St Petersburg - 2008 - Day One
May 17, 2008
For those of you following my trip from Prague you can skip this because it is the final days blog there as well.
Had to get up a little early to catch a car to the airport at 0800hr. Five of us were flying Rossiya Air (scary). Talk about a recipe for disaster. We were delayed an hour and of course that meant drinking at the bar. Pretty soon we were all on the hottest damn plane ever throwing shit at each other, getting up and purposely falling into each other’s seats, flicking ears of the sleepers, you name it. That poor plane had no idea what to do with us.
We are staying at the nicest hotel in St Petersburg, the five star Corinthia Nevsky Palace. That may sound great (which it is for comfort), but it also carries with it certain issues. Some of which are the utter milking of you at any chance since they think you are loaded since you are staying at a $500 a night hotel. Likewise, when we crashed the bar we were swarmed with hotel provided prostitutes. There is a whole racket here with full madam on site, hotel kickbacks, etc. It is just expected of a nice Russian hotel that they provide this service. We met an American finance guy at the bar who we rescued from them saying they were charging 500 euro a pop! To make matters worse, they were all smoking hot. Speaking of hot. I do not know what they are putting in the water in this country, but when the whole staff of cleaning ladies are all 10’s, you know there is something going on. I now see why the whole Russian mail order bride thing is so popular.
Had to get up a little early to catch a car to the airport at 0800hr. Five of us were flying Rossiya Air (scary). Talk about a recipe for disaster. We were delayed an hour and of course that meant drinking at the bar. Pretty soon we were all on the hottest damn plane ever throwing shit at each other, getting up and purposely falling into each other’s seats, flicking ears of the sleepers, you name it. That poor plane had no idea what to do with us.
We are staying at the nicest hotel in St Petersburg, the five star Corinthia Nevsky Palace. That may sound great (which it is for comfort), but it also carries with it certain issues. Some of which are the utter milking of you at any chance since they think you are loaded since you are staying at a $500 a night hotel. Likewise, when we crashed the bar we were swarmed with hotel provided prostitutes. There is a whole racket here with full madam on site, hotel kickbacks, etc. It is just expected of a nice Russian hotel that they provide this service. We met an American finance guy at the bar who we rescued from them saying they were charging 500 euro a pop! To make matters worse, they were all smoking hot. Speaking of hot. I do not know what they are putting in the water in this country, but when the whole staff of cleaning ladies are all 10’s, you know there is something going on. I now see why the whole Russian mail order bride thing is so popular.
