St.Petersburg, Part 1

This is just a temporary comeback to my blog. I just got back from St.Petersburg and wanted to write down some things about the trip. I had wanted to visit St.Petersburg ever since I began to study at LUT because Russia is so close to Lappeenranta. Students Unions of LUT, Joensuu and Tampere organize trips in cooperation with this travel agency mainly for exchange students. Tuija and I decided to join the trip, as well, so we spent the past 4 days traveling in Russia...

Thursday 10.4.

I went to the uni already at 8.30am to give a speech at an orientation for outgoing Finnish exchance students. Juulia and I were asked to give a short presentation about living and studying in a foreign country. We had prepared a powerpoint show and told about being abroad in general and tried to give some good tips. Our favorite part of the presentation was the end: We showed some pictures from Australia :) Going through all the pictures made me really miss all the good times in Australia and I felt like traveling again! So it was perfect timing for our St.Petersburg trip. I rushed to the uni lobby right after the presentation. There were only 6 other students from LUT taking part in the trip so we shared a bus with people from Joensuu. They came to pick us up and we headed towards the boarder of Russia.

It was my first time visinting Russia and I was expecting to spend many hours at the boarder, but all the formalities went suprisingly smoothly. Our passports were checked a couple of times; an officer came to our bus. We had sent our passports to the Russian Assembly before the trip to get visas, that were stamped at the boarder. After crossing the boarder the did a quick stop to change money to buy some groceries for lunch. Then we continued our journey until...bang! Our left tyres were broken on the bumpy road. All we could do was to stop and call for help. Fortunately another bus, full of students from Tampere, was driving right behind us and ten of us were asked to move to that bus. Tuija and I were among them, which ended up being a good decision. The others left behind were picked up by a Russian bus a couple of hours later and they didn´t arrive to the hotel until late. The bus driver had a long night getting new tyres changed, but the bus was fixed by the following day.

As we approached St.Petersburg we could see some neighbourhoods with crappy houses and kinda dirty surroundings. The area looked pretty grey and to be honest I wouldn´t choose to live there. There were some brand new houses with large windows, too. It looked funny having those crappy and posh houses right next to each other - but you could notice the poor and rich combined everywhere else, too. There were both new expensive cars (especially city jeps) and some Ladas that looked like they could break down any moment. Due to the traffic it took us quite long to drive the last 5km to our hotel, Hotel Sovitskaya. Being used to staying at cheap hostels the hotel was a great suprise :) Tuija and I had our own room with comfy beds (I just loved sleeping on a proper, soft bed!), own bathroom and TV. Our view was to one of the smaller rivers - very nice indeed.


St. Petersburg


An old building


I found my dream car lol.

We were given an option to sign up for some additional activities, and Tuija and I decided to take part in this Russian dinner that night. Because the others being left with the broken bus didn´t arrive until later our departure for the dinner was postponed till 9.30pm. We had time to walk to a nearby cafe for cappucino. It was a cousy place, where we sat for a while drinking coffee. We tested our newly-learned Russian speaking skills - Spasiba means Thank You - but the waitress pretty much laughed at us :) We met at the hotel lobby and drove to this restaurant at a shopping mall. That´s where we met our local guide, Nina. Our other guides, Kaisa and Mikko, were students from Tampere. We sat at long tables and were served a Russian dinner. For appetisers we got salad with rice, peas and apple - my favorite part of the meal. For main course we had traditional Russian beef soup, potatoes and chicken topped with cheese and mushrooms. We got also lots of bread and each table shared a few bottles of vodka. It reminded me of sitsit, except we had a lot less alcohol. This group consisting of 2 ladies and 2 men performed us some tradtional Russian dances and songs, which was entertaining. They played some famous songs and invited us to take part in most of the games and dances. It was nice having them there :) The dinner ended right after midnight. Some people went to continue the night at a night club, but most of us headed back to the hotel to get some sleep.


Russian performance


Shots of Russian vodka

Friday 11.4.

