St. Petersburg

Out of the EU and into Russia! The airport sure proved to us that we were indeed out of the EU. No renovations there for the last 40 years. We were picked up by our driver at the airport who had one of the biggest mullets I have ever seen in my life. He looked quite a lot like this guy I found on the internet, but older, fatter, and his hair was a little bit shorter, just down to the shoulders. We were rather excited to see that this is who we would be spending our time with for a week.
Russia must have been the most expensive place we have been to so far. You can't just go to Russia like you can to Germany or something and just turn up, you have to be invited, and after you have been invited you can apply for a visa which took us about 3 weeks. A hotel will invite you, but since we didn't really know what we were doing we used the Russian travel agency in Sydney to organise all this for us and to book us a guide for the 5 days we were there.

Anyway, our hotel (we could pick out of about 8, but we just went with the cheapest, that was still about A$220 a night!!) was really old and again, nothing had been done since the late 50s I think, including the beds and bathrooms. When we turned on the taps in the bathroom rusty water came out. I didn't want to repeat my Phi Phi island sickness so we made sure not to drink that water! I must say that was not exactly thrilled at my arrival in rainy and cold St. Petersburg last week after all this. Strangely 'Down Under' - by men at work, was playing on the Air Berlin flight we were on when we landed. I didn't think it was very apt at all.

Anyway, the day after we arrived we started on our tours. The morning on day 1, Monday, we were picked up at 10am by our driver, Vladim, and Christina our 22 year old guide. She was very nice although she just loved to say 'absolutely' and 'you can't even imagine' A LOT when she is talking about things, reminiscent of Fast Forward's Good Morning Moscow. She also said 'it's nice' quite a bit and sounded just like Borat, but we hid our smiles.

On day 1 we drove around the city and looked at the sights including the above Peter and Paul Fortress, the sight that Peter The Great choose to start building St. P. The church above is the tallest building in the city, due to swampy ground everything is only about 4/5 stories tall at the most.

On day 2 we were picked up at 10am again (same every day) and we went to the Hermitage Museam. It used to be the Tsars Winter Palace and it is just huge. It was built by Peter The Great to rival Versaille (remember my Paris blog). There is heaps of gold leaf everywhere.

The Hermitage is similar to the Lourve or the Vatican in that it hold a massive amount of pricess art. Below is a room full of Picassos. I was so surprised that many of the painting, including Monets, and Van Goghs, were displayed not behind glass or behind any rope or anything. You could go right up and touch them or anything if you had wanted to. There were a couple of bored old ladies around the place doing crossword puzzles who I think were supposed to be watching everyone though. Later that day on our own we went to the Russian Costume museum, and everything included old wooden bowls were in there own glass case and no photos were allowed!

The gold room.

Lenin pointing towards the future. We were at the Lenin train station.

This was the view from our hotel room on the 3rd floor. The church you can see on the left is the Church of the Spilled Blood that I have more photos of later.

We were absolutely exhausted from walking everywhere in St. P. Everywhere else we have been we get a tourist map and 1cm on the map is usually equal to about 100m or something like that, so we end up getting different things on the map fairly quickly. Not here! On our map here 1cm = 1km I think! The map looked just like Venice or Amsterdam did with canals, so we'd decide to walk somewhere, and then find that we were still walking 1 hour later. It took us 45minutes to walk to the church below from our hotel - when we were in a hurry. Distances are quite deceptive too, because we'd look and see that to get to the church we would have to got past 1 building, over a bridge, past 3 more buildings and through a park. Simple. Well every building is the size of a hospital and the bridges take 10 minutes to get across. The parks are like 10 football fields. Our hotel had 80 rooms just on our floor. When we got out of one of the 8 lifts available there was a huge empty space that you could have put a swimming pool in, then we'd have to trek down a looooong corridor to get to our room.

Walking around St. P is not really that easy since Russian drivers are absolutely crazy, you can't even imagine. The tiny smart cars are gone and the huge cars are driven as fast as possible. Vladim was a good driver, but even he would put his foot down where ever possible, and the slam on the brakes at the last minute. Pedestrian crossing have no meaning. Drivers never stop for you, even when you find a gap and are on the crossing you have to run to the other side because the drivers just speed towards you at 80km/h.

The bridge on the right at night.

Day 3 we went to the Summer Palace.

The palace. The pic above is of the end of the building.

One of the many fountains in the extensive gardens.

The Gulf of Finland that the Palace is on. For a Summer palace it was not very summery!

The view from the palace down past the fountains to the gulf.

A Russian Orthodox church near the palace. There are lots around and most of them have the gold leaf domes. Christina told us that to get the gold onto the domes the gold is heated with mercury and then applied to the domes. The mercury evaporates. Obviously this is highly toxic but prisoners did this job so it is not seen as so tragic.

The cars on the road are a mixture of old and extremely rusted old Russian cars - that are huge, and brand new mercs, audis, BMWs, and the most Hummers I have ever seen in my life. They were everywhere, stretch ones too for the many weddings trying to get some warm weather. I think there are a lot of super wealthy Russians around to afford such luxurious cars.

To save our feet from walking we got the Metro a few times, although stations are pretty far apart and we still had a 15 minute walk home anyway. Some stations are very fancy with ornate ceilings and lights. To get to the train you have to go down escalators that are about.... 10 times the length of an ordinary escalator you would find at the shops. Sometimes we'd be on an escalator and think that we must be almost at the top after such a long time, then we look past the other people and find that we were still closer to the bottom than we were to the top! Christina later told us (we were only with her until 1pm every day) that because of the swampy ground they had to dig really far down to get earth hard enough for a metro line.

