St Petersburg

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Hello!

Well we managed to survive the border crossing into Russia without any hitches - the border formalities only took about 90 minutes, which I'm told is very quick with some reporting up to 9 hours waiting around. I guess it wasn't quite as scarey as I had feared/hoped. There were no brash russian guards carrying sub machineguns and barking things menacingly in russian, only the usual selection of stoney faced passport officers. I was praying that nothing went wrong because we were very nearly the only people on the bus that spoke any english at all - the bus driver just brushed us off if we tried to ask him a question.

We were warned about the russian roads but we hadn't quite imagined just how bad they are. As soon as we crossed the border the roads suddenly changed from smooth and well maintained to having huge holes and cracks in the tar-seal causing the bus to have to swerve right accross the road to avoid time and time again and producing the king of vibration you normally reserve for off-road rally driving. Fortunately it slowly got better as we approached St Petersburg.

St Petersburg is not exactly english-friendly to say the least. Only half the people speak any english and those that do are just getting by. There are almost no signs in english and the bus stop might as well have been in the middle of the ocean for all the use it did us. Eventually after much map consultation, about 5km of rain, some speculation about whether our hostel was in fact being torn down by a wrecking crew and finally locating it behind a locked gate, through a courtyard, through another locked steel door, up two flights of stairs and through yet another locked door, we finally began to relax. Have you seen the movie 'Nightwatch'? Then you have a fairly good idea what our hostel building is like... very soviet shall we say, although quite nice once you actually got inside.

The city is quite pretty and once you get the hang of the place it's not too hard to navigate. We did some famous landmark spotting, dumb touristing, getting run over by the maniak drivers and saw some more cool buildings. We followed this up with a cruise on the canals and a meal at a local russian restaurant recommended by our canal cruise guide. There was live music, bear skins on the wall and real beef strogonoff on our plates. Awesome day.

Tomorrow we might head off to The Hermitage, which is supposed to be a massive collection of massively awesome museums, or head out to Peterhoff gardens, which is a dozen hectares of fountains and gardens and is supposed to be amasing.

I doubt we'll get another chance to write more before we get to Shanghai if not home. Photos probably will have to wait until we get home, sorry.

Anyway, with luck we get out of Russia with as much ease as we got in. Fingers crossed.

Catch you soon.
Nigel

PS: I'll write up the Norway, Finland and Estonia sections later with I have time.

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