We’ve arrived safety in St. Petersburg. The trip here, although long – 18 hours & three flights, was pretty much uneventful (we ALMOST missed our flight from D.C. to Copenhagen because we got the boarding time and flight time confused) . We ROCKED getting from the airport to our hostel. Somehow, without being able to read a word of Russian, we boarded the correct bus, and then subway train to reach our hostel with relative ease. We were quite proud.

Our hostel, City Hostel St. Petersburg, is quite the experience. We have our own room with a shared restroom and I was happy when we arrive that it was pretty clean. The location is awesome. It is just two blocks from the Hermitage, which is a world class museum. There are a few things that we are not too thrilled about.

1. While we have found that most service people in Russia are ambivalent at best, the staff is not just unhelpful, they are pretty much non-existent. The lobby to the hostel which is on a different floor that us is almost always locked.
2. Mosquitoes. Even though we keep the door and windows to our room closed, it seems to be infested with mosquitoes and Stuart, who is like a Ninja Mosquito killing machine, kills several a night. The walls are also dotted all over with blood from dead mosquitoes (see my earlier comment about the hostel being relatively clean) – kinda gross.
3. We seem to be traveling on the off season; and there aren’t many people staying at our hostel, and we are certainly the only people there that are not Russian. One of the benefits of staying at a hostel, besides the price, is talking to other travelers, and we feel that we are missing out on this. We haven’t come across many other foreigners, besides the throngs of tour groups we encountered at the Hermitage. We are longing for some English conversation with someone besides ourselves.

Meanwhile we are enjoying the sites and culture of the city, and we’ll have to fill you in with a later post on some of the highlights.