St.Petersburg, Part 2

Saturday 12.4.

When we woke up we noticed the sun was beginning to shine :) After big and tasty breakfast we did a bus tour around the city. Our guide was this Russian man who spoke good English and told interesting facts and stories about the city and people who used to live there. We made a few stops to the most photographic spots. We had already seen them during the limo ride, though, but it was alright seeing them in daylight, as well. We also went to the St.Peter and St.Paul fortress, which is considered to be the first structure of St.Petersburg. We went inside this beautiful church where nearly all the members of the Romanov royal family are buried. Our next destination was this souvenir shop where we were offered free coffee, tee, chocolate and shots. I bought a tiny maatuska doll (don´t know what they´re called in English). I saw the most beautiful hand painted maatuska dolls at the shop! After shopping we were dropped off at the St.Isaac´s cathedral. Tuija and I decided not to take part in the guided tour at the cathedral but discover it by ourselves. We climbed upstairs up to the tower, where we could enjoy a good view over the city.


Inside the church at St.Peter and St.Paul Fortress


Maatuska Dolls


At the top of the St.Isaac´s Cathedral

After taking several pictures we decided it was time for lunch. We had been told the city is full of sushi restaurants and since we both are huge fans of sushi we just had to eat at a sushi place. We had spotted a good looking sushi restaurant on Newsky so we began to walk there. After a while we noticed we had walked to the opposite direction and crossed Neva... Fortunately we found this another really nice Japanese style sushi restaurant on the other side of Neva. The sushi rolls were delicious :P I ordered some kind of mousse topped with white chocolate for dessert. The day had gone by fast and it was time to start heading towards our hotel. We took the subway closer to Newsky and wandered around for a while checking out nice looking clothing stores. Tuija found a shirt but I didn´t buy anything (so uncharacteristic to me lol). We enjoyed walking in sunshine and stopped by at a supermarket next to our hotel. We wanted to buy some food stuff that we can´t get in Finland. Tuija built her chips collection with some rare flavors while I bought chocolate bars :P

Then we went to the hotel to change clothes for the nights ballet. We walked to this another subway station through some neighbourhoods and markets we hadn´t seen before, and took the train to Newsky. It was a short walk to the theather but we managed to get a bit lost anyways. We saw The Cathedral of Spilled blood, which is impressive, but unfortunately we hadn´t much time to admire it since we had to rush to the theather. We ended up getting there in time, to find out our seats were at the most upper level. The theater itself was a beautiful old building and therefore perfect environment for a ballet. The ballet was Yanka. I hadn´t heard of it before so I bought a booklet telling the story. To make it short, it was about this dance group putting together a performance, loving each other and getting jealous... all the soap opera stuff with melancholy typical to Russian art. I quite didn´t understand the ending, though. The dance was an interesting mix of classical ballet with hard shoes and modern dancing with original moves and costumes. The ballet lasted almost for 3 hours. Tuija and I decided to skip clubbing that night so we went straight back to the hotel where we ate some apples for late dinner.


The Cathedral of Spilled blood


Yanka Ballet

Sunday 13.4.

We woke up in time to eat lots at breakfast :) Then we had an hour to spend before our bus left for Lappeenranta (and Joensuu). First Tuija and I went to this souvenir store located next to our hotel and bought some little cute things. Then we spotted a cosmetics store right next to it and managed to spend quite a lot of time there; comparing prices and checking out different brands. We bought useful stuff like combs, toothpaste etc... Then it was time to return our keycards (I had managed to loose mine,though) and leave the city. We drove to Viipuri, spending the journey chatting with our bus driver and Joensuu Student Union representatives. Viipuri is quite a dirty and grey town. You can definately see that in Russia all the money goes to the bigger cities, such as St.Petersburg and Moscow. The road right before we reached Viipuri was awful and we had to drive at 30km/h to avoid breaking the bus. Our destination was this huge supermarket selling just everything! Our target was clear: Everyone pretty much headed straight to the alcohol section :) Because of import limits I could buy only a bottle of cream liquer (for cocktail party) and 3 cans of cider. Most people were optimizing their intake by buying vodka and beer.

Soon we faced some boarder formalities. Our passports were checked a couple of times and we had to go inside this building to return the forms we had filled in when entering the country. Everything went smoothly, they decided not to investigate our bus, and soon we were back in Finland. It didn´t take long to drive to Lappeenranta, where we were dropped off at the uni. It was raining so I got quite wet while walking home... It was such a fun trip and definately worth taking part in :D I wanna visit St.Petersburg sometime again, preferably in the summer!

(I hadn´t remembered how much time it takes to write blog entries... So, once again, I apologize my bad grammar :/ I´m just too lazy to write proper English here. And, be prepared, I´ll be back soon...in early June, I´d say.)

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