We woke up at 8am and took the elevator up to the 18th floor, where breakfast was served. The view over the city was good over there! The buffee breakfast was so delicious :P I ate tons of croisants, outmeal, cheese, fruit, salad, cakes... The weather was rainy so we decided to spend the day mostly at museums. First we walked to the nearest subway station, where we tried to figure out how to buy tickets. None of the officials spoke English but one of them pointed us to the right direction when we showed her the map. We managed to buy tickets (that were actually coins) and took the train to the other side of Neva (the main river going through St.Petersburg). Then we walked along a nice street full of interesting looking shops, restaurants and cafes. It was kinda difficult knowing what was sold where, though, because most of the store windows were painted or covered and we couldn´t understand the Russian signs. So we just opened some doors and looked inside :) We also learned a few important words: cafe, subway and museum.


Russian fast food kiosk


The street with restaurants and shops

Anyways, our first destination was The Kunstkamera. It´s a big museum of natural sciences. There´re many ancient/really old things collected by travellers and scientists. The section we were most interested in was about abnormalities. There was a whole room full of embryos in glass bottles in clear liquid. Some of them were siamic twins, and the freakiest ones were connected from their heads. There were also kids heads in those bottles. I didn´t feel like eating anything right after that section! But there were other more beautiful things, as well, like old stuff from all over the World. We spent some hours in the museum before crossing Neva to the State Hermitage Museum. It´s the former Winter Palace built in the 18th century. Today it´s one of the worlds finest art museums with art by Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Picasso etc. We were most amazed by the architechture, though. The Russian Baroque style building is huge and every room is so glamorous! We walked ramdomly around for two hours but covered only a few sections of the whole museum. Every time we stepped to a new room we were amazed! Each room is designed with different colors: floors, walls and ceilings are made of marble and paintings and decorated with such style. There´re 2,7 million exhibits and someone told us that if you spent one minute admiring each piece of art you´d spend 11 years at the museum. We didn´t feel like seeing every single room and exhibit, so we decided it was time for lunch.


The Hermitage


Inside the Hermitage

Since it was still raining we didn´t feel like walking outside for too long. We found this nice looking restaurant that was Russian-Azerbaizan. I ordered a dish that sounded good on the menu - chicken, capsicum and potatoes - but it was swimming in fat so I didn´t end up eating much of it. Tuija´s chicken with mushrooms looked better. After lunch we walked to Newsky Prospekt, the main street in St.Petersburg. Our travel guide had told us about this market place so we went there and found some stores with relatively cheap prices. Most of the stuff was fake brand clothes but there were also some other brands. I bought only two pairs of "real" Calvin Klein - underwear. Since we weren´t far from our hotel we decided to walk there and found heaps of tempting looking clothing stores on our way there. Russia is the wonderland of shoes - we kept wondering how all the ladies can walk on such high heels, especially on the not-so-good streets - so if we had started to shop for them we wouldn´t have had time for anything else ;) Unfortunately we hadn´t time for more shopping because we had to get ready for the nights limousine ride...

After changing clothes we went downstairs to the hotel restaurant for dinner. I ate pasta filled with potatoes and onion and liked it better than my lunch. Our travel group met at the hotel lobby for limousine ride. Two limousines - one traditional and one jeep style - came to pick us up and drove us around the city centre for an hour and half. I had never been to a limo before so it was a fun experience: We sat there drinking champagne, listening to Russian pop music and enjoying the view. St.Petersburg is beautiful at night with all the old buildings along Neva and some smaller rivers lighted tastefully. We made a few stops for pictures and got to change limos, too. Our ride ended to The Revolution nigh club. They checked our bags at the door and prohibited me from bringing chocolate into the club. But they didn´t check our IDs, weird :o The club was pretty similar to those in Finland and everywhere else. It had three floors: one with pop music, one with trance music and one with quieter music and a good view over the city. Tuija and I ordered drinks, danced and sat upstairs. At 2am we decided it was time to head back to the hotel. We had been told that using unofficial taxis is a common and safe way to get home in Russia. Even though I had some doubts about their safety we picked up an old car outside the club, gave the driver 200 ruples and asked him to drive us to the hotel. He did so, and soon we were back in our cousy room ready to get some sleep.


Our posh limo :P


The Hermitage at night