Sorry for the Group Email

St Petersburg is what England would be like if everything was moved five inches to the left. On first glance, everything is normal. It’s only once you want to do anything that you realise the sheer difficulty of it all. The language itself isn’t that hard - it’s not far removed from German, but without being able to read anything, finding a restaurant or a toilet is almost impossible. Reading a menu makes it to tell if you’re ordering the vegetarian option, or merely sheep’s brains dipped in calf liver.

It’s also impossible to tell if it’s friendly or not. On the one hand, the Russians are famed for vodka profligacy. Drinks all round and all that. On the other, St Petersburg is constantly coated in two inches of brown slush; the snow kicked up by the endless traffic turns dark and coats everything.

And I got pick-pocketed. Our first day abroad and the locals had their hands in my trousers. It happened the very first time we were on the Metro. There was too much pressure from the chap behind me – the train wasn’t full and yet I was being man-handled on board. Something was wrong, and when I instinctively put my hand towards my wallet I realised someone else’s was already there. The stranger’s hand was removed quickly, and a man in a green hat studiously avoided eye contact for the rest of the trip. We didn’t lose anything, but a strange man’s hands on your bum does nothing for your state of mind.

I was already down. My notes for the first day in Russia say “St Petersburg people unfriendly,” which is probably unfair. It’s cold, so no-one’s looking where they’re going, and the result is that you get shoulder-checked every time you’re on a narrow street. Someone remarked that the reputation the Germans have for harsh-sounding language is nothing to what the Russians deserve for their guttural, consonant-littered speech. Perhaps, we reasoned, they’re really a misunderstood, friendly bunch, constrained by a language that would make Mickey Mouse sound like a Disney villain.

On the plus side, St Petersburg is spectacularly cheap. A beer will set you back £2, a main course at a restaurant about £3. We stopped in a student haunt called Zoom on our first night, and found good food and beer for under £5 a head. After that we picked up four bottles of water for £2.

A final first impression: the Russians like it hot. Perhaps keen to demonstrate their mastery of central-heating, every building, taxi and restaurant is approximately as hot as the centre of the sun. Enter any taxi, hotel or shop with your winter clothes on and you’ll be sweating inside minutes. We’ve started stripping almost as soon as we go inside anywhere.

Strange hands in trousers and instinctive stripping. Normality probably awaits, somewhere. We’ll let you know when we find it.

Dave is in St Petersburg. It’s alternately very hot and very cold. If you think the Russians are mis-understood, leave a comment below and tell me why.

More pictures, as always, in the set on Flickr.