St Petersburg, Russia

St Petersburg! (Carly): Wed 20/09/2006 5:54 PM

Hi Guys!

I'm sure everyone missed my long emails while I was at home!!! The end of the last trip finished well despite Adam being a little ill! Milan was ok but I would say a day is plenty of time to see everything there!

We have now embarked on the next stage of our adventures and are now in St Petersburg! What can I say its absolutely beautiful! Apparently quite European compared with Moscow - guess we'll find out at the weekend! Arriving was very tiring as the customs queue was miles long (they don't really like letting people into Russia!) and we couldn't find the bus we were told to get! In the end we followed a crowd onto a bus and got off at a tube station as they are much easier than buses! Well I say that but in Russia there is no indication of the station you are at unless you can understand the announcement before each station, so we had to count the stops and hope for the best!!! We found our hostel and its very friendly, except for the resident cat which likes to use one of the showers as a toilet and keeps coming in our room - much to our horror!!!

Still the manager Tim is really friendly (in fact this will have to be a short one as we are going drinking with him and some of the other guests in a while - finally some vodka for me!!).

So far we have seen quite a few sights including Peterhof, a palace out of town, with beautiful grounds filled with fountains. Inside they gave us "slippers" to put over our shoes - quite a good way to keep the beautiful wooden floors clean! We kept getting caught between tour groups in the narrow passageways but I tried a bit of French translation to steal a few facts from them! We got a boat there which was a lovely way to see the river and part of the city but meant we didn't know which side of the road to catch the bus back from! Inevitably went to wrong way first and ended up at a strange walled community with swipe cards to enter! Still we did eventually make it back, and survived walking in the dark with vague directions so it didn't matter!

Also seen the Church of our Saviour on the spilt blood which is in the Moscow style so brightly coloured and with onion shaped spires. Inside was amazing as every inch was covered in mosaics, even the floor! If this is what stuff in Moscow is like we'll have plenty to stare at!

Yesterday we went to the Hermitage museum which has 3 million exhibits! Didn't quite see them all but spent 6 hours inside and really enjoyed it! There was quite a lot of Italian art - we're practically experts on it now!!! It was inside the winter palace and so the rooms were often more beautiful than the paintings!!

Today been to the fortress and the first museum in Russia where there was an interesting exhibition on life in the tribes of Venezeula and lots of disgusting things like conjoined twins and deformed embryos in bottles.

Everyone talks about the crime and the dodgy police here in Russia but luckily we've not experienced any of it! Our main tactic is not talking within other people's hearing and trying to look Russian! not fool-proof though as all someone has to do is say something to us in Russian and we start to look scared!

All in all having a fab time here in St Petersburg, in fact if it wasn't full of bureaucracy, it would probably be one of the best places we've been to so far! We are even getting better at the Russian alphabet and can find street names on maps which is a huge advantage!!

Love to all

Carly
xxxxx

ps
Gemma so sorry I missed your birthday honey I was thinking of you but we couldn't find an internet cafe! Hope you had a good one and keep me posted on your floor managers exam!!

Lorna - hope you had a lovely birthday!!

Clare - Thanks for the forwards they made me chuckle!

Chris - we managed to buy pour train tickets with no Russian in 20 mins and only queued in one wrong queue! Hope you're impressed! I ingeniously looked up the Russian for "Friday" and wrote it next to the date we want to go, along with the train number, times and the number 2. We were worried that it might not be going to Moscow and had no idea what class we were in - Adam was convinced we would be sat on the roof! But we're in second class so all in all very successful!

St Petersberg (Adam): Wed 20/09/2006 6:02 PM

Hey Everyone,

Carly and I are in the first location on the second part of our trip here in St Petersburg, Russia. We got here on Friday afternoon and had a bit of trouble gettin to the hostel coz the way they do things here is a little different. Buses are a bit of a nightmare, they have loads of minibuses called marshrutka which follow set routes but don't have set stops, u just wait anywhere on the route and hail them like a cab. The language here is difficult too, in Europe everyone spoke English pretty much but at least we could read road signs and find our way around easily. Here they actually have a different alphabet, its called Cyrillic and has 33 characters, about half are the same as our alphabet and the rest are completely different. So in order to read a road sign we have to translate the letters to our own alphabet and then find it on our map which has the Russian names written in our alphabet. Also the letters which the Russians share with us are often pronounced differently, so their P is the same as our R! Confusing at first but we r gettin the hang of it slowly. Thankfully the hostel here is run by an English guy who is really nice and helps a lot.

