Although the sights, sounds and smells in St. Petersburg have been fantastic, we've found the most pleasure in the mundane transliterations of Russian words/signs. For example, take a look at the word 'pectopah'. In Russian, this is pronounced almost exactly as it is in English as 'restauran', since the 'p' is pronounced as an 'r', the 'c' is pronounced as an 's', and the 'h' is an 'n'. It's just spelled differently. In St. Petersburg, every corner has a pectopah and there is beer-selling bap on every corner (bap=bar, since the 'p' is an 'r'), so we've had great fun mangling the pronunciations at every opportunity. Unfortunately, the rest of the Russian alphabet isn't quite so easy to translate or mis-pronounce. Those silly Russians have actually added letters that have no entertaining English eqivalent,
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