June 6, by Donna

Today we woke early for one of several early morning flights.  We met up with our travelling companions, Joan, Karl and Missy, at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris where we boarded Air France for Russia.

I will admit that I held my breath when we went through Russian immigration.  We had had a great deal of trouble getting a visa for Marina, since she was born in Russia, and I continued to feel slightly nervous about whether we would encounter a problem.  But the stern looking woman officer gave us a good looking over then stamped our passports, and into Russia we went.

Our guide from Exeter International is Tanya, who seemed both informative and cheery as well as (thankfully) easy to understand.  She pointed out some highlights of St. Petersburg as we drove from the airport to the city, including Soviet era housing (quite awful), a memorial to the siege of Leningrad (quite awe inspiring), and pre-revolution era buildings (quite elegant).   We checked into our Marriott (arranged by Karl, who is a platinum member, which gave us all sorts of special privileges), and got organized.

We all took a walk before dinner, then ate at a Lithuanian restaurant called Gintara's (in honor of both Joan and Lenny's heritage).  Marina immediately got borscht, I got herring, and Joan & Missy checked out the house-made sausage. 

I've already realized several possible themes for our trip.  First, I have a stong sense of a whole country undergoing renovation.  You see magnificently restored buildings next to deplorable ones.  You see older shops and you see hyper-modern, enormous malls under development.  You also get a sense of capitalism triumphant - there are loads of foreign cars (and foreign car dealers) and designer brands.  The guide spoke about the Soviet era almost as if it were a bad dream.

A second theme is a slight feeling of lawlessness!  When talking our brief walk, we saw a car stuff with young adults, one of whom was sticking his head through the open moon roof, singing songs through a megaphone, and swigging from an unidentified bottle at the same time.  We experienced a car whizzing through a red light, just while we were legitimately walking through the crosswalk.  We'll see how this feeling develops!!

Lastly, service seems to be at a different standard.  At dinner, we ordered, then waited for nearly an hour before anything happened.  No bread, no food, no nothing (okay, they did bring the wine ... hmmm, perhaps drinking is another theme).  The food was delicious, but my American sensibility found the service pretty abysmal.

After a nice dessert of French macaroons in our room (thank you, Anyuli!!), we're off to bed.  It's almost 10:00pm, and the sun is still shining brightly.  They call this time of year the "white nights", when the days are very long.

-- Donna