St Petersburg is an amazing city with so much to see and do. Even just walking around is an experience as its so different from anywhere I've been before. There are obvious leftovers from communism, a lot of people still have pretty pointless jobs, for instance while most of the traffic lights are automated some still have a guy standing at a switchbox changing the lights from red to green manually. The pedestrian crossings are actually a lot better here, as well as having the red and green man signals they have a countdown to tell u how long the light will stay green or red. Crossing the road is still pretty hazardous tho as some Russians don't seem to pay much attention to the lights. On the down side, the water in all Russian cities is unsafe to drink, u can't even brush ur teeth with tap water, a little backward I know. Oh and the cops here are really corrupt, we have heard a few horror stories about them, mostly from the hostel manager, but apparently they regularly check people's id and try to extort money from tourists if they haven't registered their visas. The manager told us never to give them money coz no matter what happens they won't bother to arrest us unless we actually commit some heinous crime. Oh yeah and St Petersburg and Moscow are both plagued by mosquitoes, something I didn't expect as it is very cold here for most of the year.

We have seen so much already I don't wanna write a massive email so I'll try to keep it as brief as possible. Most of the tourist sites are within walking distance of where we are and the weather has been sunny although cold until today when it rained all day. St Petersburg was actually purpose-built by Peter the Great, practically all at once, because he wanted a more European capital to bring Russia into the modern world. It took so much stone that using stone for building work elsewhere in Russia was banned until the city was finished. So for the most part the buildings are in the European style, basically lots of Roman columns and arches. Its all very nice and ornate.

The second day after we arrived we took a boat trip across the gulf of Finland to Peterhof, the palace which Peter the Great had built to rival the palace of Versailles. I have never seen so many fountains in my entire life. There is an avenue lined with fountains from the dock where the boat dropped us right up the palace where there is about 50 statues and a whole bunch more fountains arranged on a hill in front of the building. Inside the palace is decorated with gold statues, silk wallpaper and antique furniture, it easily rivals any of the palaces we saw in Europe.

As there is a kitchen here we are able to cook and have a decent breakfast etc. I bought cereal and milk as you do but when I opened the milk next day it smelled pretty dodgy so I chucked the whole bottle down the sink. Later that day I bought more and checked the sell-by date to make sure. Anyway I'm in the kitchen next day gettin it out the fridge and Tim, the manager, asks me "so u like Kefir then? a lot of westerners don't like it." I told him I thought it was milk and asked him what it actually is. He tells me its this thick sour-tasting milk that Russians drink and that a lot of westerners buy it thinking its milk then throw it away thinking its off. How stupid do I feel, oh well, I tried it and its actually pretty good.

Buying our train tickets to Moscow was a bit of a nightmare as none of the staff at the station speak a word of English, pretty gay as we went into Subway for a sandwich and everyone in there speaks it perfectly. Anyway we had to point to the date on the calendar and write down the time etc to get the tickets. I was a bit worried that we had bought 4th class or something (they have that here, must be standing room only or maybe sittin on the roof!) but luckily they are 2nd class.

The Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood is probably the most Russian thing we have seen so far, its a Moscow-style church as opposed to the other European ones here in St Petersburg. It has the multi-coloured onion shaped domes like the Kremlin, and the inside is completely covered in mosaics of bible scenes on the ceilings, walls, columns, arches and even the floor. Very impressive indeed.

Yesterday we went to the Hermitage museum which is so big I can't even begin to describe it. It houses around 3 million exhibits!!! We spent six hours in there non-stop and probably saw less than half of it. There is some incredible stuff in there, mostly European art, with work by Da Vinci, Raphael, Rembrandt, Cellini, Picasso among others. The building itself used to be the winter palace of the Tsars (Russian monarchy) so the rooms are as impressive as any of the art they now display. One room, aptly named the Gold Room, is covered floor to ceiling in gold, there are also several huge halls with thrones and massive chandeliers. It is all very impressive indeed. I think its fascinating that when we think of Russia we think of poverty, corruption and oppression all because of communism but even during the communist era Russia had all these incredible treasures which no one in the west really knows about.

Ok today it rained, all day long, its still raining now. We were gonna go to the fortress but it closes on Wednesdays so we had a little peek at the outside then went to the Kunstkamera instead. It was the first ever Russian museum, opened by Peter the Great and houses his collection of 'monsters'. These are basically deformed foetuses preserved in jars for anatomical study. There are Siamese twins, babies with their legs fused together, babies with one eye and loads of other pretty gross and disturbing babies. There is also a skeleton of a two headed calf. This was all a bit much
really but Peter was very proud of it and acquired all these things in the interests of science so I spose its ok... The rest of the museum is dedicated to ethnography (the study of different cultures) so it has exhibitions on Eskimos, Venezuelan tribesmen, Mongolians, Japanese and Indian peoples. It was quite interesting but really nothing to do with Russia.

I expect we will see a lot more of the real Russia in Moscow as it is the original capital. St Petersburg is incredible and so different in a lot of ways but a lot of it is very similar to Europe. Anyway I gotta run coz i'm runnin out of time.

Catch u all later

Adam