just one little fishy

I got a blink-and-you-miss it tour of St Petes thanks to Roman, the "On the Go" tours manager, driving around the heart of the city, so I have seen the outside of the Hermitage, St Isaacs cathedral, cathedral of spilt blood, some (now very salubrious) Stalin era apartments, and Nevskij Praspekt - the main street with some very upmarket stores. Overall, my impression was that of a very European city, very modern, clean and western. Around 5pm I met up with Kimbo, Emma, Zoe, Adele and the rest of our group and hopped on a train for Pskov. Five hours of drinking later (and some exceedingly embarrassing behaviour by a few of our group, say no more) we arrived in Pskov, a small-ish country city. Very satellite Soviet, wide streets and neon lights and a feeling of bleakness. I suddenly understood why Chinese rural cities look the way they do, and where Chinese get their very odd impression of the West from! On Christmas Eve day we went for a wonderful banya (Russian sauna) and beat each other with bunches of birch leaves and twigs (more relaxing than it sounds), running between the steam room and throwing buckets of icy water over each other outdoors. They're an unusual bunch, the Russians. We then spent a while tripping about the city looking at churches and other notable buildings - I like the architecture, the "harmony in asymmetry" and the whitewashed plaster. The landscape is flat and monotonous in winter with the bare trees - very bleak. In the evening we had dinner (fantastic food - salads for starters, veal for mains, extraordinary amounts of vodka!) and played games, Santa arrived with a sackful of presents (some more socks for me - big woollen ones, they're sooo beautiful and cosy!) and generally everyone got very boozed, and the baboushka (older women who do the menial jobs - and sometimes pointless jobs, like sitting on each floor of the hotel looking after room keys - and are on the whole marked by their unpleasant temperament and sour expressions) were surprisingly low-key about us running around the place. Once I can put photos up, I'll post one of the phone in our room. It was a beaut yellow dial job, looked like it had walked straight out of 1962 - I loved it! Christmas Day was therefore a bit of a slow start. The girls and I exchanged a few small pressies (socks that say 'always late but worth the wait'. I like to think so. And little tacky xmas earrings etc!) and then we headed out to look around the Pskov countryside - the Pechory monastery and an ancient fortress. I like the older buildings, they remind me of story-book gingerbread houses, the doorsteps and window sills are all thick and a little misshapen! And the onion shaped domes on top are just so Russian - its wonderful to be somewhere so utterly foreign! After all that we hopped on an overnight train to Moscow - the 4 bed cabins were very clean and comfortable. Moscow is much colder (minus 8-ish), IT HAS SNOW!!! and much more Russian than St Petes, although it is also very modernised and western - there's no shortage of McDonalds and KFC etc. We spent the day wandering about the city (in 5 layers of thermals and my down jacket!) and looking inside the Kremlin and the amoury which houses all the treasures from Tsarist Russia which need more time to describe than I have left right now - absolutely wonderful carriages, dresses, jewels, thrones, everything! Tomorrow we're off to the garden of "fallen idols" and later on we'll go iceskating in Red Square ... Russia is fantastic!