I can’t even begin to organize my thoughts right now. This update is going to be a huge task and will most likely take me the whole day to write (how fortunate since I have nothing to do anymore… I’ll explain at the end). Honestly, I can’t wait to tell everyone about my epic weekend in Peterburg, but I’m also so tired that it seems so extremely daunting. BUT, here it goes nonetheless, starting with the frustrating arrival at Moskva Kyrski Vokzal…
So I thought our train left at like 10 PM or later, seeing as it is the overnight train to St. Petersburg, but it turns out it left at 8:19 PM. Aaron, Joe, and I went home right away after work and got changed and packed and left for the Metro around 6:45. We made it to the station on time and picked up a few brewskies and some bread and cheese and then made our way into the vokzal. Joe decided he wanted to try and do some fancy stuff at the ticket counter so Aaron and I went to get some food (blini with cheese and mushrooms… AMAZING)! By the time we finished with that we realized we only had a VERY short period of time before our train left and we hadn’t even found the track it would be on, so Aaron went to get Joe and I started asking random people where to find the track we were looking for. I found a guy who was nice enough to try and help and figure out my broken Russian even though he wasn’t actually taking my train. Turns out, he spoke English. Lol. I’ve learned to appreciate Russians who speak English but don’t automatically default to it when they realize my grasp of Russian is for inferior to their grasp of English. It’s refreshing. Anyways he took me to the entrance to one of the tunnels and said “we ask police, I translate for you.” And that he did. We ended up finding the direction our track was in, but by this time Joe had decided to run to the MTS booth to put money on his phone. Aaron and I looked at the clock just as we were entering the front of the tunnel, which led to 11 tracks, ours being #10 and our wagon being the furthest from the entrance to the platform, and it was 8:12… we had 7 minutes before our train was scheduled to leave. Needless to say, we booked it. We got into our compartment and got our winter clothes off and within minutes Joe was on the train (thank goodness) and within a minute after that, the train was moving. Super close. Too close, in my opinion… although it did mean I didn’t have time to think about how much I dislike trains.
Joe and I were in a compartment with two other people and Aaron was in a separate one with three other people. Not long after the train started moving, we went over to Aaron’s compartment to say hi to his coopmates. Turns out they were students and a professor from МГУ and were going on a trip to St. Pete’s to see different areas where Russian writers lived and got their inspiration. Aaron’s actual coop-mates were Lena, Dima, and Sergey (the professor), but there were like 8 of them total and they all came over about a half hour later. We ended up drinking beer and hanging out with them for quite awhile. We spoke Russian with them mostly, but they understand English pretty well, or at least some of them did. I got to drink some authentic Moscow Brandy, although I found out it is actually illegal to drink brandy on trains (random?). All in all, the train ride was awesome mostly because of this group of people, they were seriously amazing. The train itself was unbearably hot… seriously, sleeping was impossible. When we made it to St. Petersburg it was shortly after 5 AM and the metro was not open. SO, of course, we decided to walk the entire length of Nevskiy Prospect (the Michigan Avenue of St. Pete’s) with our new friends at five in the morning. It was actually quite an experience… Honestly the best stories I have for you happened during this walk.
First, for being the busiest street in St. Pete’s, it was pretty dead, which was kind of eerie. It was really cool because Dima gave us kind of like a tour guide explanation of everything, but he did it in Russian… some of it was hard to understand, but it seemed so much more authentic. Within 10 minutes of walking on Nevskiy Prospect, we witnessed a pretty intense car accident. And by intense I mean, A. it was an ambulance and B. 50 feet further and it may have been a car/pedestrian accident… with the pedestrians being us. There was a sign on the sidewalk obstructing my view, but I heard the accident (scared the hell out of me) and the next thing I know there’s an ambulance speeding towards us that runs up onto the sidewalk and the only thing stopping it is a sign pole (which didn’t survive). The best we could tell, the ambulance had its siren and lights on and assumed it had the right away and this car either wasn’t paying attention (most likely) or couldn’t stop because it was snowing. Anywho, there was someone in the back of the ambulance and the poor little car was pretty smashed up. It was legit scary. I’ve never seen an accident like that happen before my eyes, let alone be perilously close to being run over by an ambulance. That was the highlight of our first 10 minutes in St. Petersburg. We continued along Nevskiy Prospect and made it to the Winter Palace (The Hermitage) which was completely deserted at 6 am and so amazingly beautiful with the snow falling. There was no one around in any direction… it was really a great experience. Afterwards our friends brought us to the metro station and helped us find the stop we needed to get off at for the US Consulate and then we bid them farewell. When we made it to the consulate, the guards were not expecting us and apparently Shirah had given us the wrong phone number and we couldn’t get a hold of her. The guards ended up giving us a phone number, which we called, but no one answered and by this time we had been outside for almost three hours and we were FREEZING. So we decided to find a place to eat and rest and figure out what we were going to do. Long story short, turns out there are two Shirah’s in the 25 member US Consulate in St. Petes. Such a unique name and there are TWO of them in such a small consulate and the guard had given us the contact information for the wrong one. Eventually we were able to get a hold of Shirah via facebook message and got into the Consulate around 10:00 ish. We unpacked, got settled and then mapped out our first day in Peterburg.
Alright, that’s the basic travel information. I’ll do another post for sight-seeing and stuff so I can add pictures (which I have to do on my own computer).
TTFN.
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