A church we found on one of our walks around town. We were trying to go to the blockade museam, but it was shut. St. P was blockaded for 900 days by the Nazis during WW2, and that museum showed the way of life for people during it. Supposed to by very interesting.

Another church, this one commissioned by Catherine the Great for girls from noble families. We skipped Catherine's palace on day 4 in favour of getting driven around to a few more places. We really wanted to see the Diamond and Gold rooms in the Hermitage and finally, after 3 days of trying we got tickets. The Hermitage opens at 10.30am and before that there was a huge line of people waiting to get in and buy tickets. Christina showed us how to get in the Russian way. When the doors to the Hermitage opened at 10.30 the regular tourists in the line started walking in through the courtyard to the museum and ticket desk. The Russians on the other hand didn't bother with the line and once the doors open started sprinting to the desk and got there first. We did the same and luckily got tickets to both rooms. There were some really amazing things, but no photos allowed.

On our last day, Friday, we walked to the Church of the Spilled Blood in the morning before our flight, so called because it was where Peter the Great was shot and killed by an assasin.

Inside the church, now a museum, is spectacular. I think it is my favourite church of anywhere I have been. Every wall is covered in mosaics, showing the life of Christ and saints. The is lots more gold leaf. Everywhere I looked I just wanted to take a photo, but the photos just don't do it justice.

After the church we got driven to the airport and are now back in Vienna again. Tomorrow we fly to Dubai and I am looking forward to seeing some good movies on the plane.

I tried to get Chris to become fluent in Russian while we were in St. Petersburg by watching TV in the evening, but he is no closer to be fluent than he was on Monday unfortunately, although Russian is definately an easier language than Polish. We still had fun watching Starsky and Hutch dubbed over with Russian and Fear, or I should say CTPAX (Strach) as it was called there, amongst other programs.

Beautiful Switzerland

Before we went to Switzerland we spent a few days in Munich sorting out our flat we are renting from a lady and everything. Since we will be in Munich for 6 weeks in September I will cover it in later blogs. All I will say is that Munich my dream city with delicious foods everywhere, and the people, men especially, wear leaderhosen around as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
Here is Santa on his holidays, also wearing leaderhosen, after having one too many steins!

The ad at the bus stop. He he.

Anyway, more on Munich later, this is the Switzerland post.

From Munich we went to Switzerland and the first place we went to was Bern. A very cute town. We just stayed here for 2 nights. There is not much to do here except look around. Everything is always shut! I think the Swiss are so wealthy they don't need to bother working anymore so they shops stay shut.

I took the next two photos out the window of the car as we drove along to Zermatt to see the Toblerone mountain, the Matterhorn.

Zermatt - the view of the Matterhorn. Damn clouds! In the photo below you can just see this little pointed hill to the left of the Matterhorn.

From Zermatt we drove to Lausanne, it was pouring with rain. So much that could hardly see.
The next day we had a look around and went to this castle, the Chateau de Chillon.

The view across the lake. After this we left Lausanne and drove to the Alps.

Our cold arrival in Lauterbrunnen, up in the Alps. You can just see the snow under the clouds.

The next day the weather was great! It must be our sunny influence. We have now had 4 days of rain in the 2 and a half months we have been away.

This is the view from our hotel window. You can see the tallest waterfall in Europe on the right.

The view looking back towards Lauterbrunnen. Everywhere you look is beautiful. These pictures are nothing compared to being there.

Little Heidi children picking flowers.

Going up the mountain in the cable car. We had to go up 4 different cable cars to get to the top. This is just the first one, about a quarter of the way up.

Almost at the top....

The view from the top of the Shilthorn, 3000m up!

And there's......

Hey! :(

Yay! The one and only clearing of the clouds while we were up there. Just enough to have a look. Apparently sometimes it is cloudy and cold in Lauterbrunnen, but when you get up here it is sunny and nice as you are above the clouds.

No high heels!! How you would have even got down from the cable car along the slate rocks to see this sign I don't know.

This is the building that the cable car comes into. There is a restaurant and a shop in it, but that is the only thing on the mountain. This picture was taken when the clouds opened up a bit. Sometimes we couldn't see it at all. Visibilty was about 5 meters sometimes. The above picture with the sign was where this picture was taken.

Coming back down the mountain and out of the clouds.

When we got halfway back down the mountain we decided to walk the rest of the way back to Lauterbrunnen, about a 2 hour walk. Unfortunately we saw a sign that pointed us to Lauterbrunnun so we took it - not knowing that it was the trail that took you through the forest and down some pretty steep bits. My foot is fine for walking around normally, but in street shoes and walking on uneven rocks made it a bit painful. It was a really nice walk even though it did take us 3 1/2 hours to get home. We were exhausted, we'd been walking the whole day.

It was really nice walking through the forest, no snakes or spiders, or leeches, or anything, just fairy toadstools. I'm sure there were fairies and elves and Gnomes in that forest!

There were so many different ones.

The day after our exhausting walk we drove to Lucerne, and went for a 1 hour cruise on the lake (lots of free cruises and stuff included with our Eurail pass). Except the town, which was really old and had the usual nice old buildings and churches, Lucerne looked a lot like Canberra! The lake was just like Lake Burley Griffin, although the little beaches were packed full of people sunbaking and going for a swim. I guess if you want to have th Swiss experience on the cheap just head to Canberra.

There were lots of swans around the lake (unlike in Canberra), and Chris fed them some bread from our lunch. He got bitten a few times in the process but he loved it!

PS. In my previous post I called the Trevi Fountain the Tivoli Fountain. Oops. We never went to Tivoli, it was just too hot.