Cold Feet in St Petersburg
Trip Start
Jan 26, 2008
1
10
36
Trip End
Feb 29, 2008
Saint Petersburg,
Russia
Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Horse in the street
The St Petersburg Metro seems to run along similar lines to the Moscow Metro. Pay on entering and then ride as far as you like before exiting, all for less than a dollar a time. The only major difference was that in addition to magnetic cards similar to those we used in Moscow, you can also use brass tokens about the size of a ten cent piece to get you through the turnstiles. We purchased ten tokens and immediately used the first two to get us to our next stop. We made it up to the street, it was snowing and still quite dark, and tried to get our bearings. After one false start we headed off in the direction of our Hostel, dragging our luggage with us as we headed along Nevsky Prospect, the main avenue through the heart of St Petersburg. We fond the correct sidestreet and located the right number building and entered through a tunnel like opening into the buildings courtyard. Here we were able to spot a sign directing us to 'Zimmer Nice,' the place we wanted to be. Olga let us in and showed us to our room where we settled in with a nice hot shower and a bit of a rest before embarking on the next phase of of trip.The first objective, once we were settled in, was to secure ourselves train tickets to get us on our way to Berlin. Our Russian visas expire on the 7th of February so we need to make sure nothing interferes with our getting out of the country so we do not run afoul of the local authorities
Peter the Great again (I think)
. Our plan is to take a train from St Petersburg to Riga in Latvia where we will get the first of our many EasyJet flights through Europe. We had been told that it should be fine for us to book our train to Riga once we arrived in St Petersburg and I was determined to ensure that we got it done straight away as we must catch the train on the evening of the 6th to make it to Riga in time to catch our connecting flight to Berlin. Before I left Melbourne I had checked the details of the train we wanted and I knew that it left St Petersburg in the late evening, arriving in Riga the next morning. We went to the train station which we thought the Riga trains left from and tried to find a ticket booth that would sell us a ticket. We finally noticed the cyrillic letters: ¬¬µ¬¤¬¡ above one of the ticket booths, the last three letters are equivalent to the English 'iga' so we managed to convince ourselves that we had found the right place. We managed to communicate our wants and needs to the young lady behind the glass window by writing out on a pad the date of departure, destination and the phrase 'second class tickets' using our phrasebook as our guide. This was fairly successful up to the point at which the cashier required our passports - we had left them at our hotel as they need to be registered at each of the places you are staying in Russia. The Hotel/Hostel is required to return your passport within 24 hours. As we did not have our passports our ticket buying was at an end for the time being but we were at least confident that when we returned we would know were to go and how to go about getting our tickets
Belle at the Engineering Museum
. We spent the rest of the day wandering St Petersburg seeing some of the many sights of this magical city. The city is situated on former marsh land and now has a series of canals crisscrossing the it. There is magnificent architecture just about everywhere you look with royal palaces, mansions, theaters and ornate churches everywhere. During our wanderings we came across a circus theatre. We tried to get tickets only to find that in St Petersburg as well as Moscow there are no circus performances in the first week of February - perhaps there is a circus performers convention this week?
One of the funniest things we saw was the ducks in the canal. At one point w came across dozens of ducks all congregated together either sitting on the ice or swimming in the icy waters of one of the canals, I was cold just looking a the ducks but they did not seem to mind getting cold feet as the waddled across the ice in search of food or swam busily the water - ducks are obviously made of sterner stuff than I, as there is no way you are getting me in that water at this time of year. We have both managed to stay upright all day although Belle had a few moments were she was in danger of hitting the ground but I managed to catch before she completely lost her footing, As we wandered Marsovo Pole, however, we did note that many of the usual inhabitant of St Petersburg were not so lucky
Street Vista (Church on Spilled Blood)
. We saw five or six people hit the deck in the space of about 15 minutes. The area we were walking in is not sweep or salted and the polished stone walkway had a half to one centimetre thick layer of ice covering it. The ice was in turn covered by a light layer of snow. We have found that it is usually much safer to walk on the snow as you tend not to lose your grip, however, this area was particularly treacherous as the snow looked like it was safe to walk on but the layer of ice was lurking just below and this caused many a person to come to grief.Through our meandering we came across the St Petersburg open air souvenir bazaar. We stocked up on a few last Russian souvenirs - a Matryoshka Doll with scenes of St Petersburg, to compliment our Matryoshka doll with scences of Moscow. We also got some amber jewellery, as the area near St Petersburg holds some of the worlds largest deposits of Amber. We both got very cold at the market, so after that we headed indoors for a hot drink and some more Borscht. By contrast to the Borscht we sampled in Moscow, todays Borscht had some meat in it but was otherwise just as tasty and warming as last time we tried it. It was starting to get dark by this time so we began making our way back to the Hostel. On the way we came across another massive bookshop which we decided to explore. We picked up some postcards, a book of Russian Fairytales in English and a Russian cookbook, also in English
Ducks on Ice
. When we find the St Petersburg post office we plan to send a load of books back to Australia by surface mail to save us lugging them with us through the rest of Europe.After a pit stop back at the hostel, where we regained out passports, we headed back out to the train station to buy our tickets to Riga. We went back to the ticket counter and found the same lady still on duty, She recognized us and so in fairly short order we had two tickets to ¬¬µ¬¤¬¡. It was about this time that something that had been bothering me about the whole process finally worked its way to the surface. The first letter of the destination we were heading for was the equivalent of the English letter L. So we had just bought two tickets to Liga. The tickets were also a couple of hundred dollars less that we had been expecting to pay for them. Alarm bells were now ringing very loudly so we did some frantic double checking. We found another sign board on which we were able to identify the place name: ¬²¬ª¬¤¬¡ - 'Riga'. We went to the cashier associated with these destinations and were able to confirm that this was what we wanted, tickets to Riga in Latvia, not Liga somewhere in Russia. After purchasing our second set of train tickets and paying something close to what we had originally been excepting we wondered what to do about the Liga tickets. We went back to the longsuffering cashier at the original ticket counter, wrote in Russian the words 'mistake', 'Riga not Liga', and 'can we get a refund' on our pad, passed it to her and threw ourselves at her mercy
Heat Haze at Mars Field
. She obliged us and returned the money we had paid for two useless tickets to somewhere we did not want to go. Feeling very lucky that we had realised our mistake now and not in three days time as we were pulling in to Liga, we headed off to find some dinner.Our guide book had recommended 'ili' as a place to try for dinner or a snack so we headed back to Nevsky prospect and located the restaurant. The place was quite hip and happening and had reasonably priced food so we settled in and Belle had a club sandwich and I tried a traditional Russian chicken dish, can't remember the name, which was very tasty. I also gave in a had a Vodka based drink, I felt I had to as I have now been in Russia for over a week and before tonight had not sampled any of the local beverage. After dinner we wandered back down Nevsky Prospect to the Hostel to settle in for the night ahead of visiting the Hemitage (err-mi-taj, 'taj' as in 'Taj Mahal') tomorrow.
Comments
that pesky cyrillic
Ahhhh could feel the tension of those moments, lining up again in the hope of receiving refund ....... got to love it!!! Very glad you ended up with tickets for 'Riga not Liga' ...... when Bop and I were in Switzerland we met someone on the train who had got on the wrong carriage on an overnight train (I think in Austria??) and part of the train split off onto a different track/direction during the night so he ended up waking up in the wrong country ....... took him two days to get back :o)