We are leaving for our second study tour, to St. Petersburg, one week from today. So to procrastinate from real work, I took a look at the memo our school sent us on the city. Here are some interesting bits of information from said memo:
- If you buy alcohol on the streets, it's likely poisoned, and can blind you.
- The stolen credit card in Russia "is booming".
- If you walk alone at night, it's possible that you may get stopped by police and they may demand you give them money.
- Police's salary is somewhat dependent on how many people they catch; so if you jay-walk, you will get fined a lot.
- Train fares, airfare, hotels, restaurants, and museums often charge double or triple the amount for foreigners. If you ask a Russian why this happens, you will get a several justifications including "you have more money than us", and "this museum is here for Russians, not for foreigners".
- You can't take photos of railways, or tunnels.
- You can't take photos from the air over Russian territory; if you're caught, your camera will be confiscated.
- A 1996 law mandates all advertisements/public signage to be in Cyrillic. [translation: you won't be able to read anything. Including metro time tables]
So with that, tomorrow morning we will have our St. Petersburg orientation meeting. Hopefully things will sound a bit more inviting after that.
I was also just did a little research and found out that in 2011 Russia stopped observing daylight savings time, which puts them at 3 hours ahead of German time! (so ordinarily 9 hours ahead of US time, but since you just had DST, it's 8). Crazy.
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