From Vilnius we caught an over night train to St Petersburg. Our apartment was on the main street running through town, Nevsky Prospect or Nnnyeeeevski Proooovspekt as it is announced much to our amusement on the Metro. Nnnyeeeevski Proooovspekt!

We had a fairly quiet first day really. We went to pick up the tickets for the next stage of the journey from our friend John. However when we got there he realised he’d lost them. Oops. Two tickets to Moscow thrown out with the rubbish. Luckily he was able to get them re-issued although it sounds as though it was a complete nightmare. Russians seem to have a great fondness for bureocracy. The process involved many forms,lots of signatures, much confusion and of course a fine. Something he tells us you get used to after a short time of living in Russia. It seems that as well as the liking for official documentation that corruption and bribes are very much an accepted part of everyday life. 30 kph over the speed limit? 300 rubles = no problem.

While we were over at John’s we went to the supermarket, where we bought some of the amazing salads the seem to sell pretty much everywhere in Russia. Check out this plate of yumminess:

The strange things that look like tuna are actually aparagus although I and no one I asked had any idea how it had been prepared. It was kind of like a crinkly tube with a really odd texture, a bit like a juicy rolled up finger from a rubber glove. Bizarrely this texture made it a very pleasant thing to eat. The round things are a type of smoked cheese. We bought almost half a kilogram of this and it only cost us around ??1.50. Prices seem to vary wildly. Often we’d see what appears to us to be 2 identical items, but one might be one price, the other 5 times more. We were probably eating dirty tramp food, but I thought it was really tasty.

Andy and I left John to look after his poorly girlfriend the first night and on his recommendation went to a bar called Fidels, which is on the road just to the side of the big shopping centre on Nevsky Prospect . Great bar, about a third the price of anywhere else we’d seem, also much better atmosphere.

Anyway, so it was here we got decided to act like the Russians and start drinking Vodka. Except that we didn’t act quite ike the Russians and forgot to match each vodka with ??????? (Zakooska – a small snack) and instead choose to match each vodka with a beer. Big mistake.

After only a short time the vodka had well and truely caught us out. I remember first sitting quietly chatting to each other, then taking to strangers, then giving out our emails, then dancing, and by the end of the night finding it really quite tricky just to walk in a straight line. It was that kind of drunk where it hits you so quick you’re well aware of losing your abilities, but have absolutely no way of doing anything about it. We woke up the next morning with writing on our arms and a note pad full of people’s email addresses and our various sribbled attempts at writing our names and where we were from in Russian.

Drawing of a watch, time reads “NOW”

We didn’t manage to get out of bed unti 4pm. John and Sasha invited us around for dinner. John made us a lovely mushroom risotto, made with wild mushrooms that Sasha’s Mum had picked earlier in the year. It seems in Russia, as with most other countries we’ve visited so far people don’t have this irrational fear of fungus that weare conditioned with at home. It’s common for people to go picking here, most people would easily be able to identify the edible mushrooms and know what to do with them. I’m not sure whether or not I would really like this to catch on at home. It does seem to be becomming a little more popular, with foraged wild food a must in any trendy restaurant. However if everyone cottons on to it there will be none left when we go hunting. Yes we need a few more of the scare stories please. Mushrooms are bad, often very poisonous. You can die you know. In seconds! Aaaargh!

After the meal we headed for town to visit a few bars. Andy knew John from Uni and it seems that since then he has transformed himself into a kind of international superstar DJ, and is quite well known in Russia. This was really handy as it gave us access to bars that would otherwise really have been impossible to go to. We went to one place completely unmarked. You had to knock on the door, someone would open it, say hello to John and Sasha then welcome us in. Apparently there are quite a few of these ‘friends’ bars. It was a really nice place, quite funky decor, a dj and very nice, if a little expensive, Belgian beer. It seems the people who run them have enough friends to keep them going so they don’t really need tourists or other random people off the street wandering in to crash their party.

Our next day in St Petersburg just kept going wrong from the start. The kind of day you just want to give in and go to bed. We’d got up and walked and walked taking in the sites until we wanted lunch. The plan was to go to the Hermitage after we’d eaten, but after faffing around getting hungry and frustrated trying to find places the guides had recommended we eventually gave up and just went anywhere. Our food took forever to come and by the time we got to the Hermitage it was only 2 hours until closing. I read somewhere that this place has like a hundred million pieces and even if you looked at each one for just a second it would take around 7 years to go round the whole place. We obviously didn’t have enough time. We did attempt to go in, but after buying tickets we were directed to the cloakrooms, a huge long corridor packed full of fur-coat clad Russians pushing and shoving their way around. I couldn’t stand it. We just had to get out. Somehow we managed to get our money back on the tickets quite easily and practically ran outside to our freedom. Never again. I’m not sure when would be a good time to visit that place. We thought we’d gone at an off-peak time, I hate to imagine what it would be like in the summer.

