St Petersburg is a very different city from Moscow, Moscow has the feel of a business city on the go. Whereas St Petersburg has a more relaxed feel about it, it doesn’t have the large number of expensive European cars roaring around it, bad parking or the extremely high dress standards for the locals though most still dress nicely). But it’s a wonderful city to visit and we all really enjoyed our time there and would love to visit again. St Petersburg was built on a swampy area of the Neva River and was founded by Peter the Great after he won possession of the area from what is today Finland. The actual city like Venice in Italy is a series of small islands that have been built over numerous canals running between the different streets. While Peter founded the city, majority of the construction was undertaken by Catherine the Great and being of German origin it has given the city a distinct German architectural feel. If you had been to these places it’s like a cross between Venice (Italy) and Vienna (Austria), have a look at the gallery and you’ll see what I mean. The city has also gone by the names of Leningrad and Petrograd during the communist period.
In St Petersburg we rented a 2 bedroom apartment in Millionnaya Street, which runs up to the Hermitage (Winter Palace) and the area that used to housed former residences of the Russian aristocrats. It’s within ten minutes walk distanced to most of the city attractions and you could see our building from the Hermitage windows at one end. Unfortunately, like Moscow we rarely saw the sun except for the occasional break in the clouds. The city is more cosmopolitan than Moscow with lots of different national eateries available with the most popular being Italian for some reason? We mainly ate in, as there was abundance of small markets that we could buy food from to buy and cook in our apartment. There was lots of finger pointing when requesting items from behind counters.

There are a few churches to see in St Petersburg, we visited the Church of the Savior of Spilled Blood, which is similar in style to St Basil’s situated beautifully on a canal. Its interior is covered from floor to ceiling in religious mosaic images which are amazing to see, and unique to Russian churches. The other notable church is St Isaac’s Cathedral and it’s a baroque design and very different from the all cathedrals that we had visited in Russia.

Opposite our apartment over the river Neva is the Fortress of Paul and Peter, built by Peter the Great, so Russia could retain its newly won possession. It dominates the river, and on its grounds are now buried the remains of the Romanov’s - the last Tsar family to rule Russia, they were executed by the Communists when they took power in 1917 and buried in a small Russian town near the Ural mountains. In the nineties they were recovered and reburied in a tomb inside the church within the fortress. The fortress gives a nice vista of the waterfront of St Petersburg. Not far from the fortress is the ship Avrora, its famous for firing the first shot during the Russian revolution in 1917. During World War Two to protect it from German bombing during the siege of Leningrad (the city was renamed by the communists in Lenin’s honour) it was sunk to the bottom of the river and then refloated after the war.

The siege of Leningrad was over 3 years and was horrendous for the residents of the city with them living under constant bombardment and with very little food as the Germans tried to starve the city into submission. A reminder of this is a preserved sign from that period near the end of the Nesky prospect (the main road through the city). The city preserves a sign from the siege in the original painted form and reads:
"Citizens! At times of artillery bombardment this side of the street is the most dangerous!"

The main reason people visit St Petersburg is to see the Hermitage or former Winter Palace of the Tsar’s. It’s huge and contains one of the largest art collections in the world within its endless rooms and corridors. We spent one day in there but you can spend weeks if you take your time to view everything it contains with some care. We don’t know what they did with all the rooms when it was a place as there are so many but there are huge entry staircases, ballrooms, a huge throne room and hundreds of “small” rooms which would be ¼ to ½ the size of a average house back home. All I can say is browse through the pictures and see some of the amazing rooms, like the royal portrait room, throne and ballrooms, the painted corridors and multiple level staircases.

I don’t know if it was just our location but we saw about 40 wedding parties during our 5 days in St Petersburg. They seem to have photos in 4 locations, outside the Little Hermitage and a canal there (on our street), across the Neva River with the Hermitage in the background, outside the Cathedral of Spilled Blood and in the gardens opposite St Isaacs. They mainly seem to hire these huge stretch hummers (big American 4WDS) and there was even a ghastly pink one! And with the weather they were having the brides must have been cold. When they went across the river there was also a little cannon they would shot together to celebrate, it shot little parachute fireworks to great joy of the wedding party. An interesting point was at the Little Hermitage, the arrival area contained these huge metallic statues of Greek gods holding up the roof, very impressive. But people used to stop and have their photo taken while touching the toes of the statues. The large toe would easily fill the hand of an adult. We had no idea while they did that whether it was good luck or something else? Though one lady was standing there running her hands back and forth over the statues big toe looking up very lustfully at where the loincloth was, we had a feeling that she may have been thinking of something else!!

So out of Russia we go, in some way good and some ways bad. The good thing is we no longer have to carry our passport, visa and registration papers on us everywhere. The police stop people at random including locals for their identification papers, while we didn’t get stopped Shamus from the train did in Moscow. The bad thing is that we’re leaving but hope to return again one day as our visit was very enjoyable.

On a last note someone needs to tell Tom Hanks we found “Wilson” on the cupboard of our apartment!!