We arrived in St Petersburg in Russia exhausted. Travelling for about six weeks across twelve countries so far with another two and a half weeks and three counties to go. And so, we made an easy decision on Day 40 to have, what we referred to as, an 'admin' day. We lucked out in that decision since it was raining, so we didn't miss much.
Our admin day consisted of a sleep in, blog updates, several episodes of Game of Thrones season three, and laundry. A LOT of laundry. Our hotel was kind enough to lend us their laundry facilities including a washer and dryer, however after experiencing several shirt shrinkages on our last laundry stop using a dryer, I was adamant everything would be air dried. This was made somewhat difficult due to the dreary wet conditions and pretty soon our room looked, smelled and felt like a chinese laundry with clothes racks everywhere and additional shirts and underwear hanging off every bedpost, chair leg and wardrobe door handle, the air a musty humid haze with the heater turned up full ball to try and dry our stubbornly damp clothes!
That afternoon, I amused myself browsing the nearby shops and adding more to my ever growing, soon to be overflowing backpack. We finished the day with a greasy delicious meal of Carls Jnr, one of our American favourties we discovered was also franchised in Russia!
Day 41 was officially the first day of our Trans-Mongolian G Adventures tour. Tour members were supposed to arrive throughout the day and embark on their own activities before the first meeting that evening.
Rested and refreshed, after an early run, we set out to explore. First stop, via train ride was island citadel, St Peter and Paul Fortress.
From there we wandered up to one of my favourite sites in the world, 'The Church of the Spilled Blood', a spectacular Russian Orthodox church, the churches I like to call 'candy churches'. Words cannot describe it, so here is a picture and there'll be more further down, cause we went back again the next day to see it in the sun!
We strolled around town and checked out the markets then had an early dinner and headed back to the hotel to meet the tour group.
After the tiny group we had in Egypt, we were shocked to see we were two of fifteen on this tour! After a meeting with our tour guide we went out for a group dinner (dessert for us) and some drinks to break the ice.
Our first priority on Day 42 was the rugby. On the other side of the world, the Brumbies were playing in the Super 14 Grand Final, and Ben wasn't about to let 15,000 kilometres and seven hours time difference stop him from watching it! We'd done our research the previous day and scoped out a number of Irish Pubs that might be showing the game. We lucked out on the second try and settled in with a platter of chips, onion rings, calamari and spring rolls (just your standard morning tea snack) and a couple of beers and watched as the Brumbies (and Ben's) dreams were crushed as the lost 27-22 to the Chiefs.
One of the solo tour group participants, a 19 year old from the UK, joined us, also being an avid rugby fan. Much to Ben's delight he had someone to discuss the game with who actually knew what he was talking about. I was just happy to munch away on the endless supply of snacks that continued to appear before me!
After the boys comiserated their loss over a few more beers we left the pub and Ben and I set out on our own once more to see some more of the city. With the sun out, we wandered back to the Church of the Spilled Blood and strolled along the canal where I could snap some pictures.
We ended up at a little market behind the church and bought some presents for friends back home. We found the Bridge of Four Lions and then checked out the Hermitage museum, stopping to watch a BMX competition in the square out the front.
Russia was one of my picks for the trip. Ever since I can remember I've wanted to go to Russia. (I think it might have initially had something to do with my favourite Captain Planet character, Linka, who was from the USSR!) Although thoroughly impressed with the city I wasn't so impressed with its people! We had been warned the country wasn't very 'tourist friendly', with our first experience in that before we left home jumping through numerous hoops just to gain a visa for entry! However I wasn't prepared for what we discovered.
As you may be aware, Russia uses cyrillic, however tourist maps are printed in English, so you couldn't even match the cyrcillic writing on the wall with the writing on the maps, since they were different languages. Instead we quickly resorted to counting train station stops in each directions and taking photos of the train station names on the wall so we knew how to get home and what station we needed to find our way back to if we did get turned around!
The people MIGHT have spoke English, but if they did, they sure weren't bothering to help us out considering our extreme lack of Russian. Instead we were generally ignored and given up on as soon as it was discovered we were foreign, this included clothing stores, restaurants, everywhere! Now don't get me wrong. I'm not one of those ignorant American (sorry Davis family) tourists who expects everyone to speak English as a second language and accomodate us when we're in their homeland, but even if I were to speak a second language, I highly doubt it would be Russian. And with the number of countries we were travelling through on this trip, it wasn't even plausable to learn the basic phrases in all of them! I know when I worked in the retail and food industries, I made an effort to accomodate foreigners, I would never just shrug and walk away without a backward glance like one girl did to me when I politely tried to ask for a different size in a clothes store.
We did encounter some lovely people though, including one lady in the markets who spoke quite good English and bent over backwards to find the items we wanted to buy. Ensuring my Russian stacking Christmas ornaments weren't chipped and the paintwork was perfect, and finding Ben the perfect metal and leather shot glass to add to his collection. She got a lot of business out of us that day!
That night, all packed and ready to go, we trooped afew kilometres on foot through the streets of down town St Petersburg to the train station for the first leg of our Trans-Mongolian adventure. We boarded the train and crammed ourselves into our tiny four sleeper cabin with our room mates for the night, Sasha and Claire, two solo travellers. As we drifted off to sleep we were whisked away on our way to Moscow!
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