Today I left RDU airport with Pete on American Airlines to St. Petersburg via London Heathrow airport. We departed a tiny bit late, around 6:30pm. During the flight I watched the pilot and first episode of a series called Chuck, which endeared itself to me by employing the actor from Firefly/Serenity who played Jeyne. He does a great job and you see a lot of Jeyne come out in his character. I'm looking forward to seeing more of these one day.

The flight seemed a bit longer because of this English couple in their 40s in the seats in front of us. They pushed up the armrest between their seats and proceeded to make out like teenagers in the back seat of a car. They did this for several hours. We were just about ready to yell, "Get a room!" when they both suddenly got up and headed back to the bathrooms, where they likely joined the Mile High Club, then returned to make out some more. I neglected to snap a photo because I left my camera in my bag in the overhead bins, and also because I didn't really want to record it for posterity anyway.

We arrived at Heathrow a little ahead of schedule, at around 6:00am GMT. We took a shuttle bus to terminal 5 and got some bottled water and walked around the terminal. It's really quite modern and open.

There were some really inviting red seats that made me think, what is the point of having any other kind of seat in an airport? The primary use for a seat in an airport should really be for catching some rest you couldn't find while crammed into an airplane.

While we were relaxing on the seats, we could see out the window, where it was beginning to dump snow on the airport. This caused a lot of cancellations and delays for other people, but luckily our flight left only about 15 minutes delayed.

This photo shows the windows on the roof, you can see if you look really hard how much snow fell in a very short period of time. I also like the large scale industrial supports on the ceiling.

Eventually we dozed off to sleep for an hour or so, since British Airways hadn't decided on a gate for our flight to depart from.

When our gate was finally announced, we moved there to wait for boarding, and I took my medicines. It was a good thing because of the heart-stopper breakfast they gave us on the plane. The hot plate was scrambled eggs sandwiched between two thick greasy slices of canadian bacon, with a side sausage link. I didn't want to have a heart attack on the plane ride, so I took my time to savor a few tastes of each part and then ate the yogurt and fruit instead. After a few hours we arrived in St. Petersburg. We picked a very slow passport control line, and after a long wait we picked up our bags and went through the green line of customs. We didn't have any trouble.

A car and driver came to pick us up. The guy was holding a sign saying BridgeQuest, so we jumped in the car. During the drive I took some pictures. Most of them didn't come out because of the speed we were going at, but here are a couple. I'm not sure exactly what buildings they are, but you get the sense of it.

The driver took us to the Brothers Karamazov Hotel. (See the Google Maps link and choose my "St Petersburg" map). The woman here at the front desk of the hotel was quite friendly. As she was registering us and taking our passports to be stamped, another employee came in and sat in the chairs, and the two women occasionally exchanged looks of what I could only define as amusement. I thought the joke might be at our expense, perhaps because we're two grown American men registering together as tourists. In this respect it's a good thing the company didn't decide to save money by putting us in the same room.

After checking in and freshening up, we ventured out to find a Thai restaurant Pete has been to before. We turned left from the hotel onto Sotsialisticheskaya utilisa, turned right onto utilisa Pravdy, and followed it up to Nevskiy Prospect. I took this picture while we were crossing the street in front of this neat looking church.

We went a block west on Nevskiy, then turned south and found the restaurant quite easily.

The interior of the restaurant was dark and stylish, and the food on the menu was quite expensive, from about 290 rubles for the simplest vegetable stir fry to 1600 rubles for something with a lot of local seafood in it. At the going exchange rate, that's between about $11.60 and $46.40. I ended up ordering the green noodles stir fried with red peppers and mixed seafood:

That's all for now, I'm tired and am going to sleep very well tonight.