St. Petersburg - Day 8

I got up early for 10k around the park. There was indeed some partying last night, the place was loaded with trash & Baltika bottles. The cleaning trucks hadn't yet been through when I was out at 7:30.

We tried to meet up with Anne for a trip to Peterhof. But between her missing the last metro last night and my cell phone running out of money so it couldn't accept calls, we ended up sitting around the train station for an hour. I did learn how to recharge the phone, though. They have these cool ATM-like machines where you choose your service on a touch screen, punch in your phone number, put in money, and there you go, more minutes. Take that, Cingular!

So we went downtown to get some breakfast (yay blini! yay lingonberry jam!) and catch the boat to Peterhof which loads on the embankment behind the Hermitage. I'm not sure how, but I managed to get us the regular rate ($24 for the both of us) for the boat, not the foreigner rate (which was more expensive, of course, $18 for adults, $14 for students). It certainly wasn't my dazzling Russian. I was pretty mushmouthed with the talking today. So, we cruised the Gulf of Finland for half an hour to get to the grounds.

It was a madhouse. There's a lot of area, but there were thousands of people there. It was still a nice day when we arrived, although the forecast was for 60ish and rain all day. We walked around to look at the fountains, but didn't pay extra to go into any of the reconstructed palaces. [The Germans used the site for quarters, then bombed it before getting kicked out in WWII.] We walked along the gulf path in the woods and it was nice, since most of the people were swarming the fountains and palace. As we walked through the upper gardens, the wind shifted and it started to rain. We walked to the bus stop and caught a bus back to the metro line ($3 for the both of us, then about 50 cents each for the metro which is 14 rubles a token).

We headed to The Idiot for food & chess, but I was low on rubles. We were stupid again and walked for nearly an hour looking for a cash machine. Big Boy beat me every time today at chess. Unfun. It wasn't even 8pm by the time we were done and we didn't know what to do with ourselves. We decided to see a movie. Ocean's 13. Dubbed in Russian. I followed the plot, but the sad part is that I felt like I understood the Spanish dialog better than the Russian. I guess I'm just tired today.

We met the roomies while walking on Nevsky. They managed to get train tickets by going to a travel agency. I just saw them pop their heads into the internet cafe here. It's almost 1am.