Crystal in Russia

Rough Guide

I got my Rough Guide to St. Petersburg a few days ago. Just for fun, I decided to compare SPB to my home city. The Rough Guide to Gastonia would be about 50 pages.

Year Founded:
Gastonia: 1846
St. Petersburg: 1703

Named After:
Gastonia: William Gaston, congressman and state Supreme Court Justice
St. Petersburg: Peter, disciple of Jesus and the first Pope

Population:
Gastonia: 66,000
St. Petersburg: 5,000,000

Famous People From:
Gastonia: James Worthy, Darrell Armstrong (both basketball players), Fred Durst (of Limp Bizkit)
St. Petersburg: George Balanchine (cheoreographer), Alfred Nobel (dynamite inventor/Nobel prizes), Vladimir Putin (current Russian president), among others

Famous Events In:
Gastonia: Loray Mill Strike of 1929, led by American Communists that eventually led to the deaths of police chief Orville Aderholt and a striker named Ella Mae Wiggins. Aderholt now has a bridge named after him.
St. Petersburg: Decembrists' Revolt of 1825, February and October Revolutions of 1917 (the beginning of Communist Russia) as well as the deaths of people like Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and many of the tsars.

Number of Museums:
Gastonia: 1
St. Petersburg: 113

So there is a connection! The organizer of the Gastonia strike, Fred Beal, fled to the Soviet Union after being convicted of Aderholt's death. Needless to say he was disillusioned from Communism.

You could do a tour of St. Petersburg just on where people died. The highlight would be the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood--built where Alexander II was murdered.

So there is lots to see and do, but I don't want to be a tourist for eight weeks. I want to see what the city is all about.

posted by Crystal @ 12:28 AM