Travel Support Technology

One of the first things we did on arrival in St. Petersburg was buy SIM cards for our phones. Of three reasonable carrier choices we chose MTC as they had the best national coverage. All the carriers were great bargains compared with AT&T. For $8 we got one month of unlimited data / text and 500 minutes of talk. The coverage in populated areas is very good LTE dropping to 3G or Edge in areas of low population before vanishing entirely. Since the SIM is prepaid you can’t run up unexpected bills. The chip has performed as advertised. Good connectivity across the country, fast data speeds and we’ve discovered no hidden terms. Amazing for $8/month.

Besides the usual valuable travel apps these three apps were particularly helpful.

— Google Translate. Russian is hard! We’ve pointed the live camera feature at random signs, menus and such with pretty good success. We’ve also used the feature where you type and speak in One language and the app displays the other language in big easy to read letters. We exchanged info this way with one of our taxi drivers on the relative beauty of Armenian vs Russian girls. The driver was from Armenia but had fallen hard for Russian women.

Translate sometimes makes funny mistakes. We had dinner at a hipster restaurant in St. Petersburg. Cool place that would seamlessly fit in Cardiff with creative food and atmosphere at half the price. Their menu was in English on one side and Russian on the other. The English menu offered blueberry pie so I pointed Translate at its Russian entry on the reverse side which got translated as “Pie of Fresh Carrier Pigeon”. Fodder for some serious misunderstandings.

— Yandex. Yandex.taxi is Russian branding for Uber. We used this service numerous times in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Every trip was perfect, no confusion on pickup or drop off and payment just like back home. Yandex.maps was also helpful as it shows more local detail In Russia.

— ApplePay was probably the most helpful. It’s the preferred payment method in both big cities. Payment is often such a burden, even at home, but here we could easily buy items large and small. The sellers clearly understood and liked the process as much as we did. The same applies for Google pay I suspect. Unfortunately neither ApplePay nor credit cards work on the train since the train doesn’t have connectivity as it rolls through the hinterlands. We’re curious to see if smaller eastern towns support digital payments.