Can you believe that we're in Russia?! Neither can we, really...

After a nerve-wracking plane ride of not knowing what to expect, we landed in Saint Petersburg to be greeted by rain. No problems with passport control or customs, luckily! The toughest part was filling in the arrival card, that's completely in cyrillic. But we managed okay.

We took a bus towards the metro line but got off one stop too soon. It turned out okay thugh because we jumped out of the bus and saw the Momument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad (from WWII). We walked a short distance to the metro and got some tokens. Few people seemed to speak English, but thank goodness they had a calculator to show us how much our metro ride would cost. The St.Pete's metro is, we think, the deepest in the world. The escalator ride seems to take forever--lots of time to read the cyrillic ads along the way.The stops are rarely labelled and if they are it's in Russian. We counted the stops and switched lines. Counted more stops and got off at the right place. We got a bit lost but eventually found the hostel.

We spent our first afternoon getting our bearings and getting comfortable in St. Pete's. We quickly realized that this a safe place to be and then we started to explore.  The hardest part so far is finding a good place to eat. Our first night, we ate at a vietnamese/chinese/russian restaurant.  Our decision was made to go there by the fact that they had photos of the meals to help us decide.

On our second day, we joined a walking tour of the city.  We were brought to many of the big sights and we given a good explanation of their significance. We saw the Summer Garden, Peter and Paul Fortress (with the graves of Russian tsars), the balcony where Lenin used to give his speeches from (part of the Museum of Political History), and different areas of town (the artsy part, the student area, the posh part, etc.).

Our tour guide was born in '72 and was 19 when the USSR split, so he had lots of memories and neat stories. One of the interesting things he told us was about how they used to make illegal records on x-rays. They would pretend to be sick, go to the hospital for x-rays and then copy the music onto them. They called these records "ribs", because it was usually a fake chest cold that would get them an x-ray.

We've now met up with the group of people that we will travel with to China. Seems like a good bunch. They talked about going to ballet last night, but Joel and I already had tickets to an ice hockey game (!). We're the only North Americans in the group but we managed to convince a bunch of people to come to the game with us and do ballet in Moscow instead. No one else had ever watched a game! They seemed to really like it, depsite the fact that we couldn't take beer into the arena with us. You had to down it all during intermission. That would never fly in Canada!

There was an element of the ballet at the game anyway--cheerleaders to brighten the atmosphere  :) The home team won, 6-2, so we were happy and we were getting high 5s from the locals who were even more happy than us. Joel bought a scarf to support the home team and that won him lots of positive attention. Some guy actually stopped us on the street after seeing the scarf, wanting to know the final score of the game. Luckily there was a Russian girl with us, so she could interpret.

Speaking of language...We're finding cyrillic surprisingly easy to pick up. We can pick out the words that have simply been written in cyrillic quite quickly. It's fun trying to see if you can read something or at least sound it out, even if you have no clue what the words actually mean. Good times for a word nerd like Michaela.

Today we went to the Hermitage (pictured on the post card). It was gorgeous and is filled with art from around the world, from all different periods. It's considered to be up there with the Louvre in terms of prestige and amount of art. Much of the art is housed in the Winter Palace, winter home of the tsars. Different houses for different seasons, nice eh? This is also the palace where Lenin overthrew the provisional government in 1917, starting the Bolshevik revolution.

The city is packed with history and beautiful buildings. One nickname is "Venice of the North" because of the canals. There are actually more kilometers of canals here than in Venice, but there aren't nearly as many small canals running through the city. Pretty all the same.

Michaela also visited the Summer Palace of Catherine the Great. There are many fountains but they've unfortunately been drained for the winter. A group went together (while Joel went to the Political History Museum) and walked around the grounds. It's right on the Baltic Sea, so it's a nice setting even without water in the fountains.

We're really enjoying Russia so far. Tonight we leave for Moscow on an overnight train. It's about 600km away, so we're hoping to get a good sleep on the train. We arrive early tomorrow morning (Thursday) and have a few days there before jumping back on the train for a three-day journey towards Siberia. Who knows when we'll get another chance to write?!

m & j