White Nights in St Pete > Moscow

Before we get into the actual trip to St Petersburg, let me share an email I received 1 day before I arrived, from the apartment we booked:

"Hello Tristan.  We would  like to inform you concerning the address of  apartment: Bldg.11, Millionnaya str., Metro station –Nevsky Prospect ( ул.Миллионная, д 11.,станция метро- Невский проспект, поблизости находится Эрмитаж и Дворцовая площадь),- Russian version, just in case. You should go to this address (This is not the address we made a reservation for). We also inform you concerning the rule of the payment in our apartment service: When You check-in  you should pay for the whole period of your stay. Temporarily we had to ask you to pay by cash because of changing the system of terminal (credit card) machine"

Does that sound sketchy or what???  They are asking us to move to a different location I have no idea about (20 minutes away on foot), there is no longer a jacuzzi or karaoke bar (2 PRIME selling points of the first apartment), and we have to pay 100% of the bill upon arrival, in cash????   I have to be honest...at this point, I was REALLY nervous. I mean, this is Russia! I figured this new place would be a dump, far away from everything, we'd pay the cash up front, a bunch of things would go wrong, and then we'd never hear from the people again. I even considered that maybe it wouldn't even be their apartment building...and some innocent owners would come home to find 7 tourists with stuff all over their apartment.

When I finally got to St Pete, I couldn't deal with it. The woman told me to meet her at "new" place at noon, and I'd check it out then.  It was only 6am. I had 6 hours to kill before making any decisions.  At least she was nice enough to answer the phone at 6am.

I walked around for about 2 hours with my suitcase and computer backpack, taking in what turns out to be a BEAUTIFUL city. There are clean streets, nice architecture, and canals and rivers, like a mix of Amsterdam and Prague. Basically opposite of Moscow. And I've never been to Venice, but people also compare it to that (by the way, I will be in Venice in 2 weeks, so you'll hear about it soon).



Canal welcoming me to the city, which got this trip off to a good start

After becoming familiar with the layout of the city (including realizing that the new apartment was in an even better location than the first place!), I was too tired to walk any further. I found a nice park bench, where I took my shoes off, had some breakfast (whatever I could find in my backpack), and took a nice little nap. There were a few happy-looking bums a few benches down from me, so I knew this was a good place to sleep. There was also a motorcycle gang riding around the park (at 8am), but they didn't bother me. They were probably scared of me since I was all dirty and smelly coming off the overnight train.

Finally it was time for guests to start arriving.  Patrizia was first.  She's an Italian friend who lives in Warsaw. We met at one of the networking events I go to once in a while, and when she heard we were planning a trip to St Pete, she joined in without hesitation. After she arrived, we went to the apartment, to meet Olga, the woman who sent me the scary email above. We decided that the apartment was perfectly fine for us, and because of it's location, it wouldn't be worth putting up a fight. I was able to talk Olga out of making us pay 100% cash up front, and she became flexible and just said "pay whatever you want now, and we'll collect the rest when you check out". That made me feel much better, and in the end, we were all very happy with it.  Olga turned out to be very nice and accomodating...even though her email was so scary. 

Next to arrive was Natalia. Natalia is Romanian, but has lived in Warsaw for several years. She is fluent in Polish, as well as Russian, and 3 or 4 other languages, including Female and Alien, which blows my mind. We're lucky we had her on this trip, because she spoke to everyone in Russian for us. The other friends who stayed with us were Cristina (also Romanian), Jessica and Nick (married English-ish couple), and American Kate, who you met during my Barcelona trip. We also met up with Alena (Russian friend who lives in Warsaw), as she was visiting St Pete with her family for her birthday. My Latvian friend Irina had flights and train tickets booked to join us, but a snafu with her visa prevented it.  So all in all, there were 7 of us in the apartment, 5 girls and 2 guys. 

Most of our trip consisted of sightseeing and eating...which is perfect for me. The great part about this group is that everyone had a few things in mind that they wanted to do, but everyone was also flexible. We agreed on a few things, but other than that, people were free to do something together, or go out on their own. This worked out great because some of us (not saying who) had a hard time waking up to get going in the morning.

