It’s not so easy to compose an article after so much pasta I just had but I will give it a try.

This time hitchhiking was not so cool, it still was no problem but the same stupid thing happened to me two times. The first time a driver dropped me out 3km before the estonian town “Jöhvi” and I had to walk into the city,  through the city and out of city to the street A1 which is the street from Tallinn to St.Petersburg. The same happened to me 20km before the arrival in St.Petersburg again, the driver dropped me out at the town “Krasnoe Selo” from where I took a train to “Piter” for 56Roubles (1€ = 44Roubles). Continueing hitchhiking made no sense because the traffic was already like in the middle of the city. But except these two annoyances it was quite easy. The border crossing took me not more then 15minutes (the 3rd border I passed on feet on this journey) and getting lifts was neither a problem in Estonia than  Russia. So I arrived at the “Baltiyskaya vokzal” (one of the main stations in St.P.) at 8.30pm. Polina, my dear host for the next four nights already waited for me, thanks!

I liked Russia from the first minutes I was there, perhaps it had something to do with the prices of cigarettes I saw at the first shop after the border. 24Roubles a pack, that’s what I call decent. The other price some people could be interested in, is the price for one liter of petrol. It’s even cheaper than a pack of cigarettes. Saint Petersburg is a city I liked from the very first minute as well. It’s somehow not like I expected a russian city to be like, it’s more a european city but it has some style. It was founded by Peter the Great in 1703 in the middle of a simp or nothing. He was crazy about Amsterdam and wanted a city with channels and Cannabis, no, sorry, not the last stuff, here in front of his home (Moscow), too. So nowadays Piter comes along with a lot channels and a lot of water in the city. It was the russian capital from 1703 to 1920 and so has a lot of historical buildings, churches (funny colourful), a forstress and many bridges which open at night. I think St.Petersburg is one of the cities you can spend days just on sightseeing and you still can’t see everything. Our group (Francesco from Italy but now living in Moscow, Anastasia, Polina, Rinat and me) was a funny composition. That we had no common language didn’t really matter (especially not after a couple of beers) so the night from saturday to sunday was very rich of different events. After spending the day with sightseeing and searching roofs to see the city from a bird’ eye view (that was not succesful but we met interesting persons who live a hard life under the roofs of this otherwise very “clean” city) we had a fantastic vegan pasta made by Francesco. We were a little bit to slow with the food so we had to run with full stomachs and beer and cigarettes in our hand to the metro station to get the last metro back into the city center but we made it. The night went on with these unbelievable great 1l beer bottles, climbing on monuments and watching the bridges open while peeing in the Neva river. Just great! Even if I don’t remember so much about “later” pictures and some videos of us say that we went to a club, sat in something white on the streets (people laughed at us) and somehow ended up in a hospital. Rinat felt an ache in his breast but it turned out that it was nothing serious. Anyway, that took us one or two hours so we were at home not before 8am in the morning. The next day is easy summarized: We slept until 6.30pm and went swimming at a local lake out  of the city. That’s it. Today it was again some mixture of sightseeing, eating pasta and buying train tickets for a friend of mine, that’s how a really great weekend ended.

Thanks a lot to Polina for all the help and the great hospitality! Have fun in the Balkans and Poland!