pinkyandblue

[pinkyandblue]

Visit to the Museum of Cosmonautics: random pictures of models of the firsts satellites, the main compartment of MIR and last but not least the original rocket capsule used to do the organic testing of space travel on dogs.

[pinkyandblue]

Pictures of the famous deceased: space dogs Belka & Strelka, Lenin, Stalin and Chroetsjov

[pinkyandblue]

Views along the river

[pinkyandblue]

Christ the Saviour Cathedral

[pinkyandblue]

We hebben ze gevonden, zie hier: vier russen - super gevaarlijk voor uw computer ;-)

[pinkyandblue]

Scenic views from Arbatskaja

[pinkyandblue]

Ministry of Foreign Affairs

[pinkyandblue]

The Kremlin

[pinkyandblue]

Pinky and blue went to the Moscow University and learned a lot of new things, but they wouldn’t say what exactly... The building was the tallest building in Europe at the time it was build (36 levels) and kept this record until 1988. It is said to contain a total of 33 kilometres of corridors and 5,000 rooms.

[pinkyandblue]

Russian Subway stations: Went to one of the deepest metro stations of the world: Park Pobedy with a depth of 73m. Its escalator is 176m long and is amongst the longest in the world. It takes 2min and 57 seconds to do the whole trip. Furthermore there were a lot of beautiful stations, but navigating can sometimes be hard as you can see in one of the signs (at least for someone that cannot read cyrillic).

[pinkyandblue]

Moscow: First impressions

[pinkyandblue]

Train trip from Sint Petersburg to Moscow. One thing is for sure: there are a lot of trees in Russia.

[pinkyandblue]

The Hermitage and a picture during our transfer from Peterhof back to Sint Peterburg

[pinkyandblue]

Peterhof - The small residence for tsar Peter the Great with loads and loads of fountains. It is considered the Versailles of Sint Petersburg. 

[pinkyandblue]

“I Speak Uber”

Our very first time in an Uber... exciting!

A few days ago we wanted to go to the Pavlovsk & Catherine Palace. We were looking into our options and we only had 2 options: public transport or taxi/uber. As the public transportation system would take at least two hours transit time, we went for the uber system.

Installing the app and creating a profile was easy, and attaching my paypal account was easy as well. However when we tried requesting the car for the first ride, it went wrong. We got the following detailed error message: “something went wrong” :-). Turns out: attaching my visa card to my profile fixed the problem.

It works like this: you indicate where you want to be picked up or you indicate “my location” and your destination place. You immediately see a number of cars pop up on your screen and a few minutes later you get a proposal. For the first ride (1h drive) we got a quote of around 900 rubles (+- 15 euros), what seemed too cheap to be true. It’s very convenient that you can see the rating of the driver they propose, how much experience he have, the price and how long it will take before the car is there to pick you up. It’s almost unbelievable how fast a driver can be there to pick you up. We really had to hurry to escape our hotel from the second floor to catch our driver that would be at the front gate in 5 minutes. Another advantage is that when you confirm the booking you can see the license plate and the car brand although for a women like Pinky it would be easier to know the colour of the car instead of the brand :-)

Driving style? Well you have “ to keep calm, carry on and think happy thoughts” as sometimes they make sharp turns, squeeze in the traffic but generally speaking you feel safe (mainly because this is the driving style of everyone in Russia).

For us this experience was extra adventurous as we do not speak Russian and we were wondering how that would work out… Quite well we have to admit, the driver can perfectly perform his assignment without any verbal communication. Of course we just had to try it anyway with following results:

Ride 1: Me: Do you speak English? Driver: Nods no  - Silence for remainder of ride -

Ride 2: Me: Do you speak English? Driver: Yes  - Silence for remainder of ride -

Ride 3: Me: Do you speak English? Driver: I only speak Uber  - Silence for remainder of ride -

Overall we were very happy with the Uber experience, although we are a little flabbergasted about the low fares. We can only hope the drivers still earn enough money to make a descent living.

[pinkyandblue]

Long distance view of the Sint Isaac Cathedral, of which the dome is gilded with 100 kilograms of gold

[pinkyandblue]

Peter and Paul Fortress