Note from the committee: since the last day in Saint Petersburg was entirely free to plan, several great stories have emerged on this day. This is why there are two accounts of the same day.
Today was a first: our alarms forgot to wake us early. Which wasn’t a problem for some of us, as they had stayed in the city center until the late hours of the night. However, a few of the others who had gone home somewhat early decided to get up early and go to Peterhof, a palace with a beautiful garden just west of Saint Petersburg.
For eighteen early birds this meant that they needed to pack their bags. This caused some problems. Some of you readers may be familiar with hostels and may also know what happens when you put a lot of students in one room. As you can guess, this meant a big mess of luggage, clothes, socks, shoes, garbage and other things that could be lying around. In a normal situation, everyone would start diging up their own stuff until everything has been picked up and everyone has his/her stuff. This time, as you may guess from my story, it was quite different.
We were the firsts ones to start packing, while the rest slept on. The resulting situation (a very messy room, gathering stuff as quietly as possible and the absence of light to look for things) complicated the process a little, but after a while everyone managed to get all their things. At least, we hoped we had found it all.
So, everyone went on to breakfast. Again, like the last few days it was not really the breakfast you think we would deserve after a day of excursions and being good, silent students while listening to interesting stories from professors, during which we were constantly repressing thoughts like: what would that lever do?
After breakfast we would depart to the Hermitage, where the ferry would pick us up. However, first we needed to find a spot to store our bags, as we didn’t want to take them with us on our little trip to the Peterhof. However, this proved to be a bigger problem than expected, as we were not allowed to store them at the hostel, which, according to the ReisCo, was previously agreed. After some discussing we came to the following conclusion: “as our bags are very dear to us as they carry our luggage, let’s take them on a city tour!” Yes, we took our luggage with us THROUGH THE ENTIRE CITY…. After a long and tireing walk and some broken down bags (apparently bags are not made for cross-city tours), we got to the ferry just in time and loaded our bags into the Meteop-180. A city tour boat sized speedboat with Hydrofoils! Which meant that the distance to the Peterhof took nothing more than a small hop!
After a somewhat bumpy trip on the windy Baltic Sea, we arrived at the Peterhof. Here our next challenge awaited: the entrance to the palace and gardens. Baggage of our size was not allowed inside the Peterhof, but we went on to try our luck. After a discussion with the guards (who couldn’t speak English at all) they agreed to us taking our baggage inside if we allowed them to have a quick look inside the bags. After this we “bribed” the guards with some Dutch ‘stroepwaffles’ (stroopwafels) as a genuine thank-you and we went into the beautiful gardens.
Here we made a huge pile of bags under a tree, made some groups to guarded the bags in turns for half-hour intervals and we started exploring the beautiful garden with its nice fountains and flowerbeds. In case you want to see what I’m talking about, either take the plane to Russia yourself or use your trustworthy old friend called Google and you will find out soon enough (I would recommend going there yourself).
After the some elaborate exploration, it was time to go back to Saint-Petersburg. Here we were going to drop off our bags at the departure station for the train to Moscow. However, after finding out the costs of a locker, we decided it wasn’t worth the money for the few hours that were left before our train would depart. Therefore we decided to go into the mall next to the station and find a place to sit down, which turned out to be a restaurant, in order to wait for our train to leave.
When we got to our train, we found a contemporary-looking object, which was quite a surprise to some of us as they were getting used to the worn property we have seen in the last few days. Now a good night’s sleep is waiting for us while we are being driven to our destination, москва/Moskow, by our trustworthy train driver: mr. Ivanovitch!
Добре ноче! Good night! May our dreams take us to unknown grounds!
– Rick Voogt