words from the world

Wake-up at 4h45, a quarter of an hour to dress up, to pack up my belongings and my brother drops me off at the Roissy - Charles de Gaulle airport. I check in my backpack and the hostess gives me the boarding card. The first flight is short and 45 minutes after taking off from Paris, we arrive in London Heathrow. The safety precautions are draconian with a body search for every traveler. A bus takes me from the terminal 4 to the terminal 1 where I'm going to take a connection to Saint-Petersburg. The first travelers get on the plane and I feel the change of surroundings because most travelers are russian or english.
We land at 17h00 (local time) 2h later than in France. The airport is very tiny in comparison with Paris or London airports. As soon as we get off the plane, the authorities ask us to fill in an immigration form and to go to see the customs officer with this document and the passport. The officer auscultates the visa (got it in France, impossible to come here without visa on pain of being driven back) and gives the stamped passport back to me, I reward him with a large smile and I head for the next hall to collect my backpack. Before leaving the airport, I withdraw some roubles to take the marchroutka will drop me off downtown, 14km away. The marchroutki, a kind of minibuses, are the most economic ways to go downtown. I talk with the driver usind the sign language because in russian, I can hardly say "good morning", "good gye" and "thank you". I show him on a map where I want to go and he nods his head, I take a banknote out of my pocket and I show him 1000 roubles. The driver gives me back the change the price of the journey is only 15 roubles.
In the bus I meet an Italian guy ; he's very happy to be on board because he saved a lot of money. Actually, before getting on, he wanted to take the taxi but the price was 100 times more expensive for the same journey ! 50€ instead of 0,5€ ! I get off downtown and I start walking to look for my family host. The address is scribbled in French on a piece of sheet while all signs are in cyrillic here, just a game for the brain to convert the alphabet. Some letters are the same but the pronunciation is different, for instance, the cyrillic H is pronounced N, the C is pronounced S, the P is pronounced R, there are also new letters, one of them is pronounced "shch"...
I drop my backpack at the bedroom and go to discover the city. I walk alongside the canals. My eyes switch from a façade to another one. Sometimes ochre, sometimes white, the façades are massive, imposing in the image of the Russian Empire. Wandering about the Saint-Petersburg streets, I think of the History-wealthed cities, on a crossroads, we turn the head and a monument faces us. I let myself go with this architectural show without trying to know what the name of this cathedral or this building. It's only when I go back to my room I rebuild my run : the Nevski perspective, the Kazan cathedral, the Saviour-on-the-spilled-blood church, the Mikhaïlovsky gardens, the Russian museum and the magnificient Hermitage.






Around 10 p.m. I go back to the Saviour-on-the-spilled-blood church that is still open. To describe the interior, here is the recipe : take the best Russian artists (Frolov brothers' workshop), give them tons of multicoloured pebbles, lock them up for 12 years and you get 7000m² of mosaics illustrating episodes of the New Testament. Not a square meter was forgotten, really marvellous, even for the nonbelievers.