Санкт-Петербург, несколько слов
Oh yeah, boring, you already saw this picture just before I left to Saint Petersburg last week—well too bad—but if you look closely enough, my packing list almost completely lacks digital technology. That's why you won't see any actual photos of the trip in this post. I'll post them eventually when I get them done, but that'll be some time in July. Now it's merely a few words.
My goal was to pack as light as possible, because I always have the notion of bringing along lots of stuff which could be useful—which you just tend to do when you travel by car. And there you go—packing minimalistically works perfectly as well.
I love travelling but I hate being a tourist so the concept of being part of an organised city sightseeing tour disturbed me a little—which is why I spent the day before departure looking for alternative obscure places to see and that led me to a wonderful book on Leningrad avant-garde architecture which would become my bible for the trip. It's still in fact a guidebook but it takes you to places tourists don't usually go to.
So, Russia: the way it works is that if you go to St. Petersburg by boat on the St. Peter line and are part of an organised tour, you can stay in Russia for 72 hours without requiring a visa. I never found any proper information or any details, there are about two vague sentences about it in some sort of an official statement so it seems as if the whole thing is somewhere in the grey zone. But they'll let you into Russia, let you out and nobody cares what you do. (And I believe you are not limited to staying with the organised tour group or even staying in St. Petersburg itself.)
Fortunately, the degrading feeling of being a tourist was not such of an issue, because there was only a handful of foreigners around. We arrived for the weekend after the 1st of May, which is a national holiday in Russia so the city was packed with Russians on holiday—therefore any offers on the streets and barkers persuading you to go on their tour or eat at their restaurant were in Russian aimed at Russians which made it really easy to just simply ignore them.
Group sightseeing has several disadvantages: the first is that it is extremely slow and the second is that synchronising the pace whilst taking photos is near to impossible. (Maybe it's just me taking pictures of things that the group doesn't find at all interesting.) In the afternoon on the first day our group found itself in a 2 hour queue for the Hermitage—I would have liked to see it, but instead of wasting a precious 2 hours of the limited time you have in St. Petersburg it felt like the right time to start pursuing the avant-garde guide and head to the outer areas of the city.
Saint Petersburg is a city of contrasts. The fancy central parts stand as a complete opposite to the shabby suburbs where the 5 million population spends their daily lives; towering residential blocks, some even 30 stories high, are still being built like they were 40 years ago; those which have been around for some decades have seen little repairs except for new children’s playgrounds which must have appeared in yards all around the city only during the last few years—all looking exactly the same. Residential areas blend with industries in close proximity; some factory buildings look as if they were abandoned but are in fact still in use—the others are occupied by small businesses such as car repair shops; of course many are also really abandoned and just falling apart now. Festive decorations for Victory Day on the 9th of May seem unchanged since the Soviet times.
Travelling around the city is fun by itself—the underground is straightforward—you even get a local map in nearly every station, which really helps when you don't have a proper one (I just had the ones in the book)—and most importantly, it feels like home because the train cars are the same we have in Prague (well, had, because all the original ones are now renovated). With trams and buses it all gets a bit more complex—there's no such thing as a map (at least not in paper or poster form) and you have to highly appreciate it if you get a list of stations the bus or tram goes to, because you don't get those at every stop. Sadly even if you do, they don't help that much when you don't have a map with street names to find the stops. It still highly increases the chances of choosing the right line number though. (And I expect it to be even more challenging if you're not able to read Cyrillic.) A ride on a bus or tram costs 25 руб. and you pay to a conductor, a ride on the underground is 28 руб. and you buy a coin which you later throw into a baffle gate to let you through.
Communicating in Czech or with the few sentences I can put together in Russian isn't very effective but it's still a better way to go than trying English—the only people I encountered speaking some English (except our tour guide and the girl running our hostel who both spoke very well) was a film crew shooting in an abandoned factory who let me have a look inside. On the other hand shop assistants in a small shop (about five of them each selling their category of goods—bread, general groceries, drinks, chemists' supplies etc.) seemed more amused about their own English abilities rather than my Russian—I believe they could say less in English than I could in Russian. I still sure managed to buy some filled bread pastries (saying that I just want any which are not sweet) and a bottle of квас.
I feel most people visiting St. Petersburg on the 72 hour tours really miss out on a substantial part of the city's picture—or for that respect of a real urban and industrial Russia just there at your fingertips. And even more so for those who have never seen a city of the former eastern block.