St. Petersburg, from the outside in.

So my dad and grandfather were here from this past Thursday through Sunday, a visit that provided me with an answer, once and for all, to the question, “Why doesn’t Russia get more tourists?”
Before they arrived here, they spent a few days in Moscow with the help of a tour guide. They had hired no guide for Petersburg, assuming that I’d be sufficient enough. And I was. For all of about 45 minutes, after which we got on the metro and pickpockets lifted my grandpa’s wallet.
This unceremonious welcome to St. Petersburg was followed by us running to a cell phone store to try and put minutes on my phone in order to call the credit card companies, which, as it turns out, couldn’t be reached on my cell phone. So I took them back to the hotel, where they called the companies and canceled the cards. The wallet hadn’t had a lot of cash in it, so it wasn’t the worst thing in the world, but it was an inconvenience—especially since, in order to prove to the credit card companies that we had reported a crime, we got to experience the wonders of the St. Petersburg PD. It was amazing how inaccessible the police department was, though, especially for tourists. It was located in a less-than-clean alley off of one of the main squares, through a door that wouldn’t open until I pressed the “Вызов” button on an ancient button panel. After that there were three flights of stairs in a dubious-looking stairwell, followed by an iron door marked with a small sign (written, of course, only in Russian) that we had to knock on several times to get through. Once we were actually in the police department, I had to act as a translator between my painfully American family and the oh-so-Russian policemen. (“Of course the police here speak English!” the desk clerk at their touristy hotel had cheerfully reassured them.) I was actually doing really well until they said one word I didn’t know—I think it was an official word for paper money—at which point I was like, “Huh? What? What does that word mean?” and one of them said to the other, “She’s not a real translator! Ha ha ha!”
Regardless of the police’s condescension, we ended up with the necessary document and headed back to the center on the metro. Well, we thought, that’s over with.
Five minutes later, my dad noticed the conspicuous absence of his digital camera.
Well, shit. There was no use looking for the thief or going to the police, and both my dad and grandpa assured me that it wasn’t my fault. Which it really wasn’t, now that I’ve had time to think about it, but back then I was kicking myself—why didn’t I warn them? Well, I did warn them, but why didn’t I warn them more? Why didn’t we avoid the metro altogether? Et cetera?
Sigh. On the other hand, there were much worse things that could have happened on the visit than a couple of things getting taken, and after that unqualified disaster of a first day, things couldn’t have gone better. We went to the Hermitage (nearly two months in St. Petersburg, and that was my first visit to the Hermitage—pathetic, no?) to a couple cathedrals, to the Amber Room and to an opera at the Mariinsky Theater, but the best experience by far was a dinner with my host family. Here you’ve got to imagine two generations of Russian woman, neither of whom speak more than a little English, and two generations of American men, neither of whom speak any Russian, and one Russian-speaking American, from yet a third generation, constantly translating between the two camps. It was discovered that my host mom’s job and my grandpa’s former job have a lot in common (including a lot of hard-to-translate engineering terminology) and that both families had much to criticize when it came to my eating habits (at which point I threatened to stop translating.) Bush-bashing was also something all five of us, especially my grandfather and babushka, could do without anyone getting lost in translation. Apparently there are some things that transcend cultural boundaries, and dislike of our president is one of them.
All in all, I’m happy they visited, even if they left Russia a few possessions lighter. At any rate, you don’t get that kind of experience vacationing in the south of France. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is up to the traveler.