Pushin' Russian

I must have switched off more than I thought, I had intended to make some witty comments about Russia but the days seem to have sped by without my remembering to blog at all.
After multilingual Belgium, and tourist-oriented Croatia, it was striking that labelling in museums in St. Petersburg was almost exclusively in Russian and so, upon our arrival, were the immigration and customs forms available at the airport - although this may be unusual; owing to a caterers' strike SAS was unable to supply the immigration forms that would normally be filled in on the plane, and everyone was having to fill these in in the arrivals hall, where any English, French and German versions had long since been used up.
It is many years since I followed a BBC Radio Russian course which of course I had entirely forgotten (apart from "slooshetye", listen - which there wasn't a lot of point in saying - as well as hello, goodbye, please, thank you, cheers and excuse me). It was fun transliterating signs in the Russian alphabet, the STOP sign is easy but the restaurant is called Déjà Vu - I wish I had also photographed the Rive (PIB) Gauche sign.