Sarah & Richard's Travels

St. Petersburg or better known as the northern city has 4,8 million inhabitants. We arrived at the airport, expecting a bit of hassle, but got through no probs. Not sure how to get into the city we eventually asked someone who spoke English and he told us to get the number 13 minibus. They have these minibuses everywhere. They're kind of like a taxi that drives a fixed route around the city, but it only stops if you hail it down and the bus driver will stop anywhere - you just have to yell out stop (or whatever that happens to be in Russian), then you pay when you get off. These minibuses and well all the buses and trolleybuses are pretty old and clapped out - they probably would have been taken off the road about 10 years ago at home and this is the transport in the big cities - I wonder what the smaller ones will be like.
Like everyone says St Petersburg is a very European city with the typical style of old buildings and some very grand ones inlcuding the Hermitage which is gorgeous. Overall though the city looks pretty tired and unloved. The buildings all need a lot of restoration work, there is quite a bit of rubbish and the aformentioned public transport system could do with one or two updates. Most of the cars in St Pete were clapped out ladas with only about 1/3 of the cars new or recent models. Richy's decided he wants to cross Russia in a Lada rather than the trans sib. Don't think so.
We spent a lot of time wandering the city as it's pretty big, spent an afternoon at the Hermitage, beautiful old building, I was more interested in the actual building than the exhibits inside and wasn't disappointed, inlaid wood flooring, lots of gilding on the columns, ceiling, stucco work on the ceilings, huge chandeliers etc etc. We also saw the Peter and Paul fortress which is like a mini city that was built in the early 1700's and is on a an island on the river. They had the tall ships race in port while we were there so spent an afternoon looking at all the boats as well. The race is every year and stops at St Petersburg, Tallin, Helsinki and one other port, I'm not sure the exact order. They were leaving on our last night at around 3 am. The bridges on the canals open each night from 2am to 5am for shipping, if you're stuck on the wrong side of the river, its too bad - you have to wait as there's no other way across!
So far we're not doing too well with Russian cuisine having found a favourite restaurant (or Pectopah as I call them because that's how it's written in the roman alphabet) called Tecto (again, that's how it was written, not sure how to say it) which was italian close to the hostel. It was pretty cool and served yummy pasta, pizza etc and pretty good value. I'm sure we'll have plenty of Russian cuisine to come once we leave the cities!
We bought our train tickets at the station one afternoon - an interesting experience. We weren't really prepared as we just found the station and tought it would be a good idea to get tickets now that we were there so we queued up for a while and eventually got to the front. We I got to the front of my window, the lady just closed it and left. Turns out they have the opening hours displayed and then the times they go for thier breaks as well, and she was off on a break, too bad about the rest of the queue - change queues or wait! Anyway, the lady didn't speak any English so we got out our little phrase book and tried our best at our Russian accents at which the lady looked a bit bored as if to say, 'do you think I'm gonna understand you?' so we ended up writing it down and then getting the date wrong and the lady had to do it again - I think she and all the people in the queue were cursing us by this stage as it was taking so long. Anyway we eventually got our tickets ok in Kupe class which has four bunks and could leave the station.
The overnight train to Moscow wasn't too bad, apart from our snoring Russian room mate. Grrrrr. And it was hot. Very hot! I was quite surprised that each person in the carriage got a little snack box of cheese, rolls, yoghurt, sweets etc and water, plus we also got a handy dandy pair of slippers. Oh la la. It was a rickekty and noisy ride, but we got here (moscow) ok after the 8 hour ride.



Observations so far:
We need to learn a few more Russian phrases - hardly anyone speaks English or they don't want to
There are prices for Russians and Prices for Foreigners


We will update very soon the "moscow" story!

Regards,
Richy and Saartje