A Weekend in the West!


The 'Church on Spilt Blood' in Petersburg, cool name and pretty cool looking!

Building an outdoor ice bar on the main street of Petersburg....as one does. You'll notice its dark, quite the running theme for winter in the city!

We were promised that this river, the Neva, would be frozen and that we would be able to walk/skate/ fall on our asses across it at this stage of the year, damn global warming, the Russians love it though because it means their winters are getting much milder, they can't seem to understand it's got slightly more catastrophic results in other parts of the world and keep belching out their pollution. Anyhoo, if it wasn't frozen last weekend we are just going to have to come back after New Year....ho hum!


3.75 Litres of tasty vodka for 30 of your european Euro, when Russia gets it right it does so in style!! (Margaret, I think I've found your spiritual home!!) Honestly lads, it was empty when I found it!!

The birthday boy, a few hours into his night out!!


A weekend trip to St Petersburg was called for in honour of Sean (who does business and Russian in Trinity, but we won't hold that against him), he was hitting the ripe old age of 20 and he came to the shiny metropolis of Moscow for my birthday so my arm was twisted to repay the favour. Had a fantastic weekend, St Petersburg is soo much cheaper than Moscow, spent 250 rubles (about 6 euro) on a night out and that included a trip to KFC AND a taxi for four people home, bargainous! (the cheapness of the night may have had something to do with the MASSIVE bottle of vodka which was opened before we went out...see above) We did the touristy things during the day (which lasted about 4 hours, the sun set at 3:49pm on the sunday) its definitely a prettier city than Moscow. My love of Estonians was confirmed, they speak such a cool language (the number four is 'nelli' so listening to Sean's girlfriend say four thousand four hundred and fourty four was worth the trip alone!) and they are just mad people.

One of our friends, Josh, was leaving to go back to the states for chrismas this afternoon, tearful goodbyes all round and then we got a bit depressed because he was the first of our friends to start the mass christmas exodus. Imagine our surprise when we exited our local metro station this evening to be met by...Josh! After quickly confirming that we hadn't gone back in time, we established that even though Josh had confirmed his flight to Geneva last night, booked his hostel to stay over night there and said goodbye to his babushka (more on her later!) when he went to check in today he was informed that he was in fact booked onto the 9am flight to Zurich and why had he missed it! The beauty of Russia is that in any other country this would have been a major mix-up by the airline and they would bend over backwards to fix it and immediately offer some sort of compensation to allay the pain of missing a flight you never even knew you were booked on, not the case in this fair country. Josh had to traverse the city to try to sort out the problem, all the time being blamed for someone else's mix-up, long story short he's booked on the flight he thought he was booked on, tomorrow, and is staying with us because he can't let his babushka know because heads will roll in the airline industry!

Which leads me nicely to Josh's babushka, or Baba Sasha as she prefers to be called. Not actually his grandmother but more like his roommate/landlord. She spends most of her time with her family in the states so Josh has a pretty sweet deal in the apartment on his own. Yesterday was the first time that we met this living legend, we went to Ismailovsky Park, russian souvenir mecca, and the woman was poetry in motion with her haggling. She managed to disparage almost everything and not only got the Russian price for what we bought (dual pricing, we are never going to be able to get around it) but managed to bully the stallholders into giving further discounts, not easy with these hardcore traders. When she heard that we were Irish she said that she LOVED Riverdance (foolishly, Lui said that he could dance better than Michael Flatley, hands up anyone who doesn't see that coming back to bite him in the ass!!), wondered at why none of us had red hair or freckles and said that she didn't think there were any good looking Irish people (we took it as a compliment!) An absolute legend, we are thinking of bringing her home and putting her on our windowsill!