Lectures and Departure for St Petersburg

Friday June 17th

	Friday began at 10:00am with a day of lectures at the faculty. Here we were at 10:07 getting a lecture on "Plasticity of skeletal muscles under microgravity conditions" by B. Shenkman, who I think impressed everyone with both his subject knowledge and his presentation skills.

After our lectures, those of us planning to spend the weekend in St Petersburg made a way back to our rooms to prepare. Here, at 21:33, those of us staying at the University were gathering outside our dormitory. We were met there by Sandjar, who would be leading us to the station.

	At 21:31 Sandjar is leading us out of the main entrance of the University to our rendezvous at the University library, where we were to meet with the members of our group who were staying at the hotel rather than the university dormitories.

The six travellers from the University group.

	Looking back at the impressive Moscow University main building that we had just left. Unfortunately the power cables detract a bit from the impresive view.

At 21:50, standing in front of the Library, waiting for Misha to arrive with the hotel group.

	At 22:57 we were on the station platform and our train was just pulling in. We were in the first carriage right at the front of the train.

Jennie settles in to our compartment at 23:04. When we were boarding Misha had told us all to take any of the compartments in our carriage, so Ulf, Jennie, Natacha and I had grabbed the first one. Misha then came in and told us that what he had meant was that it was actually any compartment *except* the one we were in, so we then had to rush out and hurriedly find another compartment before all of the empty ones were taken..

	Misha pays us a visit to make sure everyone was settled in before leaving us to our journey. I'm not sure what he was planning to do with the floppy disk, but he entrusted Natacha with all of our tickets for the journey back to Moscow. On the right, Ulf is busy setting up our sound system.

At 23:23, we are all in our compartment and on our way to St Petersburg. All of my previous journeys on Russian trains have been in the low cost Platskartny class used by most Russians, where the whole carriage is one open dormitory. This time I would be travelling in the fancy kupe class which is more normal for foreigners, with four beds per compartment, panelled walls and curtains on the windows.

	This is the label from the packaging from one (the larger) of the two hampers that was provided for each person in our compartments. I assume it was intended that one would be dinner and one would be breakfast. We were not expecting to be travelling in such luxury, so we had all come equipped with our own supplies of food and drink. Consequently we were not short of provisions for the journey.

One hour and twenty minutes later, ours seems to have been the best equipped carriage and the visitors have started arriving. Here Starla and Leticia have evidently decided that ours was the compartment to be seen in.

	Ulf, myself and Starla just before 1:00am.

It is now 1:27am and Marisa and Risto have decided to join us. But by now there is now so little room that poor Risto has to sit in the corridoor.

	Natacha looking very settled in her corner of our compartment.

At a relatively early 1:54 it looks like we were getting ready for bed.

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