St-Petersburg Thursday

We are staying in a small hotel/apartment in the centre of St Petersburg. There are only three rooms and as yet we haven’t seen the other guests. There is a lovely Russian lady who prepares the rooms, welcomes guests, makes the breakfast and services the rooms before she leave around mid afternoon and returns next morning. She speaks no English whatsoever so we are very grateful to Cam for his limited Russian as he can converse with her adequately. She smiles a lot and talks to us even though we have no idea of what she is saying.

We have had to hand our passports into this Russian lady to have them presented to the Police for stamping. The Russian authorities insist that visitors to Russia obtain a passport prior to visiting, and then within three working days of arrival the passport must be presented to the Police for record purposes. Cam had planned on getting this done in Moscow but it all proved too difficult. He was unable to do it for us as he is a tenant and he would have had to ask him landlord to undertake the task and that was not easy to arrange. His plans had been to get his work to process our visas for us, as we are here on invitation from them (again another requirement – you must have an invitation to visit for a visa to be issued). He took our passports to work on Monday but for some reason by Tuesday afternoon they had not been able to get the necessary stamp. So our next and only hope was the hotel in St Petersburg and as we arrived on our third day time was a problem. Five hundred roubles each (around $25 each) and another twenty four hours and we now have our passports back with the required stamp. At least now we won’t have any problem if we are stopped by the Police and have the required stamp to exit Russia on Sunday, and we will not have a record against us if we wish to apply for another visa in the future. All very complicated, but then again, as Cam says, everything is complicated in Russia.

So far we have been really lucky – there are a lot of Police around, less in St Petersburg though than Moscow, and so far we haven’t been stopped and asked for our passports. We were a bit anxious when we only had a photocopy of our passports and visa and time was up for the stamping but we should be okay now.

Today we have been on a guided tour of part of the Hermitage Museum. Maria, our guide, was a young girl who is studying foreign languages at university and wants to be an English teacher. She is a registered guide of St Petersburg as a part time job as it allows her to practice her English regularly as she meets with English speaking tourists. She was certainly very knowledgeable of the museum. We went to the museum at 10 a.m. for the 10.30 a.m. open and fortunately were near the front of the queue. When Cam visited St Petersburg last January he said that the queue was hours long and it was minus 20 degs so he had changed his mind on a visit on that occasion.
The museum is huge and after discussions with Maria she was able to take us to various rooms and provide explanation. As there is an enormous collection of over three million items, 1057 rooms and some 117 staircases it would have been very easy to get hopelessly lost. We moved from Monet to Van Gogh to Rembrandt and numerous others in between including French, Italian, Russian, Spanish and Egyptian art. Neither Peter nor I have great knowledge of the arts and after four hours we decided to leave Cam and Maria to continue on without us.

This afternoon Peter has taken some time for sleep and after reading for a while I took myself off to wander the shops on my own. It was interesting but it was obvious that this part of the city only has elite shops with huge price tags. I certainly didn’t come back with shopping bags. You do not feel unsafe at all wandering the city on your own. There are lots of people about – hard to tell the percentage of locals to tourists but we are certainly in the minority. We don’t have to open our mouths for the locals to know that we are not from around here! I have noticed a few Asian tourists but nothing like the large groups we see visiting Australia and New Zealand.

Tonight we have a booking @ 9 p.m. for dinner on a replica Viking boat moored, or should I say, concreted into the river bank. It is about fifteen minutes walking from our apartment – our feet are constantly sore from so much walking and although we can rest for a while as soon as we are walking again the soreness comes on very quickly.
Fortunately my knee is holding together and not causing me any significant pain which is surprising considering the number of hours we have spent walking.
The public transport system is really interesting in St Petersburg just like it is in Moscow. There is the metro underground train system, then trolley buses which look as though they have welded together old pieces of steel, trams in similar condition, yellow vans with seats, with the name of the route displayed, which can be flagged down from anywhere with no particular stops, regular taxis and then the “Lada” system. If you want to go somewhere you just stand on to the road and wave down an oncoming vehicle. The majority of the vehicles which stop are Lada (hence the name) and you then negotiate a price for the ride. Around the city this is normally 100 – 200 roubles (between $5 and $10) and is a means of transport Cam often uses. However some Russian language is required as the drivers do not understand any English. On the evening we met Cam’s friends for dinner in Moscow, as we walked on to the main road from the restaurant we had at least seven cars pull up beside us on the road as they could see there was a crowd of us and potentially work for them. It was amazing. We certainly took a Lada trip home that night.