How to Phone and to Send Post in St. Petersburg

The best thing to do is to get a SIM card upon your arrival, so you can save on the roaming charges. Local mobile networks are good, cheap, and have fast 4G internet. Try to get a pay-as-you-go plan that offers cheap calls abroad (usually should be about $0.20 a minute) and has 3 to 5 Gigs of the internet included (for another $20 fixed top-up fee, valid for a month). 

St Petersburg phone code: 812.
How to call St. Petersburg from abroad. To make a call to St.Petersburg, Russia from abroad you should dial 00 for international access, 7 for the Russian country code, 812 for St.Petersburg code and then the 7-digit number.
International calls from St. Petersburg . Dial 8, wait for a tone, then dial 10 (international access), then the code of the country, the area and the phone number. The price of a phonecall to Europe will be around 20 roubles ($0.7) a minute in the daytime. In the nighttime and weekends the tariffs are 30 to 50% less.
Russia - St. Petersburg. When you call somebody in St.Petersburg from any other Russian city, dial 8, wait for a tone, then dial the St. Pete phone code 812, and then the 7-digit phone number. The price of a phonecall from Moscow to St. Pete, for example, is about 4 roubles a minute ($0.15).
St. Petersburg - Russia. If you're phoning from St. Petersburg to some other Russian city, dial 8, wait for a tone, then dial the code of the city (e.g. Moscow - 495, Novgorod - 8162), and then the local city number you need. The price of a phonecall to Moscow will be around 4 roubles a minute ($0.15).
Inside St. Petersburg. If you're in St.Petersburg and calling inside St.Petersburg, you should dial the 7-digit number without any codes. The local phonecalls are free.
Calling Russian mobile phones. Russian mobiles have either direct (cities they were registred in) numbers, or indirect numbers. The indirect number is of this form: 8 tone *** *******. If you use mobile phone, you can dial +7 instead of 8.

The "phone" in Russian is "tele`fon". The public phones are called "taxofon" ("таксофон"). The public phones in St. Petersburg work with chip cards, some pay phones in the metro work with coins.
 

How to Send the Post

If you want to send something by post from Russia, you can do it either through government post service or courier services - the difference is price and speed.

State Post Service. The government post system in whole Russia is unexpensive, but there is a certain risk that your letter would never reach the reciepient. It's ok in the most cases with the parcels though.
How to send it. You should buy the post stamps at the post offices, which you can find by "Почта" (Pochta) sign. Post offices usually work Monday - Friday from 9.00 to 19.00 and Saturday - 9.00 to 17.00, sunday is day off. It costs around 20-25 roubles (0.8$) to send a letter to foreign countries. For that price your letter will arrive in around 2 weeks.You can send your letter or a postcard using any of light blue post boxes on the streets or directly at the post office (better). Sending an average (around 500gm) parcel costs around 150-230 roubles ($6-8).

Where to send it from:
Central City Post Services (Pochtamp). International and domestic post. Less expensive, than courier services. Open: mon-sat 9.00-20.00, sun 10.00-17.45. Address: Pochtampskaya St., #9 (metro Nevsky Prospekt, near St.Isaac cathedral and Astoria hotel). Phone: 312-8022

Courier Services. Faster, much more reliable and therefore more expensive. Here are addresses of some courier post service providers in St Petersburg:

1. West Post. Least expensive courier services because they do everything through Finland. English speaking, American managed.
Address: #86, Nevsky pr. 191025,
Tel.: +7 (812) 336-6352, +7-812-327-3211, fax +7-812-275-0806
Email: zakaz@westpost.ru.
Internet: http://www.westpost.ru

3. DHL Saint-Petersburg, Izmailovski prospekt, #4,
tel 7-(812) 326-64-00,

4. EMS Garantpost
Moskovsky pr, #109B,
tel. (812) 325-75-25,
e-mail: exp@ems.spb.ru