designed in 1919 by Eliel Saarinen), we pull our clattery luggage across the square to the Radisson SAS Plaza Hotel.

The latitude of Helsinki is the same as St. Petersburg, but the mood on the streets is far sunnier. The Finnish capital is smaller (565,000 residents versus 5 million), more playful, more confident. Perhaps because the Finns are accustomed to freedoms, they seem to celebrate every moment of the breezy, balmy summer. Store windows dazzle along the grassy park called the Esplanade: bursts of marigold, poppy red and nautical blue fabrics at Marimekko; drizzled crystal goblets and candlesticks at Iittala. Exhibitions pay tribute to the architectural triumphs and furniture and glass designs of Alvar Aalto and Eero Saarinen, whose mega-projects include the ethereal St. Louis Gateway Arch.

At the top of Senate Square, the broad steps of the porticoed Lutheran Cathedral draw lunchtime sun seekers— many of them students from the university on the same hill. We follow live band music down to the harborfront Market Square, joining locals in grazing from stall to stall, nibbling ripe strawberries and raspberries, seedcrusted rye rolls, slices of Juustoleipa (a baked cheese originally made from reindeer milk) and Lappi, a mild Swiss-like cheese from Lapland.

Market prices are welcome since taxes on food are high here, as elsewhere in Scandinavia. Two friends wave as they examine handhewn beechwood bowls, still stunned by a bill of $100 for two for a simple restaurant lunch. We trade notes on Finnish crafts we admired at Design Forum in the booming Design District opposite Dianapuisto Park (my favorite was a “snowball” made of thin white rubber and packed with dry rice that crunches just like snow) and in the showrooms of Pentik, a family firm that still sells only in its homeland.

Along the waterfront, I visit with makers of horn-handled hunting knives, alder-wood necklaces and fuzzy yarn caps with bulky braids attached. English is spoken everywhere. A young artist with Nordic blue eyes explains how she etches free-form designs on copper and aluminum trays.

Beyond the cries of fishmongers, boats jostle for position at the docks. Yachts crisscross the harbor in endless regattas. We board a small ferry for the 20-minute ride to Suomenlinna Island, whose tunneled fortress, built in the 1700s, is one of Europe’s largest maritime garrisons. About 850 people live on the island. Children race up cobblestone streets and roll down grassy hills. A pristine lighthouse, a folk museum, pastel cottages and old-fashioned ice cream parlors make Suomenlinna a popular destination for family outings and wedding parties.

Alcohol is taxed even more highly than food in Helsinki. The best prices are at a chain of state stores called Alko—one of which is in the basement of the giant department store Stockmann. I was delighted to find a favorite Chilean Sauvignon Blanc for $12. The same wine was listed at $48 at our hotel.

Pricey, yes, but unlike in St. Petersburg, it was, at least, available.

IF YOU GO: Two trains a day, the Repin and Sibelius, make the five-hour run between St. Petersburg and Helsinki. For fares and time schedules, the Finnish railways Web site is vr.fi/heo. For city tourism and events calendars, visit saint-petersburg.com and helsinki.fi, hel2.fi. I traveled to Russia with Odysseys Unlimited (Odysseys-Unlimited.com), which arranged the lunch in a private flat. The best time of the year to visit these far northern cities is late May to September.

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