| April
10, 2005. The summer 2006 has been just posted
on our web site. We printed new booklets - you can now download
on here, in pdf format.
November
15,
2005
Winter offer: Spend five nights at the International Hostel
and join one of our walking tours for free! More information
on this and other offerscan be found at the hostel website,
page: http://ryh.ru/news/index.php
August
1,
2005
We’ve started translating our web site into French!
Very soon the entire site will have a French version. So far
it is the front page only: http://www.peterswalk.com/french.htm
We now offer private walking tours in French too. Please contact
us at info@peterswalk.com
with inquiries.
July
10, 2005
An article recommending
Peter’s Walking Tours was published in the New York
Times today, under Questions and Answers in the Travel section.
February
9, 2005. Our family is growing! We have a
new guide in the team. Vera has just passed her training and
is giving her first tours, preparing for the busy summer season.
See The Guides page for more details.
New
walks are in production, including Petrograd
Pub Crawl. Premiere to be announced.
***************
September
10, 2004. Guiding
news from the literary front. The long list of our customers
this season includes quite a few celebrities: Irvine Welsh
visited in early September for some local trainspotting (see
picture). He came accompanied by Dougie Brimson, the writer
who explores the darker sides of the world of football hooligans,
and Isabelle Wolff, the popular English author of female novels.
Peter’s Walking Tours took all three around on an introduction
tour on their first day.
Earlier in
June we did a joint tour with Alexei Dostoyevsky, the great-great-grandson
of the famed St. Petersburg writer. Five generations away,
Alexei, a direct descendant of Fyodor Dostoyevsky on the male
line, very much resembles the great classic visually –
same balding head, same beard. Alexei used to be a tram driver
in St. Petersburg, and for this special tour a tram was privately
rented to get us around the city. The tour was planned to
include as many St. Petersburg icons as possible, and was
scheduled for the night of June 22, the shortest of the White
Nights. Unfortunately mother nature did not comply –
a wall of tropical rain prevented the guides and the few takers
from enjoying the never-ending summer twilight. Around 3 o’clock
in the morning we hid under the gateway at the Pawn-Broker’s
house from the Crime and Punishment, where Dostoyevsky Junior
shared some family stories, knee-deep in a puddle. Our guide
Peter was reading from the novel, with a help of a torch.
The tour was wrapped up meeting sunrise on a rooftop, a tribute
to our famed Rooftop Tours, which we stopped doing in 2000.
Pictures to be published soon – none came out too well
though.
***************
April
3, 2004. The timetable of
Peter's Walking Tours for May 2004 is posted on our site now,
at last. June and the rest of the summer season are coming
up soon.
We are launching
a new meeting point! Some walks will be departing from
Quo Vadis, an Internet centre right in the heart of St. Petersburg.
Quo
Vadis is located at 24 Nevsky Prospekt, opposite the Kazan
Cathedral. It
is open 24 hours, has fast and inexpensive connection and
all accompanying
services such as IP telephones. Plus a cosy cafe in the back,
where our
guides will be meeting groups for some of scheduled walks.
See page
Meeting Points for
more on Quo Vadis, and the Timetable
for the info on
which tours start from where.
We are introducing new prices
for our walks. All scheduled walks
that cost
320 rubles will be 400 rubles. the WWII
and the Siege of Leningrad tour
will become 500 rubles instead of 480.
Privately booked tours are getting
slighly more expensive too. New prices come into effect May
1. Pessimists
should note that this is the first time we're increasing prices
in two
years! Not bad, considering 12 percent inflation in Russia
last year...
October
15, 2003.
We've switched to the winter timetable this week, meaning,
alas, fewer regular walks on the timetable. We will still
be running our Original Peter's Walking Tour daily at 10:30,
from the International Hostel as always. Plus there's a pub
crawl every Friday at 18:00 and the rotating theme walks on
Saturdays and Sundays, at 11:00, all from
CafeMax. You may always book a
private tour with us.
We travelled to Moscow last
Monday to meet our new partner, WayToRussia.Net. Over the
past years we've been repeatedly asked the same question:
it there anyone in Moscow that does the same walking tours
as you guys? There's no regular walking tour service in Moscow
yet, but Way To Russia can organize custom-made walks, plus
they are experts in everything else that has to do with traveling
to Moscow (and many other destinations in Russia), homestays
and hotels, transfers, Russian visas etc.
The project is run by a team
of young energetic Muscovites who hand-pick the best services
around to recommend to you. Extremely useful if you're just
preparing your trip to Russia. See their web site, www.waytorussia.net.
July
2003. The great news this week:
We’re in the final stage
of planning and setting a new project, Peter’s Bike
Tours. Very soon we’ll be offering regular, English-language,
budget bicycle tours! We’re still thinking
on the routes, duration and other technicalities – we
have all the expertise and are full of determination. Stay
tuned for updates. In the meantime, you may order a private
bicycle tour of the city with us – maximum six people,
inquire at info@peterswalk.com and we’ll send you a
quote and other details.
Our expert
museums-and-palaces guide Olga finally graduated from uni
last week! She just
received her diploma certificate today and is now a happy
qualified linguist – our congratulations Olga!
