March 2012, St. Petersburg, Russia
In early 2012 I decided to buy a Leica 35mm f/1.4 Summilux-R lens, adapted to Nikon. The problem was that I only knew one guy who could safely perform this non-trivial change, and he was in Russia, from which the import duties added another 26,7% to the price. Having never been to Russia, I checked the plane ticket prices, which turned out to be surprisingly affordable, so instead I arranged some time trade with my girlfriend, and prepared the trip. A visa is mandatory, but turned out to be somewhat time-consuming and fiddly to get, and I realized that my British passport had expired, so I had to renew that as well. Once all the papers had been arranged, I bought the ticket. Note that there is something of a chicken-and-egg problem in getting the visa, since you are meant to put the dates of travel on it, but you obviously don't want to book the ticket until you have the visa. It doesn't matter, just do the visa first with a general frame of dates, and then the ticket, it is a mere formality, a.k.a. a shakedown.
After I arrived, I took a walk around the neighbourhood, which is a suburb of St. Petersburg named Kolpino. It has a bad reputation on some travel sites, but in fact it is just a normal, middle class residential neighbourhood, and other than some rowdy drunks in the evening, could be pretty much anywhere in the western world. The ground is very dusty, owing to the copious amounts of mud which appear in the Russian late winter and early spring, and the buildings have seen better days, but it is populated by very normal people who just happen to be Russian.
By the way, in order to be able to read maps, bus charts, train schedules and dictionaries, I learned (most of) the Russian alphabet before I left. This turned out to be more useful than I thought, since with knowledge of a few other European languages, many words actually sound the same as German or English words when you read them, and so I often didn't even have to look things up, just read them out loud. There were a few letters I had trouble with and didn't seem able to remember, but with a bit more use these would come too. I think I will take a beginner's course in Russian at some point, since I already have a good start in it.
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