Toto, we’re not in Europe anymore

The line to check in for our charter flight to St. Petersburg took a couple hours, but it was nothing compared to what some of the orchestra members had to go through to get through Russian customs. Luckily, I’m not a string player. When we arrived at the hot, stuffy airport in Russia a lot more waiting occurred. Every string player had to provide documents to prove its authenticity to the customs officer and open their instrument cases for inspection. Evidently, the Russians are incredibly afraid that someone will bring a cheap instrument into the country and smuggle an expensive one out. Seems like a lot of trouble to me.

The non-string players were lucky and didn’t have to wait for hours in the line. We were loaded onto a few buses…ours of which was blocking some traffic. A taxi driver confronted our bus driver as we were boarding, and it was the first angry Russian yelling I’ve ever heard in person. Our photographer even took some pictures. This would prove to be an interesting few days indeed...

When everyone finally arrived at the hotel we were once again herded onto buses for a tour of the city. St. Petersburg is quite an incredible place. Every building is huge and overdone, the architecture is just insane. Our tour guide was a comically rude Russian woman that kept referring to us as “boys and girls” and then said she needed to “punish us” after we were a few minutes late returning to the bus at one of the stops. Near the end of the tour she had realized that we were an orchestra and said “Since you’re supposed to be musicians, have you ever heard of a man named Tchaikovsky?” We all laughed ridiculously, and sarcastically replied “no”. We eventually convinced her to sing some Russian tunes for us, which was as equally amusing as her tour commentary.

After sight-seeing we were famished, and many were eager to watch the Germany vs. Spain World Cup game. Most of the members congregated at a pub a few blocks away from the hotel, but there wasn’t enough room for the group that I was with (Johan, Elina, Leann, and Wictor), plus the amount of smoke in the pub was disgusting. It took us awhile to find an open restaurant, but we finally stumbled upon a nice little place with a few young, helpful waiters and a TV with the game. Germany lost, but we were happy after some pizza and beer.