Russia continues to be real horrorshow

Tonight is my last night in St Petersburg. I am sad to be leaving Russia! But excited to be going to Denmark.

To celebrate my last day in Russia I went to the State Museum of Political History, which was a surprisingly awesome find, all about 20th-century Russian history (mostly) and with lots of English translations. I think I learnt more from this museum than I ever did in history, and I was excited to find some records made out of x-rays in their display on the underground music movement (Abby, you should know all about this!).

I topped this off by going for a walk in a park, stumbling across some kind of crazy fair, and going for dinner at a restaurant that had free bread (!) and free vodka (!!). Where was this place all of Vodkatrain?! (note that my conviction that I had drunk all the vodka I intended to in Russia soon turned into, “free vodka?!” Also, it was properly chilled (a first?)).
Whilst happily downing my borscht I found myself unintentionally spying on the two tables I was facing. One contained an old couple playing cards, which led me to conclude that going out for a nice dinner but bringing a pack of cards is pretty awesome. The other was a family with the most insanely posh English accents I've ever heard. Seriously, they were like something out of an American movie making fun of English people. What's more, everything they were doing just made them more and more stereotypically "posh English" – it looked like two parents taking their 20-something prodigal son out for dinner (going to Russia to do this?), and whilst they were drinking wine I kept hearing snippets of conversation about "marital prospects", "Windsor castle", "business headquarters" and "Cambridge". The illusion was slightly marred when they started talking about Toy Story 3 ("apparent-leh it's a real tearjerker"), but returned when they started discussing the art they'd seen at the Hermitage. Feeling appropriately snoopy, I then went and bought myself some pancakes.

Other things I've done to keep myself busy over the past few days include:
- going to the Peter and Paul Fortress (properly this time – in Vodkatrain we just walked around it). They had another space museum there, which wasn't as cool as the Moscow one, but which was set up in the former jet laboratories which gave it a cool old-science feeling.
- going to the 'Zoological Museum', where I was drawn in by the promise of the world's only preserved woolly mammoth. It's true that they had one, as well as preserved copies of almost every animal, fish and bird you can imagine, but everything in the place looked like it was slightly decaying so that instead of feeling like a 'majestic nature gallery' it felt like being in the world's worst hunting lodge and it got more and more unsettling the further I got into the place. May have developed a mild fear of stuffed animals; only time will tell. Maybe it was just the whale skeleton.
- going to the Tikhvin cemetery, where a lot of famous Russians were buried (eg. Tchaikovsky, Dostoevsky). I went here on an overcast day and it was brilliant.
- watching way too much Community during hostel down-time. The videos on my iPod have got to last me another 4 months but I have “just one more ep?” fever!

I had a craving for English food so I tracked down a British pub (“the Dickens Pub”) for some pie and chips. Dave, you'll be pleased to know they had Old Speckled Hen on tap there!

Also, in the past few days I've successfully passed the test and have been mistaken for a Russian several times. One woman (maybe even a tourist? I didn't realise til after!) asked me for directions (in Russian), and a girl gave me free juice. Free juice!
(I wasn't even wearing my Zenit shirt on any of these occasions. I have won at pretending to be Russian!)

I have some photos from the past few days (including way too many of the cemetery), but it looks like the hostel net connection's sticking to a pretty slow rate so I'll have to upload them later.

Goodbye Russia.
Hello everything!