Addendum: St. Petersburg is actually younger than Moscow, but seens older because it has more classical buildings.
Well, our final night in the hostel proved most eventful. Once again, everyone was LAME and decied not to go out. We made friends with another couple of people in the hostel, and decide to stay in drink with them. Depending on who you ask, this was either a horrible idea or... well, maybe a neutral/bad one. Essentially, this one Ukrainian guy made me drink vodka with pepper in it (like everything else here that isn't sitting on cold steps, it is considered "good for your health.") It didn't take much time for the Ukrianian dude to start hitting on me, saying things to Grisha to translate (he didn't speak Russian, and didn't know I understood what he was saying.) Grisha would kind of smile, look at me, and just explain "he really likes you." Yeah, I got that. At one point in time, he smacked my ass. I tried telling Grisha that he could not keep pawning me off on every guy he claimed was a "good guy,"/encourage me to sleep with every dude that bought me a drink, but he got a little belligerent. After a sharma run (SHARMA) I went to bed.
Apparently, random drunk Ukrainian dude does not put all of his eggs in one basket. After I rejected him (does it count as rejection if I just literally run away?) he went after one of the American girls, rather successfully. I don't know what went down, I just know she was really depressed, and everyone found out about it pretty quick. Then, after we went to bed, he forced himself into our room about 4am, and the two other girls had to force him out and lock the door. I bravely watched from my bed. Then, he proceeded to knock on our door for about 20 minutes. Not. Fun.
The next morning, we got up to visit the Hermitage. well, first we visited St. Isaac's Basilica. And I thought Peter and Paul looked Catholic... this church looked like a mini-Vatican. Yes, a little lighter. The crazy thing was, it was partially a church, partially a museum. There were 6 (6!!!) gift shops and an ATM within the body of the church (!!!!), but one of the alcoves actually had a service going on. Then, Marina bought us tickets to the Collonnade, so we were able to scale the 250+ steps to go around the dome. From there, we could see the entire city. Most beautiful. One of the boys got very serious vertigo, poor dear.
From there, half of us went to the Hermitage, and the other half (2/3 of the males) decided they didn't want to stand in line 2 hours to go to a museum, and went to the Peter I museum. That museum features mostly oddities Peter the Great picked up around Europe... including way too many fetuses, apparently.
We decided to brave the cold and the line, and soldiered through. And it was worth it. I saw some really amazing art... Monets, Van Goghs. I saw my first Botticellis, da Vincis, and Lippis, which is rediculous because you'd think I'd have seen these things in Italy. Besides the art (still amazing) the building itself was phenomenal... several rooms of the palace were on display, and we joked that the entire place should be a museum to ceilings. Unfortunately, between the line and the time spent at St. Isaacs, and the fact that it was Sunday and they closed hours early, we only had a few hours. Word of advice: go when you have at least an entire day, if not more, to spend.
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