It was the border control process that exemplified a dysfunctional state, not the city.
St Petersburg was wonderful. In September 2015 went to my lute player friend's concert in Gachina organized by earlymusic.ru. The organizers took us out to dinner at a marvelous restaurant on the Moyka canal that one of the organizers had designed.
The next day we had dinner in a nice Jewish restaurant near Nevsky Prospekt, Odessa Mama.
In the hotel near the Hermitage I met a woman from Perm moving St Petersburg who was fluent in English, French and Italian who took me on a tour of the city. When I went back in March 2016 she set up a tour of Peterhof with a 75 year old woman friend of hers who had been an electrical engineer on a Soviet submarine in Cuba in the 1960s. She spoke a bit of Spanish and between my Spanish and primitive Russian, we could communicate.
On that trip I stayed in a 95m2 apt on the Moyka canal for 35 euros.
In June and October 2017 I went to St Petersburg and Moscow for White Nights Gaming to pitch a startup simulation and negotiation game I'd prototyped. Since I'd read and watched the movie Master and Margarita, in Moscow I went straight to Patriarch Ponds, but saw no trams or gigantic cat named Bighimot. No Voland either.
In Moscow I rented a room from an 80 year old physicist whose late husband was also a physicist and an artist. His paintings filled the apt. We spoke in Ruslish, though her English was better than my Russian.
The Latvian company that got me my ticket to White Nights Gaming in St Petersburg organized a river cruise to see the bridge opening and fireworks.
As far as elegantly clad and beautiful women go, Riga and Jurmala compete pretty well with St Petersburg. Both are laundromats for mafia money.
In our beachfront Jurmala apartment complex the license plates of the Mercedes, Bentleys, Ferraris, Jaguars, etc in the parking lot are Russian, Latvian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, German and Swiss.
But my only car is a 29" mountain bike.
For 20 years I owned a company doing photography and brochures for the yachting and tourism industries.
