St. Petersburg - Day 1

The train arrived on time to Moscovski vokzal in St. Petersburg. After much walking back & forth and a little growling at each other, Big Boy and I find the metro and buy some tokens. But then there's more walking back & forth trying to find the right platform. [Jet lag robs me of what little short-term memory I naturally possess, so I am even more absentminded and dithery than usual. I'm sure he is loving that.]

We figure out which station we have to get to in order to transfer to the blue line to get to Park Pobedy which is our final destination for the morning. We walk a few blocks to the apartment building and get in, after a little hassle from the concierge (think really grouchy dorm mother/bouncer). I perform the feat of speaking the most Russian since we've been here, I chat with the man sharing the elevator with us. [Russian elevators are about 2 feet square. Seriously. With our backpacks on, we're huge enough to have to perform sort of a Tetris maneuver to fit ourselves in with anyone else. HEY! The guy who invented Tetris is Russian. I wonder if the elevators inspired him??]

The weather here reminds us of Duluth. Lots of sun, lots of sky, cool breeze, and if you're out of the sun, you feel cold.

Tatiana greets us at her door and is happy we've arrived safely. She makes us breakfast, we have the problem food conversation (some of it in Russian), and chat for awhile before taking a short walk to see the local food markets. OK, here's the weird thing. I've done the most conversing since we've gotten here. Big Boy is being shy. He's had four years of practice and I'm sure is way more competent than I am, yet he won't talk. Tatiana called him a typical Russian man a couple of times. Few words, loves money but not work (ok, ok, we talked a little about how little boy is home finishing school and working at his job and she asked what does he do, why is he working, so the contrasts were apparent.).

We need to get together our list of what we'd like to do so we can schedule things on days they're actually open! We did most of that, then Big Boy took a nap, and I've put down the last few blog entries. Now it's coming up on 3pm local time, about the time I normally get up on a work day at home, and I think if I take a nap I'll feel a little less disconnected from reality.