G

Alexander Monument in front of Winter Palace

We came into Moscow Station in St Petersburg at around 9 p.m. after travelling all day. We were well fed because we had bought our own food before boarding the train from Moscow and then found that our ticket price included a box meal. But we were tired because we had been travelling since early that morning when we had left Yaroslavl to take the train to Moscow. We were both a little cranky, too: Jan because she had not wanted to arrive in such a big city at such a late hour and be faced with the problem of finding a hotel; Gerry, because he had been sitting opposite a young man who appeared to have caught a cold and as the journey proceeded had coughed and sneezed more and more making Gerry afraid he might have caught the man's germs.

As we walked along the platform, Jan spotted a young woman carrying a sign advertizing a service bureau that offered help finding hotels. She was pleased and talked to the girl to find out where the office was. The girl offered to take us, but Jan thought she understood the directions and didn't want to deprive other passengers of the sign. Soon after we left the girl, we saw a door with the words Service Bureau on them and figured it was the place we were looking for. In fact it wasn't, it was a competitor but we didn't learn that until later.

The office was up on the first floor, was very tiny, and manned by a 40-something woman, whom we'll call Sonya, who although she didn't speak or understand any English didn't seem phased by having a foreigner show up at her counter. We explained what we were looking for and our price range and she quickly recommended what she called a Mini-Hotel. She showed us photos and it looked very promising so she called up the owner and then told us that it would be fine for the next day, but that she couldn't take us tonight. First disappointment. Next, we had a bit of a hassle getting any other suggestions from her for the current night. We tried to get her to telephone a couple of hotels out of our Lonely Planet but Jan never really understood whether she didn't want to call someone who wasn't on her approved list of hotels or just didn't want to pay for the phone call.

After lots of fruitless three-way conversations with Gerry getting very frustrated because he couldn't talk directly to her himself, Sonya finally made a very interesting suggestion. There was a hotel right there in the station. It was very nice and clean and modern and she thought it wouldn't cost us too much. From her comments Jan guessed that her real reluctance was to send us out into the city to some distant hotel at this time of night (by now past ten).

Leaving Gerry in her office with our bags, Jan and Sonya walked up one more flight of stairs in the building the office was in and knocked on and were admitted through a plain door with no sign that opened into a very spacious lobby with a hotel desk. The "hotel" took up just one floor of the station building, had probably just been refurbished and looked spotlessly clean. Sonya greeted the clerks with some familiarity and explained that she had two people looking for a double room. The clerk checked and said that they had no double rooms left but they did have a quad room. That seemed fine with me until it was explained that the hotel didn't rent rooms but beds and that if we wanted the room to ourselves we would have to rent four beds. At $20 a bed that would be $80 and oh, by the way, the bathroom was down the hall and you have to pay extra for showers. Then came the worst news of all: the clerk reckoned she couldn't take foreigners. Our service bureau friend seemed shocked, argued a little with them in a friendly fashion, but they said no. She told me that she thought the rule was silly and thought she might be able to convince some unspecified boss of that but I shrugged and said that it was too expensive for us anyway so back we went to her office.

Back in the office, I explained the problem to Gerry while Sonya busied herself with other work. Having told the story, I went back to Sonya and the problem of finding another hotel and finally convinced her to make a phone call or two and found that every hotel tried cost at least as much as the four-bed room upstairs and involved a perhaps complicated journey across town at night. After lots of wrangling between ourselves, I finally asked Sonya if we couldn't indeed stay upstairs after all. She made a phone call to the man in charge. He said fine, and so finally after two hours we carried our bags upstairs and fell exhausted into bed.

The next morning, we walked out to buy milk and came back to the room to eat a breakfast of pastries and hot tea (Gerry) and coffee (Jan). Our mini-hotel landlady couldn't take us until 11 a.m., so we were in no hurry. Around ten o'clock we walked downstairs to the service bureau to get directions to the mini-hotel and then set off to take the metro from Moscow Station to Finland Station and then walked about three blocks to the our hotel. We had a small problem actually finding the door to the private apartment we were looking for. Identifying the entry door was the first problem (most buildings have multiple entry doors). All we had was an appartment number. We followed our habit of having Gerry stay with the bags while Jan reconnoitred and found the place, which she did. Our hostess, Lydia Nikolayevna was expecting us and we stayed with her for the rest of our stay.