Day 9 10/9/11 - Russia

St Petersburg -> Moscow

Highlight

• Woke up early to pack and breakfast, then off to the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, the burial ground of famous Russians such as Tchaikovsky.
• The whole thing turned out to be a big rip off – 2oo rubles to enter and another 100 for the monastery for “tourists”, i.e. non Russians.
• We managed to find most of the famous graves by matching the years of birth and deaths, since, naturally, there was no English.
• Back to hotel, picked up luggage and another 4.5 hours train back to Moscow.
• Raining v heavily so no fun. Our room was much smaller and noisier than the last one.
• Tried to go to Uncle Vanya, another recommendation for dinner. Lo and behold, it didn’t exist or we couldn’t find it (turns out they moved). It left us in a lurch in the rain again.
• We decided that instead of hunting around, we would just walk into any restaurant. Unfortunately, the restaurant we wanted to go to seemed to be the only one that was actually full in the whole of Russia. We got kicked out as there was no room.
• Ended up at Tepemok (fast food chain) due to the lack of other choices. The food ranged from bad (soup) to ok (semolina, sweet pancake), to quite acceptable (savoury pancakes). Too bad it was 1.2 hour travel to get there and there were outlets of this place everywhere, so we didn’t have to make such an effort.

Food

• Nashotel:
  • smoked salmon, potato hash, smoked meat and cold cuts cheese
  • fried dough fritters
  • pirozhki (small bun with meat and cabbage)
  • orange juice
• Tepemok:
  • mushroom pancake
  • goose liver, pickled gherkins and herbs pancake
  • red caviar pancake
  • juice
  • borsche
  • pea and smoked bacon soup
  • wood berry and almond semolina
  • caramel and apple pancake