St. Petersburg – The Start of my Trans-Mongolian Trip

So I finally make it to Russia and about to embark on my Trans-Mongolian trip. It was a crazy flight too as I didn’t get in till 11PM to St. Petersburg leaving from Stockholm. I was glad to have finally arrived though especially since it was so difficult to initially get a tourist visa into the country.  I can remember back having to apply months in advance of my arrival and taking about 2 hours to fill out their paperwork, answer security questions about who my first grade teacher was and give a blood sample. It was good to finally get here and to not have any problems once I was off the plane. Since my Russian isn’t too good (actually got quite good at translating the Cyrillic alphabet), I decided it might not be best to try and navigate the bus or subway system at 11:30 at night with all my bags in hand so I decided to take a cab.

St. Isaac’s Cathedral on a rainy day

This was my first mistake in Russia. Although I haggled with the cabbie to agree on an upfront price, he kept insisting that he was using his ‘meter’. $3093 Rubbles and 15 minutes later, I arrived at my hostel then proceeded to argue with him over a rigged meter. For a quick conversion, at the time of writing this, 3093 Rubbles equates to about $93 USD!
The cost should have been more like $25-30 USD. After making a scene and arguing for fifteen minutes I threw him what I thought he should take and finally figured out where my hostel was.

 Russian Whopper options. Unfortunately, the language barrier, the lack of picture menus in restaurants and the lack of street vendors in Russia makes the BK Broiler option that much easier!

For some reason in Russia, all the hostels never seem to have signs out front, just a solid black steel door. And there are always two or three more steel doors you have to go through before getting in. But I must say, the place I stayed in St. Petersburg, called ‘Soul Kitchen’ was one of the best places I’ve stayed in so far.

A map of travelers in my hostel. Apparently I am not the only one who has been to St. Petersburg from my home town. I have a feeling this will soon change as I continue to head east…

While in St. Petersburg, there is quite a lot to see. It’s also very expensive in St. Petersburg so I tried to keep the sightseeing to simply seeing the sights. There were only a few places I decided to pay to get in. The Hermitage was one of them and was worth it.

I’m not a huge art fan but the place is as big if not bigger than the Louve in Paris containing more than three million works of art and artifacts from around the world.

One of the many exhibits from the middle ages

If you really wanted to, you could spend an entire day in the place and not see everything. I only spent a few hours which was enough for me.
The best I thought were the exhibits they had on the Egyptians, Romans and Greeks but they also had a lot of artifacts and such from the middle ages.
Another place I stopped by was St. Isaac’s Cathedral.

Stairs up to St. Isaac’s overlook…

It was impressive inside but was also one of the best places to go for a view of the entire city of St. Petersburg. Unfortunately, it was raining off and on during my entire stay in St. Petersburg and the day I visited here was especially crazy. It went from rain to sun to pouring on me back to sun all within a few hours.

When I made it to the top, it was back to cloudy but still gave a pretty good view of the city.

Walking along the Neva River

The really nice thing about St. Petersburg is the waterways running through the city. On my third day here, I basically spent the entire day walking around the city from bridge to bridge and passed many sights along the way.

The Church on Spilt Blood was one of them (also called the Church of the Savior on Blood). It’s one of the most photographed sights in St. Petersburg and it got it’s name when this church was built on the site where the assassination of the Tsar Alexander the 2nd took place. It was built in his honor.

The Church of Spilt Blood

Just like every country I’d been to so far, the locals always want to know what your impression is of their country and how you like it.

A couple of Russian friends…

This is to be expected of course as I would ask the same of someone in my own country but in Russia, it seemed almost every local I met would ask which I thought was interesting.

I met quite a lot of locals in St. Petersburg and it definitely added to the travel experience because there was definitely a language barrier with most of the population.

Getting around could be quite a task too as there weren’t any English translations in places like the metro, bus stations and even major monuments. I guess you just learn to get by or learn how to ask ten people to get some help if that’s what it takes.

My visa in Russia was only good for about twenty five days so after about three days in St. Petersburg, I decided to take a night train to Moscow which was about a ten hour train ride. Since you can’t just walk up to the ticket office and try to order a ticket in Russian, I had a Russian friend book my ticket.

Can anyone tell me which seat I am in? Or which carriage? How about which train? I was able to find my name, so that was a start…Welcome to Russia!

It was much cheaper for them to do so and I was onto the train leaving for Moscow with a carriage full of Russians by about 11PM my last night there. This would mark the first leg of my trip as my plan was to make the journey on the Trans-Mongolian Railway which unofficially starts in St. Petersburg and goes all the way to Beijing.

Who is the guy in red?? He’s our team leader…This was the start of one crazy Monday night with friends in St. Petersburg… within an hour we were arm wrestling some Russians at the next bar…

The Trans-Mongolian is essentially the same as the Trans-Siberian of which many of you are familiar but the main difference is the train takes you through Mongolia instead of going all the way to the edge of Siberia on the eastern coast. No matter which direction you take it, its still quite a journey crossing over 6 time zones and almost 8,000 kilometers!