Thankfully once we’d given up on doing the tourist thing the evening did get better. We went to a lovely Georgian restaurant for dinner called Aragvi. Georgain food is probably the best option for veggies in Russia. With an emphasis on salads and bean dishes there was lots of choice. In fact it was a bit like my favorite place in Manchester, Aladdins.

We had Lobio a kind of slightly spicy crushed bean stew with lots of paprika, a Georgian salad which was just a normal kind of salad stuff, but then a great heap of parsley on it and we also had a cheesy bread, the name of which I have forgotten. This bread was amazing! It was very rich though and more than one in a lifetime would probably be enough to give you a heart attack. There was a good centimeter of melty cheese covering the entire top. This is the kind of place where its good to go with a few friends so you can get a good range of dishes to share between you. If you do this I would recommend only getting one of these cheesy breads between four people, rather than eating half each like we did, or you will end up going to bed feeing like a whole person has somehow crept into your stomach, refused to leave and fallen asleep.

On our last day in St P all enthusiasm for the Hermitage lost we went instead to the Kunstkamera Museum. Without doubt the craziest museum I’ve ever been to. It was began as a collection of various artifacts of scientific interest from around the world by Peter the Great in 1714 to build Russia’s understanding and scientific knowledge. He sent people around the globe to collect items and also offered payment for anything unusual. So the place now contains huge glass cabinets full of the standard various bits and bobs of small tribes and artifacts from around the world, but then at the back there’s a room full of glass jars of pickled deformed feotuses. Babies with two heads, no heads, placentas with five babies attached and skeletons of small children with various conditions. After a few minutes it’s all a bit much really.

In the evening we said our farewells to John and Sacha over a traditional Russian meal at a lovely Russian restaurant. A place I would really recommend…. if I could find the link. Although if you’re strict veggie perhaps don’t opt for their “cabbage soup” schi. Ours came complete wth huge chunks of fatty pork. Mmm.

That bit floating around just to the bottom right of the sour cream is a big dirty lump of fatty pork. This probably actually means it’s a good quality schi, but to us it just meant yet again picking bits out and eating something we knew contained meat. Luckily this doen’t really bother either of us too much having decided it’s better to just accept it will happen and get on with it rather than starve or miss out on local specialities. And the soup was very nice. I can imagine for some veggies though that eating out in Russia could be really a struggle. I’m also becomming worried that all the soups we have tried so far were only so tasty because they were made with meat stock. I’ll have to work on creating the perfect vegetarian stock if I’ll be able to replicate them well at home. But I have an idea for the secret ingredient and I’m looking forward to giving it a go. This place claims on it’s advertisement that their stock, made in the traditional way, takes over 8 hours to make, so maybe that’s the key? Long and slow. Usually a good thing.

So apart from the meaty vegetarian soup this was a great place. They specialise in blinies and have over 40 different types on their menu. They serve Kvass, a kind of Russian homebrew beer drink with a very low alcohol content. I thought it tasted a bit like coke, but without the sensation that it could easily strip your insides. They also do these great chip type things which are fried with wild mushrooms. Lovely jubly.

So that was that. St Petersburg, tick! Thanks to John and Sasha for all the help and guidance around your great city.

John, Sasch and Kvass.

After St Petersburg an overnight train took us to Moscow for a quick one day stay with some of John’s friends. They had a really nice flat on Tverskaya Lamskaya, the Moscow equivelant of London’s Oxford St, just two minutes stroll to Red Square. Brilliant.

We didn’t really do too much in Moscow. To be honest I think we were both a bit tired from all the wandering around and Vodka experience in St Petersburg so now we really just wanted a nice chilled day. Went to Lenin’s Mausoleum to see Lenin’s dead body. This was a strange experience. The enormous marble tomb on Red Square was very dimly lit and at the foot of each stairwell and the end of each corridor stood a very serious looking Russian soldier only just visible in the darkness. When you enter the room with the body you are forbidden from stopping even for a second, despite the fact that only one or two other people are there. So you slowly walk around each edge of the glass case peering in at a preserved body. Very odd.

So after a quiet eveniing eating Pizza and watching football at Paul and Iena’s and a couple of drinks in a local bar we had an early night in preparation for the next few days adventure, the 86 hour train journey on the Trans-Siberian to Irkutsk.