Owing to the general thinness (or shall I say transparency?) of the curtains in our hotel or possibly due to changing time zones yet again, I woke up really outrageously early (6am) in St Petersburg and decided this would be a good opportunity to contact Air Berlin and find out what they did or didn’t know about my backpack. Also a good time to see if the hostel staff would be able to call the airport for me.
The Air Berlin website is useless; they have a little tool where you put in your baggage claim number, which is 10 digits, but the text box only fits 9 digits. When you click submit if takes you to the ‘world tracking’ website where they inform you that this airline is not a member of our service and please contact them etc etc. Of course if you have a look through the members on another part of the world tracking site, Air Berlin IS a member, along with more or less every other airline.
We also wanted to find out if the hotel in Berlin had managed to charge us twice, and of course they had, so then I went through various complaint forms on various websites and checked our bank balances to make sure it would all add up OK regardless. Which it would.
Nine am came around and Irina rang the airport baggage people, had an interesting but short conversation is Russian, and found herself suddenly very popular when she informed that me my bag was in Berlin, would be coming here today by 2pm, and I should call them back at 4pm. Joy. Tribulation. And so forth.
In the short term we decided therefore not to buy me another jacket or jumper, and instead to go out wandering just as we would have done if we did have all my other clothes. We were checking out of our mildly luxurious double room and into the group dorm so we had to move our bags from one room to another in the morning. That done we walked up to the Nevsky Prospect, which is the main drag of SP, turned left, and walked most of the way along the Nevsky, an icy kind of wind encouraging us to walk quickly. At the end of said are the Admiralty Palace, the Frunze Naval Academy, and the Winter Palace which now houses the State Hermitage museum. And just around the corner is St Isaac’s cathedral. All pretty handy really.
What with the canals and the palatial pastel coloured buildings, St Petersburg really is a lot like Venice or Amsterdam. The streets are fairly clean, lots of tram wires overhead, but there is something different about it which is difficult to pinpoint. After a good look at the outside of the Hermitage and the Alexander monument which stands in a wide public square, we followed the spire to St Isaacs and then went searching for a restaurant called Cafe Idiot which got a good mention in our Trans-Siberian guidebook. After a bit of back and forth and remembering what various Cyrillic letters stand for in order to read the street signs, we managed to find it.
There is a story on the front of the menu about how, when and why Dostoevsky bought and lived in these very same rooms, and also some other amusing details about him settling gambling debts by dashing the heads of those who had beaten him on footpaths and other nearby solid objects. The front of the menu informs us that these people did not usually like having their heads dashed. Other news of the world was that the food was pretty tasty, and it was great to be out of the northeast – i.e arctic – wind as well.
Following that we walked up to the south bank of the Neva river via the Admiralty gardens and the statue of Peter the Great commissioned by Catherine I and also past more than one set of wedding photos in progress, over one bridge, back down the other side of the Neva and over another bridge. On the way we ran into a Russian lady asking for directions, who was visiting St Petersburg for the first time in twenty years, after being born and living there, and then moving to Canada, and talking with her all the way down the street to her Metro stop about how much the town has changed, how the shiny new shopfronts have been put up by the mafia and how those shops aren’t for the regular people, and how we wouldn’t appreciate it being foreigners, and how overwhelmed she was to be visiting old friends in a changed city, and so on.
Nice lady, actually.
Back at the hostel bits and pieces of the Intrepid Group were assembling themselves in the dorm room, and the staff informed us that they would like Alice to move into the other of the two rooms. They didn’t happen to say why, but they were all single beds anyway so we weren’t going to be sleeping together. This was overwhelmed by a phone call from the airport (after we couldn’t reach them by phone) to say that my bag had now arrived and I could come to the airport and pick it up.
Oh could I then? We contemplated calling Air Berlin to ask them if they knew where the airport in St Petersburg is, and whether they knew what a courier is, and could they bring me my goddamn bag right now? But then Alice pointed out that I was better off going to get it myself, rather than relying on another pair of hands. Again.
A further problem was that we were having a meeting at 6pm to assemble the Intrepid group, get briefed, fill in some forms with our passport/visa/insurance details and hand over our local payments, and it was now 4.30. So we couldn’t get to the airport in time anyway. With people having arrived at various times we took the opportunity to get to know one another a little bit and compare stories about how each had got here. Three of the twelve are actually doing the full St. Petersburg to Bali trip which we had contemplated… solely because they would rather the ‘getting there’ part take several months instead of about one day and also involve as little flying as possible. Come meeting time we giggled and scribbled our way through the paperwork and I was reasonably shocked to discover that some of the banknotes we had gone to great trouble – and some expense – to obtain in Germany were not likely to be accepted by currency offices in Russia. I was thinking about picking a nice drain to flush the USD down before Alice pointed out that in other places we are going – e.g. Hawaii – counterfeiting of money is not nearly so much of a problem and therefore we shouldn’t have the same problem there. So we just needed to shuffle some things around and it would all add up the same.
After the meeting we all trekked out for an orientation walk around St Petersburg – although most people had arrived a bit earlier and already seen the basic layout – and we also had a look at the train station we would be rolling to Moscow on tomorrow night, and had dinner for a decent price at a cafe. Most of the group passed on the option of continuing up the Nevsky in the icy breeze and instead went home to bed.
Anything I forgot to mention? Yes. After faring-well the Canadian-Russian lady, we saw a big car crash on the Nevsky Prospect. Actually a huge car crash! We both heard a screech, a crash/smash noise, at which point we looked up, and saw a car halfway through rolling over, aiming diagonally through the intersection, then we heard a big thump as the passenger side of the car hit a metal signpost broadside. There was no one in the passenger side so that was OK… but because we’re used to seeing a driver on the right we assumed at first that side of the car had hit the pole. Anyway the pole itself got pushed over to about a 40 degree angle, and the people standing on that corner of the footpath looked just a bit shocked. In the intersection there were two more cars munted together nose-to-tail – as near as we could work out one car was waiting to turn, and the driver who crashed might have been overtaking that car and not seen the third car coming the other way – the car that crashed was bent in on the left front as well! But once people could see the lady inside was moving and more or less OK, everybody (everybody!) crowded right around.
So you could say it was a full day.
Greg
