Picture of the Day: The Chronicles of Russia

Moscow, Russia -- May, 2011

So, I had bought our train tickets to St. Petersburg online and printed off an e-ticket. The ticket had the name of the train station, so before we left Tallinn, I looked up the location and the closest metro stop. It was practically on top of the stop, so I assumed it would be simple enough. Wow was I wrong.

After seeing the Kremlin and walking around the the city centre a bit, we decided to be safe and go find our train station before exploring any more. As we exited the metro, I was very excited to see the name of our train station on a sign. But then, we walked out the doors, and were overwhelmed. There was a building to our right that looked like you might buy tickets there. Another building looked like a train station and had tracks, but was called something different. And a couple of other buildings full of hustle and bustle. I couldn't see a single sign for our train station (and, remember, all of the signs are in Russian, which made it all the more difficult to identify the correct name).

We tried asking several people, but no one spoke English. We wandered around -- looked at train times, tried to figure out if we were in the right place. We randomly ended up in one of the buildings, and found an official looking lady who was fixing an automatic machine, and she was our savior. When I showed her my ticket printout, she explained to us that what I had wasn't a ticket and pointed us down the hall to another office. We had to wait for ages to be helped, but, finally, the lady behind the counter was able to help us get our tickets (there was actually a self service machine for printing tickets, but, naturally, it was in only Russian, and we had no hope of figuring it out).

So after over an hour of fretting and scurrying about, we finally had our tickets in hand. Not long after, we figured out that our train station was right next door. We had failed to recognize it because only the dingy backside of the building was visible from the metro station exit we took. And on one of the screens -- our train!

After that, I calmed down significantly, and we had some pizza for supper and picked up some snacks for the train at a grocery store nearby. And that is where this picture comes in. We were quite exhausted after our long bus ride, wandering around, and train searching, but we still had a couple of hours before our train left. So, we had two choices: chill in the train station, or use up some of our metro tickets to see something new.

The latter won out. We got off the metro and a random stop near the center, saw the cathedral above in the distance - its golden dome glimmering in the sunset, and decided to take a closer look.

We also saw the Kremlin at sunset and (YAY for the gees) the library: