St.Petersburg

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We discovered that a night out in Riga is not a good idea, if you are facing a 14hour journey to St.Petersburg the following day. Especially not when you have to face dour Russian guards and the Russian border control at midnight that same evening who have no English, and throw random forms at you to fill in, which are completely in Russian.

Thankfully, a very helpful Russian man who had been on the bus with us managed to translate for us, and we somehow managed to make it through without being arrested or deported back to Ireland. He even went out of his way to bring us to the correct metro station for our hostel (which wasn't on his way) and came out of the station to point us in the right direction. Blessed, we were.

Arrived at the hostel owned by a big Russian man called Igor (typical, I know!). Turns out, we weren't to stay at the hostel itself, which was pretty central, but down a few dodgy streets off the main road and under an archway into someones back parking-area, into a musty back-entrance with a solid steel door. ... encouraging!

Sorted out our train tickets to Moscow with pigeon-Russian (thanks to Nick for all the help before I left!) which was very impressive considering the ticket lady had no English, but we bumbled through in the end by randomly stabbing at a calender, smiling and repeating "pazhalusta" and "spaseeba" (please and thankyou!).

Got the hang of the Russian cyrillic alphabet pretty quickly thanks to McDonalds - see picture attached! St.Petersburg was a very nice city, although thankfully with all the water frozen over there was no fear of us being stranded when the bridges are raised for the night as they are during the summer.

The Hermitage (which is the largest museum in the world with 3million pieces of art collection) was very impressive, if a little tiring, and I even got to taste the local "blini", which is a Russian potato-cake type of pancake, which was really good.

One thing that takes a bit of getting used to, is the blatent double pricing for tourists. Entry to the Hermitage was 350rubles (10euro) for tourists, but only 100rubles for locals. The sign is there in Russian for locals, with local prices, and in English for tourists. Unfortunately we couldn't pass ourselves off as Russian!

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Photos

Peter and Pauls Fortress
An artillery shell is fired here at 12pm every day.. scaring the bejaysus out of us!

Inside Hermitage
This was built as a copy of the Vatican halls