Europe

This morning were up at 5:30am to get ourselves organised for an early departure from the hotel. We had a quick breakfast and were in a taxi before 7:00am for the trip to Tegel airport to catch our flight to Munich.

We had a nice breakfast on the plane and, before we knew it, we were on descent into Munich. Munich airport is huge but very organised. We had plenty of time before our flight to Saint Petersburg but the sheer size of the airport meant that most of the time we had was taken up just in getting from one gate to the other (which was in a different terminal).

The flight to Saint Petersburg took about three hours and was very pleasant. We had a good lunch onboard and tried to doze a bit to catch up on the sleep we didn’t get last night!

Clearing immigration into Russia was pretty seamless but were then detained briefly to answer questions about the value of some of the things we were carrying and the quantity of cash we were bringing into Russia. After a few minutes, we were allowed to go and we exited customs to meet our driver. The drive to the hotel took about half an hour. By the time we got to the hotel (the beautiful Astoria), checked in, and got organised, it was about 6:00pm (after the time zone change, since Saint Petersburg is two hours ahead of Berlin).

We decided that we should have a little walk around the city so we rugged up and headed downstairs to go outside. On the way out we stopped and chatted with the concierge for a while regarding our plans for the next few days. We have a few things booked in but we had not counted on having to pay for them all in cash when we got here! We have exhausted our daily cash withdrawal limit today trying to get enough cash to pay for the things we committed to. We have paid for some of it in Euros and the rest with as many Rubles as we could withdraw at the ATM here in the hotel. Apparently, credit cards are not as widely used here as we expected! Anyway, we think we have it (mostly?) under control.

We eventually got outside for a walk but we didn’t stay out too long. The temperature outside was -1C but it felt much colder than that. There is quite a bit of snow on the ground but we have been advised that this is a much warmer winter than usual. We walked down to the Neva River and took in the view along the river for a while before succumbing to the cold and heading back to the hotel.

Once back in the hotel we decided to order room service for dinner, which was very nice. We are now getting ready for bed, since we have an extremely early start tomorrow morning because we made a last-minute decision to go to Moscow tomorrow. So, we’ll be on the train at 5:30am tomorrow!