Stuck In The Rain – St Petersburg, Russia

What do you do when traveling and there is a huge rainstorm? Normally our answer to this would be to simply keep trucking and take advantage of the smaller crowds at the major tourist spots. However, on one particularly rainy summer day in St. Petersburg it started raining so hard that Lindsay and I were simply stuck. We were cruising along Nevy Prospekt (the main road in the city) when we stumbled upon an Internet café. We took a moment to send a few emails and just as we were about to finish we saw the heavy rain start falling outside the windows. It was such a heavy rain that we were certain it would pass quickly so we left the Internet café and chilled in the entry way of the building to wait it out. A couple of hours later we were still sitting in the foyer of an old building waiting for the rain to stop. There was really no place to sit so we simply camped out on the stairs. We were surrounded by a sex shop, small market and another store pumping loud music. Everyone once in awhile a local would come and join us in the foyer and would spark up a cigarette. Lindsay was pregnant with Jude at the time and this was driving her crazy. :) About every 10 minutes I would walk outside to see if the rain had settled down but it just seemed to get worse and worse. We sat in the foyer of the building just imagining all of the beautiful sights of St Petersburg we were missing. Eventually the rain stopped just enough and we took off to continue to explore the city. This seems like such a ridiculous memory but looking back sitting on the steps in the foyer of an old building in St Petersburg waiting out the rain is a memory we will never forget.