We're virtually nailed on for going at the end of October/early November for a long weekend.

Anyone have any specific ideas for stuff we should definitely do?

Go.

It's fabulous.

The Hermitage is an absolute must and the Peter and Paul Fortress is close. A long walk along the canals if the weather is at all decent. I'd also recommend a walk along Nevsky Prospekt.

Dostoevsky's flat is fascinatingly ordinary and bourgeois if you are into that kind of thing and the ballet and orchestra are the best in Russia (if not Europe).

The KHL should also have started by then and you should go to a hockey game (even if Moscow is a much bigger hockey city).

Oh it's more a case of just booking it. And deciding whether we're faffing about in Heathrow or Helsinki for flights.

The hotel we're thinking of booking is pretty much on Nevsky so we should be good for that.

Didn't realise it was hockey season. Hmm, excellent...

Pushkin/ Tsarskoe Selo (a village/ chateua about 20km away) is a nice day trip.

My own visit (on a school trip in 1979) wasn't entirely creditable. It was organised by state agency Intourist, like most travel then, with various English schools and one from Dublin. Our Southern friends were surprised to be accosted outside Dom Knigi ('House of Books') by a bunch of drunks asking if they fancied a scrap. Luckily, some coppers heard the rumpus and chased us away.

If you get a chance, watch the film 'Russian Ark' before visiting Hermitage.

Pushkin/ Tsarskoe Selo (a village/ chateua about 20km away) is a nice day trip.

Very definitely. The Catherine Palace has some amazing stuff, including a room covered in amber. It was gutted by the Nazis but they've spent a vast amount of money reconstructing it. There's also a table with a remarkably detailed inlaid musaic that looks like a lacquer painting.

Well it's booked. Now just to work out the visa and tourist voucher bit. I must admit the latter is confusing me a touch..

Dom Knigi was a blast. I don't think it's there any more (and certainly wouldn't be the same).

The story of the Amber Room is much better than any Dan Brown novel (not that that bar is high).

No one knows what happened to the original, and it's worth pointing out that the reconstruction was funded by Ruhrgas (which has since become a preferred partner of Gazprom, surprise, surprise).

Dom Knigi is still there (I was in St P in March, after a gap of 19 years); no, not quite the same as it was.

I didn't know about the Amber Room, that's interesting.

Other recommendations on Nevsky - I still love Cafe Literaturnaya, even if you just have tea there (we went for blinis and red caviar), and the Gastronom (Yeliseyev) food store, as grand as Harrods food hall, very extravagant with mad, beautiful architecture.

Danger Mouse wrote:
Well it's booked. Now just to work out the visa and tourist voucher bit. I must admit the latter is confusing me a touch..
If you are booking your own trip you need to get an invitation from the hotel to cover the whole period you are there, most hotels will sort this for you.

If the trip is through an agency/travel agent who are booking the hotel for you, they should do all that for you.

Our hotel put the wrong dates on, a day short, and they rejected this at the Visa Office in London. Luckily we had one day to spare before leaving, and we both live in/near to town, but it was a bit nerve-wracking as we had to get the hotel to send through amended documents. So check the dates on any documentation and don't leave it to the last minute if you can avoid it.

MsD, if you don't mind, what is Dom Knigy like?

I'm having difficulty imagining a Russian Barnes & Noble (actually, I'd much rather they ran it under a different name, and feel the same way about GUM).

Yes, definitely double check the dates. I once had to spend a night in a Frankfurt airport hotel because the hotel and/or travel agent fucked up the entry date on my visa.

The invitation is vital. I organised my visa/invitation via TrailFinders after giving up trying to do it myself. It's worse than the old system of getting a visa for India!

One tip I can give you is book your tickets for the Hermitage on line and print the confirmation off. You jump the queue and for the first hour or so you'll pretty much have large parts of it to yourself. That's especially important for the Raphael Gallery. You'll see what I mean...You won't be able to do it in one go, so book for several days and get there about 1/2 an hour before opening if you want to take full advantage of the whole advance ticket thing. There's a couple of decent coffee shops nearby off Nevsky Prospekt (sp?) so you can have a warm drink whilst you queue.

