I’m in St Petersburg, Russia at the moment, for work.
It’s quite a pretty city, in a very differnet way to any other city I’ve seen or been in. Aside from it being quite dark and dreary (it IS late autumn after all, and it does get to -30 or so in Winter with 2-3 hours of sun!), it’s quite an interesting place. The architecture is interesting – lots of very big, “heavy” feeling building, friendly people (once it’s established that I dont understand Russian! Hand signals are working quite well), etc. A lot of the time has been spent in the office tho – we get up around 9am, work from around 11:30am until 9:00pm, then head back to the hotel and hunt some dinner. Having two local speakers (Kirill, one of our PM’s (Leonie is the other one), and Julia, our Tech Writer and translator) is a great help, especially when ordering food.
There are a few things that have really hit me – outside of the total foreign-ness of not speaking, or being able to read, the language. Everyone here smokes (well, almost everyone – about 70%), and they smoke inside quite a lot. Coming from a country without indoor smoking, going to a pub is an interesting experience – clothes stink, and I feel like I’ve had a smoke myself (lightheaded etc), Not a lot of fun, but worth it anyway. We also used the subway to get back to the hotel last night. It’s around 40-50m below ground (New York is maybe 5-10m) and sometimes floods. The trains move at about 50km/h, which in a tunnel feels very quick. The subways are REALLY clean and safe, and we got back in maybe 10 mins, where as driving takes 15. Very cool. Around 40% of people here use the subway, which is a massive uptake for any city.
As it was Julia’s first week, we had their traditional celebration, where the new person puts on some food and drink. By drink I mean Vodka, Brandy, Whiskey, Coniac. They dont mess around with beer or wine much here. That was quite an experience – they know how to drink here – slowly, and over time, not the NZ-style mass consumption.
On the weekend, we are planning on looking around, given they have places of the size and quality of the Luvre (sp? in Paris) and similar here (the Hermatige). I’m just hoping that the weather clears up a bit :)
