back from St. Petersburg

...or Санкт-Петербург as it is actually called.

Unfortunately I'm now sick. Headache, throat, cough, exhausted, the works. Not too terrible but enough to prevent me from going to class this morning. We'll see about the afternoon.

But aside from getting me sick, the weekend was great! We left on Friday night (technically Saturday morning) on a 1:30am train. Oh man, overnight trains. My only other serious train experience was a 40-hour Amtrak stint back in the US. While that was pretty much the worst thing ever, some elements of this were worse and some were better. +beds to sleep on. -the bathroom. That pretty much covers it. Isn't it illegal for train toilets to just flush onto the tracks in the US?? Well...not here. There's a reason they keep the bathroom locked for the first 20-30 minutes.

Anyway, we got to St. Petersburg around 10:30am Saturday. I slept all right and was immensely thankful for the silk travel sheets given to me by Joan and Mary!! It was waaaay too hot in the little compartments, and I was with Irina and two random Russian guys. Fantastic.

We set out straightaway for the hotel so we wouldn't have to haul all our stuff around. (I packed everything into my backpack and a new shoulderbag I bought recently, plus a plastic bag to hold some snacks and souvenirs.) For some reason all the трамвайs weren't running so we had to take a bus which was a bit more of a pain but worked out okay. The hotel was...nothing special. We each got a bed, there were two beds per room. I made use of my silk travel sheets yet again. The towels were a joke and the TAP WATER...dang...I'll never complain about Moscow water again! This stuff was brownish and smelled bad.

Anyway, we also ate breakfast/lunch in here somewhere before finding the hotel. A random fast food blini place. Once we had checked into the hotel, we set off to be tourists! St. Isaac's cathedral and the colonnade, the Hermitage museum, dinner, another cathedral where they were having a service, a boat tour, and finally back to the hotel. It stays light so late there!! The cathedrals were amazing and it was neat to see an orthodox service taking place. Chanting echoes magnificently in the huge cathedral, and there was a choir up in a loft in the back. The Hermitage was HUGE, there was no way to do it justice in three hours, but it was free for students and really neat. The boat tour went along a bunch of canals and out onto the main river. If it hadn't been bitterly cold I would have enjoyed it a lot more, but oh well. At that point it was 9 or 10pm and the sun was just beginning to think about setting.

We got up Sunday and had a complimentary breakfast in the hotel after a less-than-lovely shower. (The main problems - the terrible water and really dimly lit bathroom.) This breakfast wasn't nearly as good as the one we'd had in Suzdal, but it wasn't bad either. Omelette/quiche type thing (bland but ok), bread with butter, cheese, and salami, and a roll with odd honey. I asked for apple juice instead of tea and they charged me 20 rubles, sigh. We headed out around 11am. First stop was a church/cathedral called "Savior on spilled blood" (it's more natural sounding in Russian). It's similar to the famous St. Basil's Cathedral on the outside, and inside everything is in mosaic. The sheer quantity of cathedrals is enough to blow you away - to say nothing of the care and detail put into them!

Next we went to a market and spent quite a while poking at souvenirs. I got some neat stuff. Next we ate lunch at Subway. It was fantastic, unlike the Subway I went to in Moscow that was basically terrible. I had an Italian BMT and a chocolate chip cookie. Yay! Anyway, we were going to take a boat to Peter and Paul's Fortress followed by a palace and gardens located in Petergof, a small town just outside St. Petersburg. But it started raining and for some reason the boats weren't going there that day, so we instead took the metro and got on a bus for at least an hour that took us all the way to Petergof! En route we had a very random discussion about 9/11 and US government conspiracies, led mostly by Nick and Jack. The gardens were huge and beautiful. However, spring hasn't quite gotten that far north yet (we're talking 60 degrees latitude), so nothing was in bloom and the fountains were still turned off. We all got a chance to touch the Gulf of Finland (huzzah!) and had a nice leisurely time strolling around. A nice contrast to Irina's typical breakneck walking pace.

When we got back into St. Petersburg, it was getting on towards dinnertime, probably 8 or 9pm. We walked around a bit until finding a restaurant probably best translated as "Fat Friar's Pub." They had Russian food and tons of beer and little else, so everyone except for me and Jack got beer. We ate and chatted for quite some time since our train didn't leave until 1:30am and there wasn't much else to do. Around 11:30 we headed out, though, and walked all the way to the train station. It was finally mostly dark outside, and not too cold. We sat in a pizza place until 1am when they closed, eventually got on the train, and showed up in Moscow 10:30 Monday morning.

I forgot to say - "we" included just Irina, Jeff, Jack, Celina, Nick, and me. David went with his Russian girlfriend Olga to St. Petersburg a few days earlier and they did their own thing, though we randomly ran into them twice. Dima, Felix, Laura, and Jenna opted to also go up early and do thehir own thing, but we met up on the train back. I think Jessica is in Prague for some reason. Jill stayed in Moscow because she's training to run a marathon I think. I'm not sure what Alex is up to, and that about covers it.

Now I should see about eating something and hopefully getting un-sick. This coming weekend we're planning a similar weekend trip to Kiev, only we'll leave and return a bit earlier/later since it's a little farther away. It would be nice if I wasn't sick for that, and it would also be nice if I could do my physics and Russian homework as well as my astronomy research and go to class without coughing up a lung.

As always, stay tuned. And for those of you who managed to read this far, here's a link to photos from the weekend.

St. Petersburg