Rossiya Hotel - Novgorod

... service/ smiles- I think this may actually be shocking at first but really I am excited to just see people smile in general. I am excited to go to a store and not get scowled at when I try to buy a $5 item with a $20 bill. (Here if you buy something for 200 rubles with 1000 ruble note almost always you will be asked for exact change and frowned at if you don't have it.)

5. Familiarity - Finally, I can't wait to be in a place where I am comfortable ...

Only a week and a half left in St. Petersburg and I am filled with a strange feeling of excitement to finally be home and panic that I haven't see all the Petersburg museums on my list!

Thursday I finally got to the Nabokov museum here. Nabokov is a well-known Russian-American writer most famous for his controversial book, Lolita. I really love his style of writing perhaps because his multilingual background (French ...

... s d'une foreuse manuelle pour faire des trous... interessant ! Nous regrettons de ne rester que 1 journée chez Macha et Genia, car ils sont tellement charmants ! Ils sont fan de culture et de musique francaise, et ils apprennent tous les deux le francais a une vitesse impressionante. Ils nous arrangent meme notre logement pour notre prochaine etape a Iekaterinbourg chez une copine a eux. En ...

... de la place, le sul que j'avais trouve proposait des chambres a 5000 roubles (140 Euros), j'ai senti une pointe de lassitude poindre, avant de finalement trouver un hotel tout pourris, pour seulement 2000 roubles, c'etait ca ou bien je tentais la gare (option non retenue). Le lendemain, visite du Kremlin de la ville, le temps ne s'ameliore pas et j'ai gagne un etat grippal.

... was heavily bombed & destroyed by Nazi occupation in WWII. It would have remained a mess if Putin hadn't arrived. He invested money there only after kicking out the Mafia element. I had this lovely short lady taking me on a walking orientational tour. Although I had taken a night train to the city with little sleep I perked up when she arrived at 10am. We wondered the sights and I enjoyed the history lesson.

... the monastery, or if it was open to the public so we headed back to the hotel. The next day, we were planning on going to another monastery some 60km down the river Volga but no boats were running on the Saturday. So we wondered around the city some more and found this small church up one of the many hills. There we met a lovely girl who spoke good English and she offered us tea and bread. She explained that the 2nd ...

... http://wikitravel.org/en/Nizhniy_Novgor od http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nizhniy_No vgorod http://www.waytorussia.net/TalkLounge/

... all about competition. Our friends stab each other in the back. And there's homeless people everywhere. They all like Putin. The idea that his successor would step down to allow him to run again caused them to have a fit of laughter. Otherwise, they don't really care about politics or voting. Putin has the support and he hasn't done anything too stupid yet, so why worry about it. They also told us Moscow was a ...

Nizny Novgorod was not stop we planned in the beginning, but was recommended by people we met and Tim wanted to see the Volga of the Boatmen. It was a very nice town with lots of nice looking churches and a kremlin on top of the hill. A girl in Mcdonalds seemed surprised that tourists would come to Nizny Novgorod but its a nice spot. We arrived in the morning and booked the train to go that night (saves accomodation!) so had a day to wander.

... Monument. As we were walking through the Kremlin it started to spit out, and then started to rain and then started to pour! We hid under an archway near a beach for the worst of it, and then headed back to the bus. It looked like there was a great market in front of the Kremlin, but unfortunately it shut down because of the rain. We were brought back to the hotel and had time to go to the communist grocery store before supper. This was quite the experience! The food ...