I got on the bus at the Autobussijaam on 46 Lasted str. at 6:35 a.m.
It would have been a trip of about eight hours, one of the longest made via bus on this journey to Asia.
I remember all these women, with their faces marked by age and fatigue, boarding the bus with plastic bags full of clothes.
It had become a recurring scene while travelling Eastern Europe.
This time I picked a company called Ecolines, which provides quality services and affordable prices all across Europe.
The trip was quite comfortable, with several stops along the way.
When we reached the Narva-Ivangorod crossing border, we had to go through the check point.
For the first time in my life, I was actually traversing a land border, while leaving Europe behind me.
I also felt that I was entering a different dimension of the journey, that had nothing to do with all the trips I had done previously.
It was probably about the skin change that a tourist undergoes when he starts to actually travel.
I mean, for real.
Which is definitely not about flying from an airport to another, experiencing a city, or any place for that matter, through a schedule of things to see, to do.
In the end, I really believe that travelling has more to do with experiencing people and places with the illusion of never having to leave them.
With that same pace as life goes.
Even if your next destination it is a city that you have never seen before, as in my case, but one that you have dreamt a lot about.
So, travelling is to chase the desire that every place in the world can be your home after all.
We queued for a while, waiting to get our visa checked, then we walked for about a kilometre to get on a different bus.
We left the border after an hour, approximately.
We got to Saint Petersburg before 4 p.m.
The impression of the city was immediately different, compared to everything I had seen up to that point.
A question of dimensions, above all else.
The huge boulevards that offered the somewhat ostentatious perspective of a special grandeur.
I checked into my room in Zakharievskaya Ulitsa 23, in the Tsentralny District, right in the heart of the city.
After a quick shower, I went out looking to buy a local sim card.
I found a mobile shop around the corner, called Tele 2.
Fortunately, the guy at the counter could speak some English.
With Google Maps up and running again, I was able to find the nearest bus station with the intention to reach the Nevsky Avenue.
It was a fast ride to the Leningrado Hero City Obelisk.
There I came across of group of young fellas that were playing This is Love by Maroon 5.
Welcome to Russia, I said to myself, smiling wryly.
The Nevsky Avenue suddenly struck me with its grandiose perspective.
Ultimately, that is one of the reasons for its very existence.
In the years of its construction, between 1715 and 1726, it was referred to as the Large promising road or the Large perspective.
Here’s a note from Wikipedia:
Its name comes from the Alexander Nevsky Lavra, the monastery which stands at the eastern end of the street, and which commemorates the Russian hero Prince Saint Alexander Nevsky (1221–1263). Following his founding of Saint Petersburg in 1703, Tsar Peter I planned the course of the street as the beginning of the road to Novgorod and Moscow. The avenue runs from the Admiralty in the west to the Moscow Railway Station and, after veering slightly southwards at Vosstaniya Square, to the Alexander Nevsky Lavra. [1]
While I was walking along the huge avenue, with the sunset that had begun to inflame the facades of the baroque buildings, I had in mind a song of the genius Italian songwriter Franco Battiato, that goes like this:
And we studied locked in a room
The dim light of candles and oil lamps
And when it came to talking
We always waited with pleasure
And my teacher taught me how difficult it is
To find the dawn within the dusk
The song is called Nevsky Prospect.
I was getting hungry, so I decided to sneak into a Pasta Fresca and order gnocchi with cheese.
I finally walked back to my flat, that was about 30 minutes away, enjoying a lovely Petersburg evening, living a dream with open eyes.
The Late Bloomer 