st petersburg

we're finally in russia, took the bus from tallin here yesterday. luckily the border crossing was straight forward and easy, except the immigration officer couldn't scan my visa page in my passport and examined every page of my passport and tried scanning other pages. called someone else over to look at my passport and made some comment that i've travelled a lot. asked me if i speak russian, i said a little bit, and he asked "why?", half laughing. interesting.

st petersburg is a city, a bit overwhelming. we're very glad we learned how to read cyrillic and a few basic russian words, it's come in handy already. walked around st petersburg today and it's a beautiful city full of old architecture, some amazing churches, and nice canals. we'll make the obligatory visit to the hermitage tomorrow, from the outside it looks massive, no wonder people can spend days inside.

other adventure so far is we bought train tickets for moscow today. as the book recommended, we wrote out where we wanted to go, the date, class in russian. we got the tickets no problem (though a lot more expensive than we thought it'd be). checked the tickets and they're for the wrong month! (august instead of july). good thing to remember is to write the date with "." in between the day-month-year not "/". after standing in line for another 20 minutes, she changed our tickets to us for the next train (our first option was fully booked) and we'll be going to moscow on monday.