St. Petersburg

I already posted my haul from St. Petersburg, but at least few of you were interested also hearing about my trip in general, so here comes couple of pictures and a little travelogue. I did some collages of some pictures too to keep this post a bit shorter...

So we (that's me and my bf) were in St. Petersburg last week. We were there total of four days and we used the really handy Allegro train to get there. Well, it would be more handy if we lived in southern Finland, as now we had to leave really early in the morning to catch the first train and also we were back home late at night. We could have of course chosen later train to go there and come back with earlier train, but we wanted to maximize our time in St. Petersburg.


First after we arrived we located our hotel and then went to see the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood which was actually quite close to our hotel. It was really different from all the other churches I've seen from the outside, very pretty! But of course it was also pretty from the inside too:
 It's full of mosaics (Wikipedia says that according to its restorers, more than any other church in the world) and it was really breathtaking. You can't really see how amazing it is from any pictures, you just have to see it yourself!

We had made this plan to only see one sight per day as neither of us really enjoys running around too much after too many sights, so we usually just pick the ones that we really like to see and stick with those. So this church was the thing we had planned to see at our first day there. We used the rest of the day just wandering around the city.


So we pretty much just walked around Nevsky Prospekt on our first day and of course saw some fine buildings, like Kazan Cathedral (on left). I think it's also open for visiting, but we just spent some time in the little park next to it. 

On the second day we had the Winter Palace and the Hermitage museum in our list. The Winter Palace looked of course really gorgeous outside too, though there were some reconstruction going on and I could take picture where you could see the whole building as it was partly covered in plastic. But it was still so breathtaking sight and really huge!

Of course we had to go inside to see the palace interior and all the art collections. If it looked gorgeous outside, it was even more prettier inside! We consciously just went through those collections that seemed the most interesting to us since the place is so huge that you really can't see everything even if you'd spent more than one whole day there!

Honestly, it was quite a strange feeling to go from room to other and constantly stumple upon all these paintings of famous artists like da Vinci, Rembrandt, Renoir, Monet and van Gogh just to name few. Huh, probably no need to say that it was pretty amazing, even for a person like me who doesn't really know too much about art...

And you can probably imagine that we spent quite some time in the Hermitage... Then the rest of the day we used pretty much for eating and getting back to the hotel. 

We started the third day by visiting the Summer Garden. There wasn't really too many people there, maybe it was because we were there after the real travel season. But it was still worth visiting the garden!


After wandering through the garden and spending some time there, we walked over one of the many bridges to get to the Peter and Paul Fortress.

It is actually the original citadel of St. Petersburg and it was built from 1706-1740. After the day in the Hermitage, we weren't really up to visiting any of the buildings, but we still wanted to see the fortress so we went in and wandered around the place for awhile. The weather was really nice too, so it was a perfect day to spend outside.


Our last day we had still one sight to see, and of course it was the Saint Isaac's Cathedral. (And again , they were making some reconstructions so it was pretty impossible to get a nice picture from the outside... )

But it was really worth seeing the cathedral inside! Oh my, so much gold! I think one of my tourist guide books said that they used 400kg of gold inside the cathedral and well, it sure looked like it. There were also of course some really gorgeous paintings and mosaics inside too.
 
You can also climb up the stairs to the colonnade to see a great view of the city, though you have to buy the tickets for this one separately. But on every vacation we usually go to somewhere where you can see the view of the city, so of course we had to go there!
It was a bit cloudy day, so the view wasn't too clear, but you could still see quite far, so it was well worth the ticket and the climb up of the 262 steps.

I have to say that I really liked St. Petersburg, though it probably isn't my favourite city in the world, but there's really so much to see and it's a city with some really gorgeous buildings! If I'd go there again I would probably choose a hotel that's close to some metro station, because I think I've never walked as much in four days that we did in here. Of course all the sights are pretty close to each other, but we also wanted to do some shopping etc. so it would have been nice to stay near a metro station. But overall we got to see some really nice sights, eat some good food and had a nice little vacation.

pekal

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