additional impressions of Russia

There are a lot of police in Russia, kind of like there were a lot of military all over Jordan. The police don't have machine guns, though. Our tour book says to avoid attention from police, but generally they seem pretty nice and their uniform hats (the cute fuzzy ones) make them look approachable. The one police officer we actually talked to (for directions) was friendly and helpful, although he spoke no English.

People in Saint Petersburg don't walk nearly as fast as in Moscow, and they are somewhat less fashionable. This gives the whole city a more laid-back feel, which I like much better.

It appears that although they dress well, Russian people don't bother with fancy hair that needs "work"...pretty much all the women just have long, straight hair. I guess as soon as you walk out the door and put on that hat, you have guaranteed hat hair anyway.

Everything opens late here. The major tourist attractions open at 10 or 10:30am, in contrast to Egypt where they open at 7 or 8am. Part of it is probably that the sun doesn't come up until 9am or so, but I'm guessing there aren't enough tourists to justify opening earlier, either.

It's really quite necessary to learn the Cyrillic alphabet to get around here. For instance, "Restaurant" is spelled "Ресторан" and only a very few will have the Latin spelling on their signage. We might have walked right by Cafe Literature without being able to read "Литературное кафе". Street names are similarly untranslated, and less popular museum exhibits are often labelled in Cyriliic-only, as well. At the Hermitage, I stared at a sign for awhile before figuring out the artifacts were from Сирия (Syria) and Ирак (Iraq).

There are cloakrooms everywhere. Every time we walk into a restaurant, a cafe, a museum, or whatever, the first thing you do is go to the cloakroom and leave all your outerwear. In return they give you a claim tag It never costs any money, and they'll store all kinds of stuff; in the Hermitage they stored D's daypack along with his jacket.