From Russia with love...

Well, after 30 hours of no showers and very little sleep, we made it to St Petersburg.  Once again, Thai Airways was fantastic (except for putting eggplant in their curry) - entertainment on demand and so much legroom!  Austrian Airlines were ok, but they seemed to have some sort of odd fascination with plain dry sandwiches.


So far we've braved the Metro and the local buses (Stephen somehow magically knew where to get off the bus), and walked about 6 or 7km with our heavy backpacks - I think all up I'm at around 15kg of luggage, which isn't fun after a km or so.  After the plane trip, my new rule is to never again travel internationally with a laptop - the weight is annoying (laptops are heavy), and it adds yet another thing to take out of your bag when you're going through xrays - liquids, passport & boarding pass, belts, jackets and now laptops as well.  However, now that I'm writing this blog post from the hotel, I'm starting to think that laptops are a great idea :)


Russia has been interesting so far.  I had some sort of strange vision of a bunch of sour people wearing fur coats and speaking no English, lots of tanks and people marching in an orderly fashion, and ugly looking square concrete buildings, but it hasn't been like that at all.  St Petersburg is an absolutely beautiful city and most of the people have been lovely and spoken pretty good English.  Everything's been amazingly cheap as well - at the time of writing our guidebook it was 17 Roubles for A$1, but because of the strong Aussie dollar we're currently getting 29 and a bit which is pretty nice and makes everything very cheap.  

The food, however, has been less than awesome.  On our first night, we visited a local pie shop recommended by our guidebook, and had some pretty disgusting pies - the pastry was sweet-ish and bizarrely textured and the filling was either mystery meat or tasteless boiled cabbage.  The flavours of the country so far haven't been awesome - everything is either very sour or incredibly salty.  Even the berry dessert pie that we tried was so sour that we couldn't eat it.  Breakfast this morning (left) wasn't so bad - some kind of pancake rolled around cheese which was pretty good (I think it's called bliny), some sort of salty omelette with cabbage in it, along with tea, bread and boiled eggs.  I'm hoping that the cuisine improves or I think I'll be spending the entire holiday eating potatoes :)


Some of the sights of today:

The Domes of the Church of Our Saviour on the Spilled Blood were very beautiful.

St Isaacs Cathedral was pretty impressive.  We took a walk up the 200+ stairs to the Colonnade just below the dome and wandered around at the top (well, I clung to the guard rail and the others wandered).  The view was pretty nice.  They seem to have some sort of minor obsession with painting things gold here.

Bankovsky Most (Bridge) was pretty cool as well - it's held up by these cool gryphon statues which are yet again gold-plated.  What was I saying about the gold obsession?  

We weren't allowed to take photos, but we went inside the Kazan Cathedral as well, which was interesting mainly because of the people inside - it was full of people praying!  The women had all brought scarves with them which they covered their heads with when they went inside, and there was a huge queue of people before the altar as well (I'm not sure what they were doing).  It was interesting to see the different value of religion that they had - there were many young people there who were obviously visiting during their lunchbreaks.  

Right now, my feet hurt and it must be nearly time for sleeping - tomorrow we're thinking of visiting the Hermitage (Winter Palace) or the Peterhof Palace (Summer Palace), which requires a boat trip.  I'm going to try to sneak in a visit to the Anthropology and Ethnography Museum too, if I can drag Stephen along :)