We’ve done a massive
update of our web site. Still some corrections to be made
– those of you who ever designed a web site know that
it is never perfect. The major changes include a new home
page, a friendlier interface, easier access to the information.
Many thanks to our web master Victor
Fokin (victor_fokin@mail.ru)
who is in charge of the technical work,
and our graphic designer Tanya (taptap@pisem.net) for
her sleepless nights creating the pages – from general
layout down to every little button. We’re also doing
a thorough proof-reading of all pages – please let
know if you find some spelling, grammatical or any other
mistakes.
May
14, 2003. THE
BIGGEST news is that we’ve launched more exciting walking tours. One
of them is entirely new – that’s Lenin’s
Secret Walk Pub Crawl. The first one will be running on Saturday,
May 24, at 18:00, meeting point CafeMax.
After that, the next one is June 7,
and then every Saturday onwards. See Timetable for further
details. The detailed description of the tour will be published
on the web site very soon.
Other new
tours are not exactly new, but we haven’t had them in our timetable for a
while. There’s Peter’s Food
Tour, running every Saturday at
11:00, meeting point CafeMax. That one is a big hit – it
received raving press over the last year when it was first
launched.
Then there’s the Big
Night Out Tour, available from June 11 every Wednesday, meeting
at the International Hostel at 21:00. The tour is guided by
Nick – our leading authority on clubbing and nightlife.
Don’t miss that one! The detailed description of the
tour will be published on the web site very soon. The tour
existed for a long time as Peter’s White Nights Walking
Tour – that was actually the very first tour given by
our company in 1996!
There’s
also the Slums
Tour, previously only available
by private booking, now running on alternate Sundays - June
8, 29; July 20. Meeting
point CafeMax, 11:00. With all the anniversary face-lifting
of the palaces in the city centre this is your great chance
to see the other side of it – have you heard of ‘Potyomkin
Villages’?
***************
With the city’s 300th
anniversary approaching, it seems that every newspaper and
TV channel in the world is determined to run a St. Petersburg
feature. Hordes of international journalists descend upon
the city scanning the surface for interesting and unusual
subjects. Inevitably, many of them come across Peter’s
Walking Tours – a subject too attractive to miss. Here’s
a few of the stories that have been published recently. Please,
if you come across a story that mentions Peter’s Walking
Tours in St. Petersburg Russia, do not hesitate to send us
a copy by email.
A
story published in Die Presse, Austria
A story
published in City, Finland
A story
published in Die Zeit, Germany, May 15, 2003
***************
Like many
other residents of St. Petersburg, we are rather sceptical
about the forthcoming
celebrations of the 300th anniversary of St. Petersburg.
It is a great date of course – we’ll be proudly telling
about it to our grandchildren, no doubt. But it all comes
with too much stress – streets and squares will be blocked
off for the official corteges, drawbridges will be opening
at odd times, the airport will be closed for a few days only
serving VIP jets, etc etc. Too much police in the streets
is never pleasant, even that we know they are there for our
benefit:-) The authorities are putting a huge effort to present
the city to the world community at its nicest – will
their efforts be as consistent after the celebrations are
over? Will the paint stay on the facades long after the anniversary
or will it peel off?
Anyhow, we
decided to ignore the festivities to as much extent as we
can. No tours are running on May 27, the actual city birthday.
Instead, we’re heading out of town for a picnic –
want to join?
March
4, 2003. We’ve received
some good press coverage recently. The various international
media that ran stories about Peter’s Walking Tours last
month include The
List, Glasgow and Edinburgh Events Guide; The
Moscow Times, the leading English-language daily in Russia;
The
St. Petersburg Times, the English newspaper in St. Petersburg,
Russia; Russland.RU,
a German internet-based newspaper in Russia. Use the hyperlinks
to see the stories. We were interviewed by even more journalists,
and expecting more stories in international newspapers and
on TV coming up soon. Also, very soon we’ll post some
of the older stories about us on our site. Fame at last!!!
:-)
19
January 2003. Finally we kicked
off! Well, we’ve been running the tours for quite some
years now, but we just switched to a full-scale mode, with
two starting points, including the lovely new one at CafeMax, right on Nevsky Prospekt, the city’s main drag.
The first scheduled tour from CafeMax departed on January
17 2003.
We also just launched this flashy web site (still under construction,
but almost complete now). We’re printing our new flyers,
for the first time in colour! Copies of the flyer should be
soon available from a number of locations around the city
– the list of the places will be growing, including
some hotels, tourist services and bars. So far, you can pick
up a flyer at one of the meeting points. Or indeed write us
an email and we’ll see if we’re not too lazy to
mail you one:-) The flyer will be available from roughly Jan
24.
1 January
2003. We’re excited to
inform you that we are almost ready with all the preparations
for our new mode of operation. We’re planning to kick
it off on January 17, 2003, which will become a historic moment
for Peter’s Walking Tours. Please see our Timetable
for details on tour dates.
The first
significant achievement on our way to success was this web
site. It was made possible due to organised and persistent
joint effort of the team of Peter’s Walking Tours and
our industrious designers:
Victor
Fokin – web design and mastering;
Tatyana (TapTap) Bezmenova – graphic design of the site,
logo, flyers, and all other presentation material.
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