St Petersburg

The thing that I didn’t talk about in my Moscow blog was the people. The fashion in particular. It’s like they’re twenty years behind the western world, which to be fair they probably are, with good reason, but it was also very hit and miss. Some people looked great. Some looked terrible. Amanda and Steve were told by some friends before they got to Russia to look out for “Ruski's”, and to photograph them and put the best photo of the day on the net. Of course we all got involved in that. I personally have not posted any of them on the net… until now. One thing that really amazed us was that all the women wear high heels, everywhere. Even though there are lots of rough footpaths and roads and cobblestones. Crazy.  I particularly like the tights here:

The overnight train from Moscow was far better than I had expected (after overnight trains in Egypt where we didn’t have individual compartments and we were in upright seats hanging onto our bags all night). Pat was a bit shocked that nobody was coming to make the beds for us. The beds were relatively long and comfy but not ideal, I didn’t sleep much more than an hour or two, and Adrian didn’t really sleep at all.


We got to St Petersburg at 630am, but our hotel wouldn’t check us in until 2pm. So we went out for an orientation walk. We were all sooooo tired. I enjoyed St Petersburg, but I liked Moscow better somehow… St Petersburg is dirtier, a lot of buildings have dirt and soot on them. When we left Russia, I knew I could’ve spent another week in Moscow really happily, but I’d seen pretty much everything I wanted to in St Petersburg.

View from our hotel window.

Not the view from our hotel window.

After lunch that day, we had a guided tour at the Hermitage Museum, which is in the old Winter Palace, for two hours. I personally think it would’ve been better to have done the tour in the morning, or the next day, because we were all exhausted and out of patience. We had been warned that the guide wouldn’t wait if we were dawdling, because the museum is so huge and we had such a short time to see it in, but she was actually starting to talk when there were only one or two people there, out of the 15 of us. She was also talking really quietly, and with the number of other people and other tours in the place, we didn’t have a hope of hearing her unless we happened to be standing right on top of her. The first two people lost patience about ten minutes in and buggered off to wander around by themselves. I made it to 45 minutes, and by then I could see that Amanda (who has had a hip replacement) was very uncomfortable, so the two of us and Steve did a bit of a fade out and took our own little express tour through the palace, then went to the coffee shop. It was a real shame that the guide didn’t work out so well for us. The palace is stunning, every room is different, and it’s rammed full of art, but then again art and museums are not really my thing even on a good day.

Kat and me outside the Hermitage.

It was raining almost the whole time we were in St Petersburg. On the second day I decided I needed a sleep in, because we’d been on the go since we started the tour and after the overnight train I was totally wrecked. Most of the group went out to see the Peterhof fountains, and apparently Adrian got absolutely drenched in the rain, but I stayed in bed til 11am or so. Then I met Kat at the music museum, which was full of very helpful and very lovely Russian ladies who didn’t speak English. They tried very hard to tell us about everything in the museum. Lots of hand gestures. We wanted to pack them into our backpacks and take them on tour with us.


Then I went to see the woolly mammoth!!!!! It was the one thing I’d read about that I really, really wanted to do in St Petersburg. It was at the Zoological museum, which was much bigger than I’d expected somehow. It was pretty cool. It was about the only place in Russia that I saw any kids… which was the weirdest thing, there were just no kids anywhere. Not on the metros. Not in the streets. Not in the hotels. Apparently the population is declining in Russia, but there was a total, unexplainable absence of children pretty much anywhere.


The woolly mammoth was awesome!!!!!!!! He only has half a trunk and only a few patches of wool still left on his body. I think they dug him out of the ice in Siberia, I remember it being in the news at home when they found him. They had two or three babies as well, which had been found in different places. One of the babies was really fluffy and cute. I only had to push three or four kids out of the way to get my photos. Being 6ft tall has its advantages.

And the baby woolly mammoth!!!

Kat, Tony (the tour leader) and I had decided to go to the ballet in St Petersburg (again), and this time Tony organised the tickets and made sure it was Swan Lake we went to. The metro stops are quite far apart in St Petersburg, and we didn’t know where we were going, and so we had to wander round for ages finding the place. But we found it in the end. The ballet itself is beautiful, of course, but the dance company were not as good as the one we saw in Moscow. There were a few off-balance chorus ballerinas. We were sitting right down the front, by the orchestra, and Kat and I spent at least as much time watching the orchestra as the dancers. We spent a lot of time giggling. I even had one of the members of the orchestra trying to make me laugh towards the end of the ballet, when he had this really long sustained note to hold and he was running out of breath.


On our last day, we were leaving from the hotel to catch our bus to Estonia at midday, so by the time we rolled out of bed and wandered down to breakfast and took long showers and repacked our bags we didn’t have a lot of time to go and do much. But we were taking photos out of the window of our room, and there was a beautiful church a block away, which we hadn’t seen from street level. So we walked over there. Then we had pancakes with chocolate from a street vendor. Yummmmm.


And then to the bus and Estonia!!

McDonalds in Cyrillic.  Important stuff.  Phonetically it reads the same as in English.