Day 1 St-Petersburg

Cam had a car ordered to pick us up from his place at 7:45 to go to the airport to catch a 10:10 flight to St-Petersburg. A fairly uneventful ride to the airport really – well that is if you consider that my seatbelt didn’t work and the driver at least in my opinion had been to the same driving school as me only thing additional that they taught him was that to duck and weave at high speed should get you there earlier, me I am not to sure about that just thought thank heavens Garey ain’t in the car with us.

Russian airports are really quite strange places considering that they are the gateway. They are generally untidy and the runway has the old planes that they either no longer require or have broken down in times past, parked or pushed into the grass besides them. All that said the plane that we flew on certainly left on time and arrived on time this end so I guess that at least is a benefit.

Ok, arrived in St-Petersburg and once again a car had been ordered so after a few minutes wait we were met by a reasonably new Mercedes Benz, driven to town to our hotel and now the great St-Petersburg part of the trip starts. Ok for those of you who don’t know this city was named by Peter The Great after his patron saint St-Peter who was conveniently named the same as both him and for that matter me!! Peter the Great however was not like me – he was a very tall man in stature some 2.4 meters high in fact.

The city was built on the old swamplands that he arranged to have drained when he decided that as a nation they needed a navy therefore to have a navy then they need a port, interesting eh! However in things typical of the day human life was cheap and the cost of the port in human terms was some 30,000 plus lives.

In the Second World War St-Petersburg was under siege by the Germans for some 872 days often referred to as the 900 day siege. Now if you want some real interesting facts then cop this lot, at the peak of the siege they had 30,000 people die in one day of starvation, the food rations were rationed to 125 grams of bread per day and this bread was made of a mixture of flour and sawdust. They boiled their belts to soften them so that they could chew them, the city became devoid of domestic animals and rats became non existent as they were eaten. At the height of the siege they started eating the dead. To my understanding the rat population remains depleted to this day.

Ok so that’s my little bit at this stage apparently we are just about to go wandering around the city so will fill you in later on the others things that may or may not be of interest.