Saint Petersburg post

Hello all!

I returned from Saint Petersburg tonight at 5:30pm, and will be leaving my apartment shortly after 5:30am to fly to Barcelona, Spain for spring break.

Therefore, I haven't had time to blog about my trip.

I did however post SOME (key word - I have a lot of photos that turned out really well from this trip) photos to my Flickr page.  I will be uploading a lot more when I return from Barcelona - my internet was too slow to do them all tonight.

But under each photo if a very detailed caption, each containing interesting information that I would have posted here for you to read about.  So I would appreciate it if some of you took the time to look through the photos and read the captions.  It's hard work creating and captioning them!

I will definitely post about Saint Petersburg when I get a chance, because it was a really interesting experience that I really look forward to sharing with you all.  But for now, while I am off enjoying some much-deserved warm Mediterranean weather, I will leave you to my Russia photo album on my Flickr so that you can have a taste of the stories that are to come!  Enjoy!

Ps: If the link does not work for you, here is the URL: http://www.flickr.com/photos/devannn/sets/72157629264756706/

Some notes about the St Petersburg trip

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.