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So I have been incredibly terrible in adding blog posts and I am becoming dangerously close to forgetting everything that happened in Russia so I'm now just going to create a list of stuff that happened.
6 May St Petersburg:
The Germans went out on their own this day so the girls went to the State Hermitage for the morning. We lost Fairlie in the morning which was quite stressful: the queues were huge and she went away to see if she could buy from a machine, then she completely disappeared. Thankfully she reappeared just as we had got to the front of the queue - there's a cheeky hour wasted. The State Hermitage was absolutely massive, and some of the art was amazing. There was also a mummy in the Egyptian section which was completely unwrapped. I went a bit wibbly wobbly for a second but Suzanne barely blinked an eyelid: herein lies the difference between the professional life of a lawyer and a police detective...
We wandered around the museum for absolutely ages, then when we nearly passed out from exhaustion we staggered into a pasta restaurant, was not nice. Then we took a walk, up
to the Church of the Spilled Blood, where we tried on all the hats in the world - I nearly bought a rabbit fur hat which was ridiculously cool but then realised that I would have to carry it around summertime China so had to leave it there! We didn't actually go into the church, but the outside looked like something from Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory. Pretty cool.
In the evening, Pallavi arrived.
Can't remember anything else about this day. I'm sure it'll come back to me. I'm going to have to do a catch up post at some point.
7 May St Petersburg/Train
The group went out for the morning to get a tour bus around the city but I had to do my pointless assessment with Live the Language (my language school in Beijing) - I had tried to explain that it was probably pointless to assess my Chinese as I literally knew two words at this point but I still had to stay in all morning for a 5 minute interview during which I said 'no I haven't ever learnt Chinese before' and the lady at the other end showed me the textbook
that I would be using and then said 'see you in 2 weeks'! The most awkward part of this was that there were people sleeping in my room when I was supposed to be doing the interview so I had planned to speak to her in the lounge area. Except that when I came in I nearly sat on the head of a sleeping Spaniard who had apparently turned up before her bed was ready and fallen asleep on the sofa. Unfortunately there was absolutely nowhere else in the hostel that I could take the call so I ended up whispering into my tablet while wedged between the sofa and the fridge. Strange morning. Incidentally after nearly sitting on the sleeping girl, I then spent the rest of the morning sitting on the floor protecting her from other arses coming towards her face, like a strange guard.
In the afternoon Suzanne and I went to an English School to do conversation practice for one of Vladimir's friends who taught a class to adult learners. The school was in a quite dodgy area of town up some seedy stairs but was lovely inside. We had to take our shoes off and put on fluffy slippers, and the class was very small and friendly. I learnt some things about Russian culture, for example that when a boy turns 18 he cannot have an international passport until he has done his national service (so the boy in the class wanted to do foreign travel but could not because he didn't want to do national service, or because he couldn't do it, we weren't sure). We then talked a little about our countries (frankly a shamefully difficult task for me due to the aforementioned lack of knowledge relating to my country) which created a number of awkward moments when the students (and the teacher) didn't know the difference between England and Ireland and certainly had no idea at all of any of the history between the countries... Suzanne took this well but I could see the rage in her eyes! I suspect that the teacher then realised that the students knew very little about our part of the world and so so she asked us to draw up a little trivia quiz about our respective countries - as expected the students knew none of the answers to our questions, but we forgave them! We then went out for a quick dinner which was very tasty, and were shown a very strange youtube video by one of the more socially inept students which appears to be a propaganda video which starts off with cute nesting dolls wearing nice hats and things and then the nesting doll turns into a large weapon and is fired into the sky and the video talks about Russia not being afraid to fight - given the political environment at the time Suzanne and I just smiled and nodded with wide eyes. I will try to find it on youtube once I am no longer under the control of the Great Firewall. If you want to have a search I think it was called something along the lines of "Russia is.."
We then had to find our way to the opera as we had bought cheap cheap cheap tickets. The show was two short operas but we only had time to stay for the first which was Aleko by Rachmaninoff. We were relieved to see at the beginning that there was a screen above the screen that showed the English translation of the songs. However, as the show started, it quickly became clear that even with the English translation, we still had NO idea what was going on. I've just read the wikipedia synopsis and I now know what was happening. 2 months later. There were lots of gypsies and a wedding and then a woman tore the bride's dress off and then the crazy bride-stripping lady was mean to her husband and had an affair and then her husband killed them both. But it all sounded very nice. Then we got the bus back to the hostel to go to the train.
Vladimir had told us that the train we would get from St Petersburg to Moscow was the nicest we would see on the trip so we were all crossing our fingers that it was beautiful, and thankfully we were not disappointed. As we waited at the platform it chugged into the station and suddenly atmospheric and intrinsically Russian music started blasting through the speakers... Very exciting. We had fresh towels on our beds, and one and a half compartments. The girls took the full compartment and the valuables from the boys and then we sat and waited for the train to leave, then talked about our feelings about St Petersburg, giving our experience a mark out of 10. For the sake of good record keeping:
Suzanne: 7/10 ( later revised to 6/10)
Henrik: 6/10
Pallavi: 7/10
Niklas: 6/10
Fairlie: 6/10
Me: 6.5/10 (it seems I like to be awkward)
General notes: Clean, friendly sometimes, a little boring, not very European (the notes for the later cities are better, I was just getting into the swing of things leave me alone this is toomuchpressurewhydoyouexpectsomuchfromme)
I also took a video - this website won't let me add videos so here is a link if you are super duper interested vimeo.com/100221582
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