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We woke up at 10am ready for our taxi to the airport at 11am. Everything was fairly casual and we all got ready then the long dreaded goodbye to the Dutch girl approached. We addressed it with best wishes for her journey through her life without real friends, hence her solo travelling and her up and coming internship which she will be fired from immediately for being intensely boring. As we expected she made it unnecessarily awkward but eventually we saw the back of her.
Driving out of Kiev towards the airport we realised that we had completely missed the city centre that we had been looking for but oh well. As always the taxi driver created lanes for himself and pulled off obscene manoeuvres whilst on his mobile in order to arrive at the airport on time.
Check in at Kiev ran fairly smoothly and we were at passport control before we knew it. Here they checked our passports unnecessarily thoroughly despite leaving their bloody country. We went into duty free which was severely over staffed with females of an above average complexion. I believe this to be a government policy to counter unemployment which Britain should adopt.
Our flight to St Petersburg was with AeroSvits, which seemed to run a very inefficient operation running a Boeing 767 for a 2 hour flight with a 50% capacity. Classic Communists.
On over arrival we were greeted by a chain smoking middle aged taxi driver holding a sign ' Danel Tomson' Which I assumed was me. After finding out the taxi driver was going to charge us 200 rubles more than previously quotated fights started to kick off. I was quickly on the phone to the hostel that had given us the price of 850 rubles and the lady on the phone said the 200 rubles was for the sign. b******s to that. I briefly quoted contract law and she agreed to make up the difference even though only being about £4, but it was the principle.
The lady who I had been in contact with through the phone and email turned out to be a rather shy and easily embarrassed young lady, who in retrospect I felt I had been too harsh on. Anyhow, the hostel turned out to be a bar with 16 beds in the back room newly refurbished and very liveable.
Exploring St Pete we wandered towards the city centre for food and we were enticed into an Azerbaijani restaurant. The food was good but portions were just not big enough for our largely distended stomachs.
Anyhow we returned to the hostel meeting a fellow sleeper from Serbia who's name I could not grasp so have been calling Mel throughout the night which seemed to work well. We wanted to have a couple of drinks undecided on going out and went about 10ft to our hostel bar. Here one vodka turned into two etc. We were there from 11pm to 4am talking crap with Mel and our barmaid Sasha who gave complementary back and arm massages as she gradually got more pissed on beer even though on duty.
All in all St Petes is a lovely laid back city with the architecture of continental Europe and look forward to the sightseeing tomorrow.
For the record both Nathan and Marcus Post are snoring at this moment at this time at 04:06am. Must be hereditary.
- comments
Paul You had to walk 10ft to the bar?????? wtf that is abit much Danny, don't they know who you are? Sounds like the trip has start with a blast!