St. Petersburg has received its own phone number. Yes, one number for the whole city. Just imagine it. But if you dial it, who will be on the receiving end? Anyone whom you don’t know, someone of the residents who downloaded a special free app and is ready to talk to someone he doesn’t know either. In English too.
The idea has come from Sweden where the same project was launched in May. Viktoria Evdokimova, a former St. Petersburg resident now living in Moscow, heard of the Swedish brilliant story and financed the app development for the Russian city on its own. Mobile operator MegaFon agreed to help with number.
Everything is simple: you just dial the number. The charges are that of your operator for a call to Russia. The whole process just doesn’t differ from an ordinary call, except the fact that at the receiving end… will be Mr or Ms or Mrs X. What we can say for sure is that he or she will speak English since every user willing to receive international calls points out this specially when registering in special app through AppleStore or GooglePlay.
When you are calling, anyone, who is willing to talk at the moment, may answer.
The project seems to be successful: at the time of writing, 11018 calls from 23 countries totaling more than 12 days in duration were registered. 1298 calls were from outside of Russia.
Ready? Dial +7 812 930 1703
Website of the project: http://www.callstpetersburg.ru/en/