Lee and Clare, The road home

St Petersburg - The tour.

26^th September 2003

Well we're up to day 10 of our trip already, time is flying and we're already on to our 4th currency! (The Rouble!)

We're trying to master a bit of Russian too with the help of a phrase book. Not easy though. Hello, the first word you normally learn in another language is: "zdravstvuitye". Now you try saying that! And that's it in normal script - Russian is in Cyrillic script, totally different to ours.

But we did make it to St Petersburg eventually and we've been loving it here. We've been here 3 nights and are braving another night train to Moscow tonight. Quite a laugh buying the ticket from someone who spoke absolutely no English!

Everything in St Petersburg is on such a huge and grand scale. Apparently everything's been done up a bit as this year is the 300 anniversary of the place. We went to the Hermitage museum for a day. This really was amazing.

We find sometimes now that after all our travelling museums and palaces can all blur into one, but not this place. First we saw where the Tsars of Russia used to live, so beautiful and opulent, then a lot of Russian arts. Beautiful sweeping marble staircases, gold everywhere. Downstairs lots of marble carvings. All of this stuff was amazing in itself, but on the top floor there was loads of pictures by famous European painters. We wandered from Van Gogh to Picasso to Matisse to Monet feeling very cultured. This place really is fantastic and well worth the entry fee (free with the dodgy student card we got in Istanbul!!).

Did a walking tour yesterday and heard loads about all the Russian Tsars, a lot more interesting than the British royal family. Heard also a bit about the communist times, but the guide was a bit reluctant to enlarge on those times much.

We're stuffing around and relaxing today and shopping for Russian dolls (you know, the ones that open up and have another inside) and Lee's just bought a very stylish Rabbit fur cossack hat. (Grotesque, ugly, smelly thing). But more of that in the next letter.

Best head off then,
Da svidanya!
(we can say that one!)
Lee and Clare