Peterhof, Peter the Great's Summer hang out

Watching the bridges open at 2am (notice the "sunset"?)



The Alexander Column, which was near our apartment, is apparently the highest free-standing column in the world (about 155 feet). In other words, is not super-glued down! How do they get it to stay up??? Supposedly it took 3,000 men to put it in place. It hasn't fallen in 175 years, but I still stayed at least 156 feet away from it at all times.

Hermitage Museum, with the Alexander Column

The Church on Spilled Blood offers the type of architecture you tend to think of when it comes to Russian Cathedrals.  The truth is that it's really the only one of its kind in St. Pete.  Moscow has many more of these.  The Church gets its name from the fact that it was built in memory of Alexander II, on the spot where he was assassinated. 

Church on Spilled Blood

Of course, part of the reason for some late mornings is that we went to bed so late. With the White Nights, it was hard to feel tired. The sun never TRULY went down. At 2 or 3am, it would be kind of dark, but you could still see the sun on the horizon, as if it went from sun-set straight to sun-rise, without any true night-time in between.

At 9pm, you really do need sunglasses

Church on Spilled Blood after midnight



For food, we generally ate breakfast at home (bought stuff at the corner market), ate lunch wherever we were sightseeing, then organized a group dinner every night.

Cristina making breakfast (or a snack)

A really funny hot dog (not my best meal, but the best picture!)

Our dinners were really good. One night was a fusion place with a great view of the city (Terrassa), one night was a nice Asian-inspired place for Alena's birthday, and the last night we ate at a Georgian place, and I fell in love with Georgian food. And I am talking about the country, not the dirty South. Georgian food has a lot of meat, but also a lot of breads and vegetables that are very hearty and flavorful. Unfortunately I didn't get a lot of good pictures of the food, because it was gone within 3 seconds of getting placed on the table.

My Georgian meal (but the best were the appetizers!)

Some other observations:

- Girls wear skimpy skirts and high heels EVERYWHERE - to lunch, to museums, even to go sightseeing where you have to walk on cobblestone. They also do "photo-shoots" everywhere, posing like they are professional models - in front of castles, statues, and probably even McDonalds. The girls I was with had a good time making fun of all the styles (including leopard print everything on girls from 13-80), but I didn't mind the outfits, if you know what I mean.

Somewhat familiar, but also not.  I will never get used to the Cyrillic

- The airport in St Pete is small and crowded, and very contradictory. There's enough people where it took me 100 minutes to check in for the flight, but small enough that when I went through the security line, it took only 1 minute, and the same guy that checked my ID, ran around the x-ray machine to frisk me after I went through. I guess it says something about the process...

- When they say "First floor", it's the "Ground floor" just like it is for us in the US. "First floor" in the rest of Europe seems to be one above ground level. This was especially confusing in the museums, because in English it would say something was on the "1st floor", but in Russian, you could see it say "2nd floor".

- The Metro stations still use people to sell tickets/tokens for the Metro, rather than having automated machines. Some stations have a couple machines, but still have more clerks than machines. In one station, I saw over 20 windows to buy Metro tickets, but ZERO automated stations. Maybe it's something leftover from Commmunist times, when everyone had a job.
- One small thing that stood out to me was something that happened when we went into the Hermitage museum.  A few of us were late getting there, but Patrizia had the tickets and went early.  She was able to leave the tickets at the information desk, with a woman employee.  This was clearly outside of protocol, as we were the only ones that had tickets waiting there.  But the woman was very happy to help, and this made me realize that the generealizations I have made in the past (about service and people in Russia) can't be applied to everyone.  Or maybe it's just different in St Pete?

Overall, this was a great trip. If you ever go to Russia for any reason, make sure you go to St Petersburg. And hopefully it's during White Nights. I guarantee it will change any negative feeling you had towards Russia (ahem...Moscow) into one of appreciation and enjoyment.  I know, because that's what happened to me.