Don't Kill Rodya!

Today with Kate feeling sick I took the time to take the Dostoyevsky walking tour described in the Lonely Planet "St. Petersburg". Taking the train to the bustling Haymarket I then got promptly lost for an hour or so before I located the start to the tour.

The tour takes you past a house where Dosty wrote parts of the novel and the flat where Raskolnikov would have lived. To get to the flat I had to mill outside the gate to the apartment complex, wait for somebody coming out to open it, sneak in as though I belonged and then climb up five flights of stairs. There's loads of graffiti at the tops of the stairs from the hundreds of Dostoyevsky devotees who've taken the pilgrimage.

"Don't Kill Rodya"

Then you trace Rodya's footsteps as he set off to do the deed. According to the Lonely Planet you can get in to see the pawnbroker's flat but when I got there the gate was bolted shut.

Finally I headed over to the Marinsky to pick up our tickets for tomorrow nights Madame Butterfly and had my first experience with a truly Russian queue. Two people away from the front of the window, my window suddenly closed without warning. I then had to move to the back of the next queue where exactly the same thing happened again. Finally after 1 1/2 hours I had the bloody tickets.

No wonder they never went to war. Moscow would have been radioactive rubble before Kruschev had managed to punch out half the authorisation codes.