Trip

18/9/2002 St Peterburg, Russia! (Phill)

18/9/2002 St Peterburg, Russia! (Phill)

Yeah baby! Russia.... So we made it, no real problems getting here. Wow is St Peterburg cool. Well, cool isnt the right word, its actually very intimidating, every building is grand and formidable. When we arrived it was raining so Lindha, John and I walked in the rain. I had drawn a lovely map on my wrist so I could avoid looking like a tourist as we walk. Russia is pretty notorious for backpackers getting in serious trouble, either with the police or just bad people. I heard all sorts of stories in Finland
from people coming the other way, most of them involved the police threating backpackers into giving them money. Luckily theres three of us so that helps.

We found our hostel, but when we arrived the building was pitch dark. We walk in a halway from the street and I can hear a lady talking to me but I cant see her cause of the lack of light. Wehn iget closer theres basically jsut this pale white head floating in front of me (she was wearing dark clothing which I couldnt see). Totally crazy. We eventually managed to fumble the meaning of her Russian and foudn the hostel nestled away on the fourth floor. John and I agreed this is exactly how we expected a Russian building to look like: high ceilings, cold rooms, and echos.... Lindha is in the girls dorm and john and I bumped into one of the aussies I knew in the boys dorm.

After dumping off our stuff we headed (is that a word?) out to the Mikhail Castle. Navigating roung St Petes is dead easy, big, wide streets, the only problem is trying to read the Russian street names. e found the castle, except it was closed for renovations. So we moved on and found th giant Russian Museum. Basically a massive art gallery, it was full of Russian paintings. Not really my scene, but it was still impressive. At this point I was pretty starved so we hunted down a Georgian resteraunt that the Lonely Planet book recommended. Not bad food, bit oily, but it filled me up.

We found a 'department store' but not erally. Remember the old movies where people walked in a store and stood behind a counter. They would ask teh storekeep for what they wanted and he's climb a ladder behind him and pull things off the shelf... yeah they still use that here.......... The store we were in was not aimed at ordinary Russians (we spent their weekly salary on chocolate and drinks) but more at the old communist beaurocrats. Lots of Caviar and imported Western goods, although we cheaped out and bought Russian chocolate. Big mistake..... Not good, it tasted kinda like Hersheys, so hardly high quality. :)

Most important impression of Russia so far?: the woman are georgous!! John seems to think its the eyes, but I think it's the attitude. They all seem to be totally unavailable, but in a wierd way, available at the same time. Quite confusing. Anyway, any of the high school friends of mine will remember the Scotland scale and we've been using that all day!

Tomorrow we're headnig out to The Hermitage. It's a massive museum with 2.8million objects. According to the book if you even glanced at each object it would take over 9 years to see the whole collection................ Should be fun.

Our plan is to stay here for two nights and on the third night hop on an overnight train to Moscow, stay one night there and take a couple of overnight trains back to Helsink in order to make our flight on the 23rd back to London. Russia is cool so far. I'll send out another postcard batch tomorrow so if you havnt had one from me yet email me your address. Off to bed now...............