contrasts on a grand scale

In order to have  a Russian adventure,  you must:

* get on a bus in Finland, as a carefree student, with a girl called Annika who has golden curls and a fluent proficiency in Russian.
* for the next 544 kilometres, ignore the other passengers - mostly middle-aged men going to Russia for the cheap booze and starting to drink as soon as they find a seat in the bus, occasionally trying to chat up the two female students.
* find your hotel room, once you arrive exhausted in St. Petersburg, in a box-shaped, Soviet-era building with about a hundred miles of identical, depressing corridors. Gasp as you see the view over the river Neva.
* travel around the city on the metro, feeling completely useless among all those Cyrillic letters that you can't read. This is why you brought Annika (actually, it was Annika who brought you, but never mind). She can actually read the signs and buy the tickets at a much cheaper price that the other tourists do because she can pass as a Russian and get you places.
* get offered moonshine on the metro and feel sorry for a pet bear outside a museum.
* get exhausted and impressed as you wander through the literally endless Hermitage Museum. How can such a large and baffling place exist? Puts things in perspective, doesn't it, especially as you look at a Rembrandt painting that was once destroyed by someone grieving for a father banished to Siberia. The glory and riches of this place, paired with the tragedies of the past.
* endure while Annika the literature-lover browses Dom Knigi, House of Books, for hours (it doesn't help that you're a literature-lover too if you don't read Russian).
* go to the world-famous Mariinsky (Kirov) Ballet, knowing absolutely nothing about ballet and not even recognizing the name of the equally world-famous work Giselle, and be suitably impressed by the glamour (and yes, the performance too).
* look up a night-club that is supposedly the place to be. Find yourself in a dark basement pub where men stare darkly at you. Leave in a hurry and realise you are lost in a very dark and slum-like neighbourhood where someone will surely slit your throat in a minute. Note that you must have exhausted more than your fair share of guardian angels when you finally make it back to civilisation alive.
* comfort yourself with some real Russian pelmeni dumplings and salyanka stew.
* gape at the size and scope of St. Petersburg - its endless (and sometimes eerily empty) avenues of palaces and golden domes, its stark contrasts between rich and poor, old and new, Czar-style and Soviet-style, and its people that are so rude and so fantastically friendly at the same time.
* return home with a ton of delicious chocolates and maybe a bootleg CD.