On the evening of June 22, 2012, guests and residents of St. Petersburg had the opportunity for the first time to evaluate the unusual format of a bus tour, voiced in the rap genre. This way to get acquainted with the sights of the city is offered by the Baltic Travel Company within the framework of the City Tour St. Petersburg project.
Baltic Travel Company was founded in 1992. At that time, she was a small travel company with a staff of seven people. Currently BTK is a fairly large tour operator providing transport, consulting and entertainment services. In 2008, this company became the winner of the competition announced by the administration of St. Petersburg, the subject of which was the implementation of a project called "City Tour St. Petersburg". The authors of the idea wanted to create in the city an analogue of regular excursions existing in a number of European capitals, the participants of which can get off at any point on the route and continue on the next bus. An indispensable feature of such a project was to be the text of the excursion, recorded in several languages and broadcast to the salon through headphones or speakers.
The idea, the return of which was doubted by representatives of the tourist business of St. Petersburg, was implemented as a permanent excursion route, along which participants are transported on six double-decker buses purchased in Spain. The text broadcast to the salon has been translated into ten languages. The Russian version was voiced by the actor N. V. Burov. The excursion route includes Nevsky Prospekt, Palace Square, Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood, Spit of Vasilyevsky Island, a stop at the Bronze Horseman, Peter and Paul Fortress and the cruiser Aurora.
In the spring of 2012, among the information of news agencies, there were messages about the expected new program within the framework of the City Tour St. Petersburg, which will feature the text of the excursion, read in the style of rap. It is believed that the idea arose after employees of the company saw a TV clip that told about an experiment in a German school. Two groups of children were offered teaching material in the form of a regular presentation and as a rap-style speech. It turned out that the students who heard the lesson in a non-traditional version learned the material better.
The author of the two-hour soundtrack of the rap tour was Roman Petrov from St. Petersburg, known as DJ Rowman. It took him about a year to revise more than a hundred pages of the original text, but as a result, two dozen independent tracks appeared that retained the meaning of the original material. As noted on the project website, the author of the editing managed to stay within the framework of the Russian literary language. The tour with a new soundtrack takes place on Friday, Saturday and Sunday evenings, and its route coincides with the traditional daytime.
