St Petersburg, day 2

It's 35 degrees inside and 38 degrees outside, and I'm competing for space in a crowded room with four Russians watching a shockingly badly dubbed Simpsons episode. Welcome to St Petersburg! I just threw up blini on my shoes and the only policeman I've seen had a fag hanging out his mouth and a beer in his hand...at 11am.


Landed in St Petersburg yesterday off the appropriately named Fokker aircraft, after spending my connecting flight to Vienna being accosted by an old man who was travelling to Macedonia 'for reasons I don't divulge' and who wanted to know how interconnected I thought the catalysts for World War 1 and the catalysts for the Russian Revolution were.
Having balked at the advice from my hostel ('take three trains, then one bus - nothing will be written in the Roman alphabet - then walk for twenty minutes to find us'), I had booked a taxi transfer online the night before out of cowardice. I found the guy skulking round the entrance of the airport, holding up a sign that was written in somewhat improvised Roman letters.
'Where are you from?' he asked me in fairly impressive English when we were in the car.
'London,' I told him.
'Ah, yes. I have been to London many times, but I won't go again,' he answered. There was a long silence, and then he added, 'That was back when I was a famous ice-skater.'

The Apple Hostel is expertly hidden up a number of flights of stairs, through an archway, up an alleyway, and entered via a concealed back entrance. A guy who had apparently been on the same flight as me trudged in five hours later, having wandered around central St Petersburg pretty much since then. The staff appear to consist of two women swapping alternative twelve hour shifts - from them I have learnt Russian pop songs, the word for 'constipated' (not because I needed to use it), and what Russian Facebook looks like (very funny.)
From another Russian girl called Polina, a Belgian girl from the hostel and I managed to garner tickets to see Swan Lake tomorrow night at 'non-tourist prices' ('Just don't speak English while you're there,' Polina warned us.) And tomorrow night we're off to Moscow on the overnight train, from the confusingly named Moscow Train Station in St Petersburg.
Information I have learned about Moscow:
1. There are less parasites in the water than in St P - 'do not,' said the hostel administrator, 'drink the St Petersburg water, on pain of death.'
2. Actually...there isn't a 2. Less parasites is a good start, though.

Tonight, vodka-drinking is on the agenda (and, according to a guy from Essex from the Apple Hostel, lesbian bars.)

Useful trivia: if you buy something labelled '3MEN, XXL' in the dodgy supermarket under the hostel, it won't be porn. It will be a packet of cleverly concealed gummy snakes. Don't believe me? Learn the Cyrillic alphabet - after that revelation, I certainly am.