St. Petersburg, Russia

Let me start off by disappointing my lovely guest poster, Caz - sorry my dear, I didn't see anyone walking bears on leashes in Russia. I didn't see any bears at all, really. But now that we've cleared that up...

Russia was a crazy, crazy place. St. Pete is supposed to be a gorgeous city, but I actually found it to be kind of old and run down looking. One of my classmates pretty much summed it up when he said, "this place needs to be power washed and repainted." From the pictures I took it actually looks really nice, but then I remember that I only took pictures of the pretty stuff. Everything else - meh. Anyway, here is by far the best sight we saw - The Church on the Spilled Blood.


The food in Russia wasn't nearly as bad as I had expected, probably because I avoided any and all things involving pickled fish. Breakfasts were sort of a weird combo of cereal, bread, fruit/veggies, cheese, sliced meat, and either meat dumplings or meat blini. I tried both of the latter because I wanted to experience local food. There were definitely people who ate Cocoa Puffs for breakfast every day. I also ate some AMAZING food at an Uzbekistani restaurant, had a pretty interesting bread/funky sauce/cheese/veggies/other weird stuff lunch off a street cart, and was entertained by this portion of french fries pictured below. No, we hadn't eaten any. This is the full portion.


The vodka wasn't nearly as plentiful as I had expected it to be - we mostly drank beer. Our hotel bar had a special on Baltika and we more or less went to town. A friend of mine did have a vodka tasting in his room on the last night there, so at least I got to try some. Newsflash - it tasted just like American vodka.

Our company visits were all pretty great. Here is a lovely picture of us in the hairnets we had to wear on a plant tour.


While we were there I actually taught myself to read Russian. I was pathetically slow at sounding out words but I loved practicing by reading every sign around me, to the great annoyance of pretty much everyone else. I imagine this is what it was like learning to read English. Thankfully a few of the characters in Cyrillic are the same as English, so at least I had a baseline. Someone else had actually taught himself to read Russian during class one day, so he knew more than I did and I asked him for help about every 3 seconds.

"CHRISTIAN! What does the "3" mean again?"
"CHRISTIAN! What about the pi with a little foot thing coming off of it?"
"CHRISTIAN! If a "6" is a "b" sound, then what is an actual B?"

You get the idea. My Russian actually paid off a number of times when English translations weren't available. For instance, while at Pepsi we got to sample a number of different products, including Frito Lay chips. The writing on the bags was in Russian so no one knew what was inside.

"Uh....pee...errr...zzz....PIZZA FLAVORED CHIPS!"
"Ba...s...no wait. Ba..c...on BACON!"

And so on. I'm awesome. PS, they also had caviar flavored chips. They were nasty with a capital OMGTHEYWILLSERVETHESETOMEINHELL.

So that is the very very abridged version of St. Petersburg. It was a great first stop because it was definitely the hardest city to get around due to lack of English speakers. Plus, Russia seems to be around 20-30 years behind the US in a lot of aspects - things are pretty hard there and it's reflected in the demeanor of the people. So to transition from there to our next 3 countries made the other places seem even better, and really put things into perspective.

Next stop: Finland!