St.Petesburg experience

St. Petersburg is one of the biggest cities I have ever seen, not only because of the size of the city, but also due to the measure of the buildings. Every national or important edifice showed the inmensity of the old Russian times.

The city itself impresses the visitors not only because of the mentioned monuments, but due to the cultural differences between Russian and European population.

But let´s start from the begining…

Two friends of mine and I planed this trip since the moment we recived the news that we were going to have an Erasmus experience. We were very excited and we could't wait to go to St. Petersburg. We took a bus from Tallinn´s bus station and it took us around three hours to arrive to the border. The trip was nice, relaxing and we could enjoy the views from the window of the bus. However, the real trip started once we crossed the border. The bus driver´s way of driving changed when we entered in Russia, actually everybody drove in a different way in that country, so we were a bit scared when we saw our bus overtaking all the cars that appeared on the road.

After another three hours we arrived to St. Petersburg. The bus left us in the middle of a square, next to a subway station. We picked our suitcases and entered in the tube straightforward to the box office. The woman who attended us did not speak English, well… Nobody in that station spoke English, so we bought three tickets to take the subway, however, while we were buying the tickets the woman tried to tell us something, as we could not understand her and she could not understand us we continued our walk to the metro. Suddenly, the police stopped us, they started to tell us something and they did not allow us to enter inside. After, some minutes of uncertainty we understood that is was also compulsory to pay a ticket for the suitcases (So… That was what the woman from the box office was trying to tell us…! ). Once we entered in the subway we found another problem: our metro´s map was not in cyrillic, but in the station everything was written in it! So, how were we going to find our stop? I do not remember how exactly but we found it in the end.

Finally we arrived at the hotel. We left our suitcases, we took some money from an ATM and we went for a walk.

It was October so we could enjoy a walk at dusk. The city was amazing, vast, imperial, beautiful, and it got better at sunset. At night, we could find easily a cheap place to have dinner (it is true that it was a foreign currency and the change made everything was cheap for us). Hopefully, the employee of the place spoke a bit of English, so we could order tipical Russian food.

Next morning we ate as much as we could from the hotel´s buffet to get energized ourselves and we started our tour. First, we got lost into the city center. We visited important churches, we visited the enormous St. Isaac´s cathedral, we bought tipical Russian souvenirs in a tipical Russian market and we discovered how curious and interesting was to find art in the walls of the streets. Then, we visited the "Hermitage". What a huge place! There were thousand of monuments and pictures inside! We entered for free, thanks to our international students´ card, and we spent three hours in there. Inside there was a lot of history, you could feel it, there were old paintings and monuments. It was very imperial, I mean, you could feel the historical importance of the place. It is true we spent not so many time in there, three hours is not that much in such a big place, but it is also true that we discovered a place that not many tourists can see: We got lost among the old sculptures of the museum. We could see the isolated monuments of the museum. After some uncertain minutes, we finally went out of the building and sat down in the garden to have a snack. The snack were simply but amazing at the same time: Lays and M&M´s!; but not the normal ones, we discovered new tastes of Lays and new colours and flavors of M&M´s!

We also had time to visit “Peter and Paul Fortress”, including Trubezokoy (the old jail) and the church were the Zar were buried. We had an strange feeling while we were in the jail because once we entered in the cells we could understand how hard should be being arrested.

As we spent some days in the city we decided to visit “Catherine Palace”.

In St. Petersburg downtown´s main square there were always guides offering trips to the different palaces close to the city, so, as we went without our own guide, we decided to join one of those trips. We talked, as we could, with a russian guide and she allowed us to join the group. Thanks God there was a woman among the people of the group who spoke a bit of English! She told us where to take the bus to come back after the visit, so we did not get lost.

The palace was huge, the gardens were vast and beautiful, the rooms were big and splendid, and the “Amber room”, even though it was not real amber but a replica, was amazing, we could imagine how impressive should be the original one.

We dedicated the last afternoon of our trip to walk around the city center, to visit some shops, to buy some souvenirs and to buy some things to bring them to Norway and Tallinn, respectively.

The trip was short, unique and fun. We enjoyed the city and its people a lot. We discovered a different culture and a lovely city. I recommend everybody to go to St. Petersburg at least once in its life.