Yes, this month learning Russian in Saint Petersburg I survived, but to speak Russian really well I should have to spend a lot more time, because it is rather a very difficult language. For example Russian language has two verbs for each action, depending of imperfective or perfective tense and totally 6 cases. But Finnish with 9 cases seems to be even more difficult.
The photos are as usual presented here; don’t hesitate to leave a comment or ask me something about a special picture.
I really love Saint Petersburg (or short only Petersburg, as the locals usually don’t say the Saint); it is a save City, and most restaurants provide an English menu card as well. There are only a few strange things which attracted my attention:
1. Why in general the public parks have only one entry? It is not possible to cross a public park, you have to go out, where you entered! But the parks are clean and beautiful.
2. Even on weekends the metro works only until midnight. Mostly all big bridges to the other parts of Petersburg are drawbridges and after 2am closed for traffic to open the passage for ships. So there is no way to get over the river not even during the white nights in summer, when everyone parties during the whole night.
3. The streets, restaurants, pubs and directions in the metro are well signposted, but not the hostels or the schools. No direction signs or signpost for this localities; you just have to know where they are located… I don’t believe that this is only for safety reasons.
4. For pedestrians, it is sometimes not very easy to walk along the river, because there doesn’t exist directly crosswalks over the bridges, so you have to take a detour and cross three streets. And sometimes this causes a 300m Walk instead of a 10m one.
5. In a church, the women can let the head covering on, the men have to take them off.
Of course I visited the big Hermitage presenting more than 1 million exhibits and paintings. Of course I did not see them all… In one of the biggest Museum of the world, is this not possible. And I went 2 times there, because of the free entry for students.
Now here it’s getting to winter, it was already snowing and the normal temperature is about 0°C, but once it was -9°C for a while. For my few days in Moscow the temperature will increase up to 9°C according to the weather forecast. Let’s see if it’s true..
