After a ridiculous past 24 hours, I think it’s time to say hi and let you know I’m alive.

I arrived in Saint Petersburg yesterday after 14 hours of flying. I could write something sarcastic about that experience, but it really wasn’t too bad. I watched ’10 Cloverfield Lane’ on the plane, but all that did was make me want to build a bomb shelter and become a doomsday prepper.

Emirates has inflight wifi which blew my mind. All I did for 20 minutes was message everyone telling them I was messaging them from 36,000 feet. Best $1 I’ve ever spent 🙂

Sunrise somewhere over the Arabian Peninsula

First thing you need to know about Saint Petersburg is English isn’t widely spoken at all. I feel like English is more accepted in other parts of the world but not here. I don’t want to come across as some tourist that expects everything to be in English at all- I mean, the reason I love traveling is because it exposes you to different things. That being said, you won’t even know what you’re being exposed to here as English is non- existent. I had lunch today, that although was very tasty, I have no idea what it was.

The extravagance of the monarchy and the aristocracy of Petrograd and then Lenongrad is obvious here. The churches, like the Church on Spilled Blood and St Isaacs Cathedral are beautiful.

Church of the resurrection of Christ (aka Church on Spilled Blood)

Inside the Church on Spilled Blood

When the Soviet Union came to an end, the city was renamed to St Petersburg but tell tale signs of the struggles of the past are all over in the form of Soviet era buildings and monuments. Also, the older people here have had rough lives. I can imagine some of them have lived through WW2 and the harshness of the Soviet Union!

Things I’ve found really cool so far are the following:

1. Passport control here is the quickest ever. You walk into a little booth within 2 minutes of getting off the plane and bang, you’re in Russia!

2. Public transport is easy as. Using the metro is like playing Pictionary- you can’t read the words, so think of them as pictures and go from there. You buy tokens from a vending machine for $0.50 each. None of this complicated zone style Oyster/Octopus card business.

3. Russian women are easy on the eye.

4. The sun only sets at 22:30. Saint Petersburg is also known as the city of the white nights as its so far north.

5. The Russian Ruble is weaker than the Rand.

I’ll be sure to write a ‘Top 10’ article on Saint Petersburg at some point. It seems that if you want to be a blogger, all your articles have to say stuff like ‘top 10’ or ‘you won’t believe what I did last summer’, etc.

Cheers for now.