A travel blog entry..lets start with the worst- St Petersburg
I guess I had way too much expectation, people from various forum suggested to spent at least 5 or a week here to fully enjoy the “glamour” of the city. Stupid me I took the advice and planned for 5 days and still thought it might not be enough, glad my plan was flexible and cut out one day.
In my impression, its a glamorous, glorious and elegant city full of colorful onion dome building. The reality is there’s only one single glamorous onion dome building in the entire city (Savior on Spilled Blood church)…the other similar building are not worth mentioning. The city is so old: broken window, wall, falling apart pipes etc. Dirty dusty muddy road resulting in loads of horrific dirty looking cars in the city.
Seriously had enough after day one..when a pickpocket on the famous Nevsky Prospect tried to unzip my backpack three times and luckily I caught him doing it and nothing has been stolen. I was completely freaked out and rushed back home to calm myself down.
Four restless days in st petersburg, so much stress walking around town with all those noise, air pollution and fear of being kidnapped or robbed, I literally had horrible nightmare every single night.
The bad impression turned into a nightmare on the day I left Russia to Latvia. Experienced the most ridiculous border check, I was seriously been treated as a suspicious criminal and was hold up at the border for nearly two hours. They just couldn’t believe I’m just a traveller, the fact that I’m a Chinese made the matter worst.
Well..the only good thing I’ve experienced there…was the Russian dumpling Pelmeni mixed with sour cream. In fact the Russian eat anything with sour cream and cream cheese. Thanks to my couchsurfing host my stay was a little bit brighter with their introduction of these amazing traditional crusine.
Oh and the Hermitage museum??? Now I’ve proved that travel forum advice on a big city like this are so not applicable to my style. Everyone says you need to spend 2 days in the museum just to go through all their amazing artwork. Well I had enough in two hours…skipped through everything except contemporary European painting on the third floor. These are artist that I know how to appreciate after all those art history studies in high school. I could have spent 2 hours standing in front of one of Claude Monet impressionistic painting just to soak in all those colors, but too bad those security guard was already staring at me after five minutes.
I guess my future travel plan is now more refined: I will not visit any more big city EVER!
More than Music 