Post

The main post office (Glavpochtamt), Russia’s first, which opened in 1714, is a couple of blocks from St. Isaac’s Square. The historic building contains seventeen different desks; for ‘postcards, stamps and envelopes’ you have to go to counter 4. Although there are signs in English, the operators normally don’t speak it, but mainly they are friendly. Remember: it is (for some reason) forbidden to take photographs inside. You can also buy stamps in any of the city’s 400 sub post offices – just look for the yellow-blue post sign. Letters can be posted in the light-blue post boxes around the city. The Central Post Office has a cash machine.

Stamps need to be dated after 1998, and they should not be USSR stamps otherwise your mail is even more likely than usual to go nowhere. (Some kiosks in the city centre tell international visitors that they have to buy a 10Rbl stamp and a 6Rbl stamp for one postcard – the 6Rbl stamp is an USSR stamp).

If the post office is just too hard, or you’re sending something important, there are various private courier services which are reliable, but much more expensive. If you want a letter to arrive the next day in a European country, you could pay between US$30 and US$50.