Sophie's travels 2011-2012: 28/01/2012 Tallinn, Estonia to St. Petersburg, Russia

I got up at 2am, farewelled Alanna and got my taxi to the airport around 2:30am. I got checked in and boarded my flight to St. Petersburg via Riga (Latvia). I slept most of the flight and made it in time for my connecting flight to St. Petersburg. With the time difference I made it to St. Petersburg around 10am as the sun was rising (amazing sunrise from the plane window). It was freezing! -21 degrees!! I got through customs and collected my bag ok and found the mini bus I had to catch into the city to meet Andrea and Chris. It was already full so the driver got the person in the passenger seat to get out and help me load my bag in and sat me in the middle in the front! They didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Russian so it made for an interesting trip but I managed to point to where I needed to go on the map and he understood so we set off. Locals got on and off along the way and I ended up collecting the money for the driver as people got on. The driver had to use the edge of a role of packing tape to scrape the ice off the inside of the windows as we were driving so he could see out! The vents in the gutters along the street had steam coming out of them but it was a clear blue sunny day (which made it even colder). Along the way someone slammed the door too hard when getting off the bus and it seemed to come off the roller so the driver got out and chased him down the street and started kicking him! At that point I wasn’t sure whether the stay on the bus any longer or bail! I stuck it out and eventually he gestured to me to get off and I grabbed my bag from the back and carefully shut the door and waited for a few minutes for Andrea and Chris to arrive (who said they thought the saw me but then though it couldn’t have been me because I was too fat! I had about 10 layers on!).

We walked to the tube station and caught the tube to the hostel: Missis Hudson where we had a 10 bed dorm to the 3 of us the whole time we were there! It was a great hostel. Once we caught up and chatted for a while I got changed and we ventured back out into the freezing cold. We walked down Nevsky Prospekt (the main street) past the Kazan cathedral, Singer building (old sewing machine company), the statue of Catherine the Great, The Ploshchad Ostrovskogo (the Catherine gardens) and the Aleksandsinsky Theatre (behind Catherine the Great).

We walked right down to the winter palace (with the Hermitage inside) over a couple of bridges with totally frozen water underneath – Amazing! We walked around the main square in front of the palace on ice around the Alexander column then over to the waterfront of the Neva river and along the waterfront to the bronze horseman statue. We saw a guy ice fishing on the main river and a few ships frozen into the ice. It was soooo cold but we walked over to St. Isaac’s cathedral and up the colonnade for amazing views out over the city. We couldn’t feel our fingers or toes so from there we decided we needed to warm up so we walked back down Nevsky Prospekt as the sun was setting and stopped at the supermarket for some supplies. We went back to the hostel and had some dinner and drinks and warmed up before bed.