Flying from St Petersburg To Frankfurt

Previous page -Leaving Russia

 

St Petersburg back to Australia

In order to use our frequent flier points we needed to leave Europe with Qantas. Frankfurt was the city to leave from but to get to Frankfurt we had to use Air Baltic and travel via Riga.

 

 

 

The plane trip from St Petersburg to Riga took only 1 hour and fifteen minutes.  It was uneventful and no food was on offer.  It was quite a bumpy landing though. We went through the usual rigmarole of transiting an airport. Ian spotted a very snazzy bus on the tarmac. He is a bus driver by profession but never drives anything as smart as this bus.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Both of us felt a bit peckish so we wandered around looking for something to eat. We found some delicious slice. It was very rich.

Then we waited for about an hour for our connecting flight to Frankfurt.  That flight took just under two hours and was just as uneventful as the last short flight.  We would have loved to have got a train from St Petersburg back down through the Baltic countries to Germany but there is no train service from St Petersburg to Tallinn, hence all the flying.

 

 

 

When we approached the customs clearance area in Frankfurt airport we could choose the red exit for declaring stuff or the green one.  We were going to go through the red area as we weren’t sure whether gear that we had bought would comply with German rules and regulations.  Well, we ended up going through the green section in the end as there was no-one staffing the red exit. 

I think we could have bought anything into Germany and no-one would have known.  Frankfurt airport is quite large and we had difficulties even finding a toilet at first.  We bought a bottle of water each and then went searching for the exit to the train station.  It turned out we had to get a free shuttle bus from our terminal (Terminal 2) to Terminal 1.  The airport train station is accessible only from Terminal 1.

 

 

 

 

 

We managed that OK but when we went to buy our train tickets to ride into the centre of Frankfurt we were totally flummoxed.  There were several complicated ticket machines and we were hopelessly confused.  A saviour comes along in the shape of a total stranger who told us exactly what we needed to press in order to access our tickets.  We just shoved the 20 Euro note in the machine and it was all done for us.  The tickets cost 3,50 Euros each which wasn’t too bad.  The man even told us which platform the train would leave from.  How kind!

After we got on the train there were two stops at ground level then we went back underground and got off at the very next stop which is Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof.  All very easy once we knew how to get our tickets.

Next page - Finding the youth hostel in Kaiserstrasse

 

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