Привет из Санкт-Петербургa и спасибо всем большое! (Greetings from St.Petersburg and thank you all so much!)

(Janette from class 3B writes about the trip that our students who study Russian made in April.)

I'm quite sure many of us were sad to leave Russia behind a little more than a week ago, but at least we have our great memories with us now. And great time we really had, and a great group! We saw a lot, surely learned a lot about cultures and used a lot of Russian -or at least a few words here and there. However, we handled our meal orders, used many complimentary words and greetings, and even had a little chatting with local people.  

Even though it was only four days that we spent there, it was a really useful trip -now we can survive at least a little better abroad next time. Many of us seemed to be waiting for seeing the culture itself and the sights, and those we did see. What surprised some of us were the facts that quite few people really spoke English -but that wasn’t the purpose of the trip,was it? -and that at least in the local grocery store near our hostel there were a lot of Finnish products, even with the Finnish labels!  

We started our trip by visiting the great Grand Duke Nikolay Palace, where we had a dinner of four dishes, including the very Russian blinis. After our long and tasteful dinner we enjoyed the Russian folk dance show -and even our Mexican exchange student got a taste of those dances! The show, including also singing, was very impressive -and very Russian.

We saw many churches and statues, and the Russian architectural culture in our trip.  This one was the beautiful Church of our Saviour on Spilled Blood.

                                    The boys went really Russian with their furry caps

We really got used to the populous public transport in Russia, and I have to say I'm really impressed with the metro stations there -and the lenght of the escalators there was quite impressive, too... 

 We had a chance to visit Russian school, in which they also teach Finnish starting at the second grade. The teacher had made us a great presentation about the school -in Finnish! It was impressive to see how enthustiastic they seemed to be about our language and country, and the possible cooperation with our school.

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We also visited the museum of natural sciences and had a chance to get to know about the Finns' life in Russia. All in all this was really rewarding, but also a little tough trip with all the places to visit. Hopefully everyone had a time of their life and will possibly visit Russia again!

Now, the last goodbyes to Russia, and in the Russian way:         до свидания!