St Petersburg

Decided to take a shirt trip to this wonderful city on Friday morning (that's when I left, not when I decided to go la!). So yea, left my house in Moscow early Friday morning for an Aeroflot flight which also marked my first time on a Tupolev 154. That's an airplane... Made in Russia :) Kinda like a Boeing 727, with all the 3 engines at the back, one each on both sides of the fuselage, and then one on top of it. Anyway, it was a nice and uneventful flight.
Landed at St Petersburg's Pulkovo I Airport exactly an hour after taking off from Moscow and was met by Asgeir, an Icelandic student in Petersburg, who was kind enough to let me stay at his place for the night in his extra bedroom which his flatmate had left a few days earlier.
Basicly the trip was wonderful and I was shown just about everything there is to see in the city by Asgeir and Frol, who were fantastic hosts. That included a boatride around the famous canals, The Hermitage museum, which is just massive and if I hadn't had them to guide me through it I'd probably still be wandering the halls and rooms of that palace today!

Umm... what else could I say.
Well, I'm really glad that I decided to go see the place for myself, as I'd always wanted to go, but somehow always let my habit of procrastinating get in the way (membership in that club is free by the way, and oh so easy to fall into it's habits!), but having finally been is great, as I'd sometimes thought I'd just give it a miss since I wouldn't be missing anything (all Russian cities are the same, innit?!). But St Pete's is VERY different from Moscow. First, the buildings in the centre are much lower, so you can actually enjoy the views and the sun gets to shine on the sidewalks (you could view that as being both negative and positive though, but I found it very nice), and it seems more relaxed, and yes, European in a way, but still Russian (in a nice way though!).
So I definitely recommend going there, and as always, pictures will be posted when I've got time (ie, when I'm back from HongKong la!).