Hello again! I am just back from Russia - been to two beautiful historical cities: One is St Petersburg and the other one is Moscow, and this week (Probably I should have said this month!) I will mostly be writing about this last trip of mine. Before starting my post about St Petersburg, I would like to note that Moscow was not as interesting as I expected it to be, though St Petersburg was way better than I could have imagined. Thus, apart from St Petersburg being the first one I visited in Russia, I am starting this series of posts with it as it looked much more appealing to me. I can't stop looking at the photos I took there - full of colour and energy, different from grey and crowded city Moscow, and too similar to magical city Amsterdam (Actually magical is not enough to describe it. I am a big fan of Amsterdam...) By the way, the one here is a picture of me and the Saviour-on-the-Spilled-Blood or the Cathedral of Resurrection as some may call it.

About Russia

Though I have been to a few countries earlier, this was a new trip to me - a country completely different compared to the West European countries, with the remains of communist years, maybe a bit boring or as most people warned me, lack of cultural things like local food or so... None of them was the case. Russian people are a bit different than the European people, that's true, but every nation is different, isn't that so? The best thing about Russia was, as a tourist, being able to walk around the city without caring about on which path I am walking. In Turkey, if you are about to cross the road on a pedestrian path, then you have to wait for the cars to pass by before putting your feet on the ground. Not too surprisingly, in Russia, pedestrians have the priority. You can use pedestrian paths freely as every single car would stop to wait for you. These are small details maybe, but if you do not want to stop on every corner just the way I did, you should know that. No waiting! You have the priority in Russia (If you are not driving of course).

Food is delicious. This is for sure. Before I got there, almost 9 out of 10 people I talked to told me that I would suffer from hunger. I never believed but my family did! Of course this wasn't the case either. Russia is rich about the variety of food, and you can eat whatever you want in any restaurant. I mostly preferred steak, french fries and salad as a meal (and now I feel quite fat), but they have fish, or pasta, or different kinds of desserts as well. It's all up to you.

This is a picture of me in Moscow - I just wanted to put it here as I love it very much!

Besides all these, getting around the city St Petersburg (and Moscow) is too easy thanks to the city's great underground network. The Cyrillic alphabet might look a bit difficult to read at first, but trust me, you get used to it in a few days - even in a few hours I could say! If you want to use the metro as a means of transportation, luckily, every station name is written both in cyrillic and latin/roman alphabet, and this helps you a lot. By reading all those station names, you somehow start to understand the cyrillic alphabet. I now can read words in Russian, but if you could hear me reading, you would laugh your ass off... I am like a kid in school, spelling out the words as learning how to read. Even sillier, I get too excited when the word I read makes sense to me; especially words such as Mc Donald's or Prospekt or parking, and some other international words we used to hear in every day life...

A little note about Russia: Russia is famous with its pickpockets - at least, I've heard so. So I kept my bag with me all the time and haven't put my money in front pocket as this would be an invitation to the pickpockets. You just be careful about what you are carrying, and you'll be just fine. People kept saying Sicily is full of mafia members, and I was so scared of being abducted the first time I got there (haha silly of me), but Sicily was a safe place and I haven't seen a member of mafia at all. It's all the imagination of people around you. So don't worry about the pickpockets.

Now... My next posts will include details such as the histories of both cities, their most important cathedrals, palaces, squares and a few famous historical people who lived in Russia - like Peter the Great and his wife Catherine, and Ivan the Terrible (or Ivan the Great as some may call him).

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Ciaooo