Never knowingly taking the shorter route

Ok, so where was I? Oh yea, freaks.

So the first day in St Petersburg got off to a bit of a bad start, though the sleep deprivation probably didn’t help. Over the next couple of days we saw the various sights of St Petersburg. These include galleries, statues, churches and so on. The thing with St Petersburg is that everything was build from about 1750 to about 1850 and its all baroque and gilt and, well, a bit tacky, really. Its also like they’re trying to pretend that because this wasn’t the capital during communism then it had nothing to do with them. They like to spend their time thinking its still 18th century.

Got the train to Moscow. They play crazy music on the speakers. Luckily it stops after a while, but there is no volume control. Hope thats not the case on the trans-siberian. A much better start in Moscow - got the metro to the hostel with no problems, had a nice wander around, managed to get food and stuff, the hostel has a really good atmosphere. So over the last 2.5 days we’ve seen St Basils, the Kremlin (which is full of churches), Lenin, loads of communist statues, and a modern orthodox church. Quite fun. One thing that has dawned on us, though, is that Russians really hate tourists. They seem quite a non-smiling, taciturn bunch, and everyone fleeces tourists, but they seem to want to punish you for being a tourist. They blatantly have different prices for Russians - even on official things; they refuse to help, even when you really try to speak their language and read there crazy letters; they won’t smile, even when they are working in the service industry, I mean isn’t that the point?

Don’t get me wrong, Russia isn’t all bad, but their attitude really stinks. They need to embrace tourism and just smile occasionally. They also need to accept that they were communist, not just hide it. I mean Berlin can do that with Hitler, surely they can.

Anyway, now I’ve got 6 days on a train, see you later!

First day and a bit in St Petersburg. When we arrived Emily and me were a bit frazzled from a couple of nights on a train being woken up in the middle of the night for various reasons. Emily was also coming down a bit ill. I think that might have given us a bit of a bad first impression for the city.

The first problems were that at the Station no-one would point to it on a map. You see, rather than having one major train station it has about 4. And our tickets didn’t bother informing us of which one we were going to. All people were wanting to do was put us in a taxi. So, eventually we got a taxi with the nice couple we met on the train to their expensive hotel and because we knew where that was we could find our way to the hostel. They paid so it was OK, really. Well, I say OK, I mean we almost died several times on the way die еще he freakish drivers.

Next we got to our hostel, fairly uneventfully, and then went out and looked for some internet and breakfast. It seems that at about 7 in the morning all the people are drunk and the only places open are off-licenses. We found internet but couldn’t find food. Eventually we went into a cafe and stood around while they looked at us. Eventually they decided to serve us and we chose some pancakes. There was jam in front of it so we put some jam on it. The pancakes turned out to be filled with carrot and onion. Nice.

We spent the rest of the day looking round the sites and eating and stuff. Likewise today.

There are several other freaky things to come, but my internet is about to run out. Suffice it to say that there is a pretty long list.

More later.

Ok, I’m now in St Petersburg. Currently waiting to be let into the hostel at 11. Least we have a place to stay. We hadn’t really thought about it til we opened the guidebook on the train and saw that booking ahead was strongly advised in summer. Oh well, it seems to have worked out.

Anyway, Berlin was really nice. I had a fantastic time there. In the morning we saw loads of the local sights, including going up a massive tower to look over the whole of Berlin. For lunch we had sausages and schnitzel. In the afternoon it was hot so we walked around the zoo, which is basically a big park, then in the evening we had a meal in a local pub with really nice beer. I had goulash. On the Tuesday we went to the Reichstag and wandered around a fair bit.

Later we boarded a train to St Petersburg. It was pretty soviet - all velvet and musty-smelling. For the most part there were only us and a middle-aged couple from Winchester on the carriage, so we chatted a bit. The train went through Poland and Beleraus. When we got to Orsha in Beleraus we were told that there would be a one hour wait while we were shunted around. We all got off - then as we were taking pictures they shunted the carriage off with all our stuff in it. We were then told to go and wait somewhere. Eventually they shunted it past us and then the other way then past us again. Cue four very English people striding up and down the station platform like fools. Definitely Englishman abroad. Eventually we clambered over the tracks to get on the train then sat around for another hour waiting.

Eventually we pulled into St Petersburg, and though a contrivance of taxis with the other English and a metro we managed to get where we were going. Emily has already been chatted up by a drunken Russian, so things are pretty much as we expected. It is pretty disconcerting not being even able to pronounce the words, but we’re surviving.

I’ve put some photos up too.