I'd known before I'd even signed up for this trip that because of the restrictions on visiting Russia without one of the very expensive and hard to obtain tourist visas, I wouldn't be able to go anywhere in St Petersburg except on an official tour. What I hadn't realized was how frustrating I would find it. Except for the inside of the Hermitage and the State theatre, all I saw of the city was from the inside of the bus. I would have loved just five minutes wandering through the crowds on the Nevsky Prospekt last night, amid the couples and families and packs of teenage girls eating and shopping and strolling as though it were the middle of the afternoon and not almost midnight on a Sunday, when there were (presumably) jobs to get to the next morning.
Here's one of the few ordinary Russians I saw who wasn't on the other side of a bus window: the security guard at the souvenir store we were allowed to visit after the Hermitage.
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