The Rough Guide to St. Petersburg

This book gives ou a nice overview of the region, and incredible specific tips for visiting St. Petersburg.

This book was basically the only guidebook that I used for my two week trip to St. Petersburg. It was extremely up-to-date, with only one restaurant we tried out of business (and a friend had eaten there a week before, so it was a recent development), and provided great descriptions for all of the places that we visited, with many details and interesting tidbits. It has a chapter each for the Hermitage and the Russian Museum, with descriptions of what could be found in each room, which greatly assisted in deciding where to devote our time and then to navigate these huge museums. We even found some wonderful, cheap restaurants in the book that our friends living in St. Petersburg had not found. By the end of our trip, we were all speaking of this book in reverential tones and I would highly recommend this book to anyone as their primary guide to St. Petersburg. The book has a language section, with the cyrillic aphabet, a pronunciation guide, common words and phrases, and terms for foods. This was extremely useful for learning to read cyrillic and to get around. However, I would recommend getting a separate phrase book or dictionary, as even though many of the basics were covered, the language section is just too short to contain everything you're likely going to need to communicate.

While in St Petersburg for several months I stocked up on three guidebooks. The Rough Guide was an excellent way to get to know the city. The amount of information is so dense that it actually becomes a drawback at times. I used the Rough Guide in conjuction with the Lonely Planet guide to St Pete. Together they were a great combination. If you want one book that will fill you in on the background of St Pete's and delves in depth into its subject matter this is the guide for you. Or, if you are going on an extended stay- as I was- I can recommend this guide. If you're going on a shorter trip you may try the very good (and shorter) Lonely Planet guide.

This book is a must if you are traveling to St. Petersburg. It has tons of great info and is definately worth the $20 some bucks it cost.