After a classic piece of Russian customer service, of which more later, I found myself in the Hermitage at St Petersburg, all 1,057 rooms of it, with exactly an hour and a half to see the greatest art collection in the world. I felt a little like the American tourist who approached the ticket desk at the Louvre, demanding: 'Which way to the Mona Lisa, I'm double parked.'
I'd never been to the Hermitage before, but seeing some of the paintings was an extraordinary thing, like meeting somebody you've known your whole life. There was Degas' Place de la Concorde, Rembrandt's Return of the Prodigal Son, Monet's Waterloo Bridge: Effect of the Mist... This museum contains an extraordinarily high proportion of the art that forms the backdrop to all our consciousness.
Other galleries are proud to have a single Rembrandt; the Hermitage, which also formed the main stage of the Russian Revolution, has 26 in one room alone. In total, there are three million works of art. So 90 minutes was perhaps not quite long enough to appreciate it.
Yet if the paintings are familiar, the rest of St Petersburg is quite magnificently foreign. When I travel, I want to go to somewhere different. And in a world becoming ever more pasteurised, how fantastic it was to be in a place where there are no street signs in English, and where the only language you hear is Russian. To get somewhere this alien, you usually have to fly for most of a day. But St Petersburg is three hours from Heathrow.
The city makes a good affordable destination. Although it is, of course, a key posing centre for the new Russian rich, St Petersburg's main pleasures are more or less free. There are the buildings, magnificent palaces, apartment blocks and urban set-pieces everywhere. They are Western in style - St Petersburg is Russia's great copy of the West - but very Russian in scale.
There is the water. Many of the finest palaces, apartment blocks and museums front on to embankments, and many of the most magnificent views are across a vast expanse of H2O. Cruise liners and tankers tie up in the city centre. Canals cut through the main shopping district. Young Russians on jet skis bomb down them.
In summer, the evenings are almost endless, another symptom of the city's beguiling strangeness. The main reason St Petersburg is such good value is that you get hours more daylight for your money. In mid-August, dusk is at 10.30pm, and the cash-strapped council puts on the streetlights at the last possible moment. Standing in one of St Petersburg's huge squares in the semi-darkness, with the grandiose buildings all around you, is a curiously thrilling experience.
There are three key rules for a successful trip to St Petersburg without doing too much damage to your credit card. The first is to book early. What you want is a 'mini-hotel', a happy halfway house between cheap (but ghastly) Soviet era relics and swish Western chains. Mini-hotels are often family-run, with a lot of character, Western standards and prices per room between R2,592 (£50) and R5,185 (£100) a night. Central mini-hotels in this bracket include the Sonata, the Nevsky Inn, the Kristoff, the Pyaty Ugol (Five Corners) and the Rakhmaninov.
Then you need a visa. Having booked, your hotel will send you an 'invitation', a fax or email, which you must then forward to the Russian embassy. Apply at least three weeks before you travel and visas cost as little as R2,333 (£45). If you leave it until the week before, you might have to use a commercial agency and pay R11,408 (£220).
Rule number two is to acquire at least a passing familiarity with the Cyrillic alphabet. It's not only rather fun, it will be essential if you are to use the metro for R15 (30p) a ride and navigate the streets. (Delivering yourself up to the city's rapacious taxi drivers can be costly.) The alternative, which I rather enjoyed, is to hire a bike, which is only R415 (£8) a day.
Remember my 90 minutes to see the Hermitage? That happened because the guidebook urged me to buy my ticket by credit card through the museum website. 'The queues can be horrendous in summer,' it warned. What the website doesn't tell you, until you've paid, is that it takes three days for your e-ticket to arrive. With time running out before my return flight, I decided to give up and brave the 'horrendous' queue. When I got there, the queue contained 15 people and took four minutes. Here, to avoid similar mistakes, are my suggestions for three days in St Petersburg without breaking the bank...