When you go in, the ticket desk is up some stairs to your right as I recall. You can't miss it, you'll see it pretty much as soon as you go in. There's always a right old bundle to be first to the counter. Ignore that counter and go round the other side, not everyone realises at first that there are other kiosks around the other side.

My Lonely Planet had some really great walks, so you won't need a guide in the City.

There's a beautiful hard back coffee table book about the Hermitage. Don't buy it in the Hermitage bookshop. It's significantly cheaper in the bookshops on Nevsky.

Enjoy. It's a wonderful city and the people are fabulous.

The visa application process for Russia is a bit awkward and you'd think it's intentional, so that you have to go through one of the agencies who for a fee do the whole visa application process for you, including a "letter of invitation" (15 quid or something). Takes a week but you don't have to deal with any of the hassle. IIRC it worked out at just over a hundred quid (or it did about 2 years ago when I last went on my British passport as last year the russkies made me re-instate my Russian passport) and if you PM me I can give you the details of the agency I used to go through.

I don't know if that is necessary? We filled out our own visa forms. It was lengthy and the main complication for us is that we are both self employed, which "technically" means they want to see accounts and bank statements ... Got round that one by putting our own companies as our employers, which they sort of are.

We took the forms, and invitations from the hotel, direct to the visa office near Old Street (with photos) and collected visas the next day. I took them in (the second time) and he picked them up, but of course, he had to have the exact slip that they gave me.

Ps: Dom Knigi is a great bookshop, but not as mad or as cheap as it once was.

The way of all things, I'm afraid.

If you think it is a pain to get a visa in London, you should try Milan, where the small consular staff evidently spends all of its time extricating oligarchs and their spawn from jail after unfortunate incidents in nightclubs, luxury shops, etc.

They are only officially open a few hours each week and often actually not there during those hours.

MsD wrote:
I don't know if that is necessary? We filled out our own visa forms. It was lengthy and the main complication for us is that we are both self employed, which "technically" means they want to see accounts and bank statements ... Got round that one by putting our own companies as our employers, which they sort of are.

We took the forms, and invitations from the hotel, direct to the visa office near Old Street (with photos) and collected visas the next day. I took them in (the second time) and he picked them up, but of course, he had to have the exact slip that they gave me.

Perhaps, it's a bit easier now that there is a separate visa office (I think it opened in January 2009), 'cos when you used to have to do it at the embassy in Notting Hill, it was a mare, only open for 3 hours in the morning, etc. I did it "properly" once and wanted to kill myself, so "dump docs at the agency, pick up docs at the agency" was a much saner solution.

Also, dealing with the embassy staff in the past year sorting out my Russian docs, to my astonishment I've discovered that they've actually learned to
1. try to work to the deadlines they originally set.
2. apologise when there is a delay.
3. be helpful when you have a couple of questions.

MsD wrote:
Ps: Dom Knigi is a great bookshop, but not as mad or as cheap as it once was.

Popped into Dom Knigi on Novyj Arbat in Moscow last month and was disappointed to discover that the 20th century military history section was just a bit sh*t. The 1st WW/civil war section was quite threadbare and the 2nd WW section was full of German translations and some bog standard semi-literate mass produced rubbish by 2 or 3 "official" scribes.

Bit disappointing, really, but did manage to dig up a re-print of a couple of classic works on the Moonsund Operations of 1917.

Danger Mouse, SKA (the hockey club) have an English-language website.

Gah! They're away when we're there! Bugger. Cheers anyway.

Re: visa/invite - need to sort it tomorrow. Booked it through opodo so I'm hoping they'll sort it for us.

The official visa application via the FCO and Russian Embassy appears to work out significantly cheaper than random google searched ones.