Saint Petersburg (original email)

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Hey Everybody,



Here’s a travel update from St. Petersburg. Firstly, Eric and I are alive (that’s the most important part). We crossed into Russia early Saturday morning after taking a 27 hour train ride from Warsaw, Poland which crossed through Belarus, Lithuania and Latvia before entering Russia. The border crossings were all quite easy actually and I was glad all of our paperwork was in order.



Poland was surprisingly beautiful by the way. If any of you have any inclinations to travel consider Poland (Krakow is one of the most beautiful and fun cities I’ve ever been in).



So, now we’re in St. Petersburg. This city is absolutely gigantic. We’ve spent 5 days here already and I’m sure we haven’t even seen half of it. The architectural style of all of the buildings is very different from the rest of Europe and they’re in the process of restoring some of the grandest buildings.



We’ve even learned how to read Cyrillic for the most part. We still don’t understand the words once we’ve read them but at least we can read it. People generally don’t speak too much English around here but they make a very good effort when we ask them in Russian if they can speak English (I think they appreciate the effort from a couple of Canadsky’s).



We’ll be taking off to Murmansk tomorrow (look that up in your Atlas, I think you’ll be notably impressed at its proximity to the Arctic Ocean). From there it’s on to Moscow from where we should be able to check and send more messages. Please feel free to send us something but don’t include this address in mailing lists with big joke files and stuff because it’ll overflow after a couple Meg and it’ll cost us lots of cash because we pay by the minute/hour.



Canada Direct doesn’t work worth a damn from here so I’d like to ask a few folks below to do a few favours for me.



Jason: Can you please print off this message and give it to my mom and dad or call or fax them to let them know that I’m ok and I can’t call.



Kimmy: Can you try to do the same with Ann. And also can you send me her contact info in B.C. because as I said I can’t call and I’d like to try to fax her or at least send her a letter there.



Bobby: just keep being you.







Lots of Love.



Gerry & Eric

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