Tuesday was a bit of a blurry day.
We'd had roughly four hours sleep on the train and hauling our bags to the taxi was about all our feeble minds and bodies could handle. We were too early to check into our rooms at the hotel so we left the luggage with the bellboy and asked one of the receptionists where we could have breakfast. "No, I know no cafes near here..." Then after conversing with a colleague, "Try the Literarti Cafe: turn right outside the hotel, right again and it's on the opposite side of the road."
So that's where we headed at a slow crawl, except we found ourselves in a back street near a canal with nerry a shop or restaurant in sight.
Fortunately, our hotel, the Petro Palace, is brilliantly situated at the heart of St. Petersburg and slap bang in the middle of all the museums, palaces and churches you would want to see. It is a hundred yards from the main drag, Nevsky Prospect, which we eventually managed to stumble onto - and I mean stumble. Practically the first bright window we spotted was a little tea-room, where we hunkered down for a couple of hours, revived somewhat by croissants, ham-and-cheese toasts and hot chocolate. (We never ever found the aptly named Literati Cafe; I suspect the name is wrong and it's located elsewhere. If any of you know it or find it, let us know. Please.)
The Petro Palace may be well placed but it is not a patch on Moscow's Savoy.It looks great on the outside but inside it is a hotchpotch of narrow passages, barn-like open spaces, some bare-tiled and others covered with worn-down carpets. Gail and I were shown into a room that had something of the prison cell about it and immediately asked to be relocated, which to the hotel's credit it did, and we nested there for the rest of our stay in St Petersburg.
Where Sue got her energy from I have no idea. In the time it took Gail and I to unpack and shower, update the blog and make some phone calls, Sue, armed with Lonely Planet and a digital camera, had taken in the Admiralty, the Peter and Paul Fortress, Mars Field and the Marble Palace.
It was becoming a bit of a pattern.
Griboyedov Canal, Bank Bridge.
We all showed up to dinner in the evening though.
One of our contacts was a TV presenter of a weekly current affairs programme, Roman Gerasimov. He had booked a table at a restaurant called, Teplo, which is hidden away in a small courtyard just off St Isaac's Square. He took over immediately, which was great because we were a little tired of making executive decisions and then not being able to carry them out because no one understood us. He insisted that we had vodka, and in the correct way: a small plate of pickles and bread (much nicer than it sounds) of which you must have a mouthful before you down your shot. Roman maintained, and he turned out to be right, that if you drink vodka this way, you will not get a hangover. You might give your taxi driver 5000 roubles and leave your hand-bag in the cab but you won't get a hangover.
Roman was a proverbial mine of information. The conversation inevitably turned to politics. Despite being a so-called democracy not a lot has changed in Russia since Perestroika. There is still an enormous amount of corruption at the top, and a massive abuse of money and power. He mentioned that one of the news stories that had kept them entertained for weeks was the so-called expenses scandal at Westminster. "Imagine a minister being called over the coals for purchasing a duck house on expenses! Millions go missing in Russia." Another issue he was particularly passionate about was the distribution of funds for restoration and preservation. Apparently, Moscow takes 80% of the budget, which means St Petersburg has a pittance with which to repair its damaged bridges, palaces, churches and monuments. And if you could see St Petersburg, the Venice of the North, with its elegant buildings and picturesque bridges that adorn the canals and hugging the shores of the Baltic Sea, you would despair at the crumbling architecture.
So, it is now mid-night and the end of our first day in St. Petersburg. I have a feeling we're going to love our stay here.
Night-night.
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