If in the early morning we were struck by the silence of the forest, in the afternoon the silence was broken by something that cannot pass unnoticed from St Petersburg to Vladivostok even to a distracted traveller: the ubiquitous sound of “cloppete cloppete” produced by the high hills of the Russian women who are constantly trotting up and down the big avenues while wearing their extremely short and provocative mini-skirts… This definitely scored as cultural shock number one.
