Jule in Russia:Day 1&2

Big hello (or maybe even good night/good morning) from Russia. I am in St.Petersburg now. I am on a study trip with my marketing course until Sunday night. It’s 3:51 am and I am kinda tired but I still wanna tell you a few things about my first impressions. Monday morning we took a train at 7am from Helsinki to St.Petersburg. The train ride was actually fun but quite exhausting. We arrived at 2:15pm Russian time. We had the rest of the day to ourselves. To be honest I don’t really remember what we did. We checked into our hotel and I think we tried to find some store to buy food/water. You can’t really drink tab water in Russia and brushing your teeth with that water might not be a good idea either.

looks pretty healthy though doesn’t it?

I think after we figured out that our hotel is actually located in a shopping mall we were kinda ok lol. We went to eat at some “pizza&Pasta” place which promised an English menu. It is really hard to find anything in English here. The restaurant sucked…but what do I know? lol. We spent the night at some friend’s hotel room…having a little party….pretty quiet one for Finnish standards but hotel security came at some point and let us know that we should better shut up. As all of us were(and still are) kinda scared of the Russians we kinda obeyed lol.

Today we went to some fancy university to have some lecture about Russian Business culture and we got to meet some nice Russian students. In general I can say that Russians are so damn unfriendly and they don’t (or they don’t want to) speak English. Their impoliteness really pisses me off. They don’t even look you in the eye and kinda treat you like shit. If I would not be so scared of them (they look really grumpy though!) I would actually go up to them and give them one of my awesome lectures and evil eyes!

We went to eat at some Russian place which I didn’t like. There are 2 reasons for that: 1^st The food was crap, 2^nd They treat you like shit. After that some of us went to the famous “colorful cathedral” as we like to say. It was so pretty. But as it was snowing the entire day, some of us thought it would be fun to have a little snow ball fight there. And they were right…it was fun…but cold! At some point I was convinced I had some kind of a swimming pool in my boots.

We spent the night at some other friend’s hotel room and played some drinking game which fucked up some of us pretty badly.(not me…seriously! Although there would have been enough reasons for that!I’m sure there’s gonna be some material on facebook pretty soon…)

Tomorrow or better said later we have to meet at 1pm to go to the American chamber of commerce and then the Ford company here…I think. But some of us(incl. me) thought it would be cool to meet p at 7.20 am, have breakfast and do some sightseeing before we have the meetings. At the moment I don’t feel very comfortable doing that. I just came back from the aforementioned party and I should get p again in 3 hours the latest…let’s see how it works out! I’ll try to keep you up to date. !

P.S people here are weird.girls look like prostitutes and guys are just…ugly.