I am now caught up with our journey. We put in some really long days here so it was too hard to come home and merge photos from 3-4 cameras and then start writing. We had a great time in St Petersburg. It definitely lived up to everything we’d read and watched before coming here. Our apartment couldn’t have worked out any better too. It was right in the...
About a 20 minute walk from the mosque, we arrIved at the Peter and Paul fortress. The Peter and Paul Fortress is the original citadel of St. Petersburg, Russia, founded by Peter the Great in 1703 and built to Domenico Trezzini’s designs from 1706 to 1740. In the early 1920s, it was still used as a prison and execution ground by the bolshevik government. Today...
We crossed the river during our metro journey and went back above ground to check the area out. On our way to see a fortress, we came across this mosque with its intricate tile work outside.
On our last full day in Saint Petersburg, we went to check out the metro subway system. Opened in 1955, the metro of St. Petersburg is considered the 12th busiest metro system in the world. It has five lines, 67 stations, 3,500 trains and over 2.5 million passengers each day, and is served by a staff of 12,000 people. Many of the stations are works of art in...
Eduardo took most of these the night after our sauna visit. The city looks so nice in the night. These were taken around 10:15pm.
After a busy day of pounding the pavement, we were in need of some relaxation so we found a Russian bath about 25 minutes by bus/walking from our place. Degtyarnyye Bani was a little more high-end than the two other baths we’d tried on the trip, although the outside didn’t reflect that. The men’s area was on the 3rd floor and of course, no one spoke...
I don’t know too much about these statues other than they’re massive and really cool. Located outside one of the small Hermitage buildings, there are 10 of these statues of Atlantis cut from granite. You can see how big the feet are compared to Eduardo’s hand.
The Peacock Clock inside the museum is one of their main attractions. It’s a large automation of three life-sized mechanical birds. When we first arrived in front of it, it was impressive on its own as a statue in all its guilded gold. But overhearing a couple tour guides explaining that it moves made it that much better. Unfortunately, they only operate the...
Our next stop was the Hermitage museum. It’s an absolutely massive complex of buildings and is one of the largest and oldest museums in the world. It was founded in 1754 by Catherine the Great and has been open to the public since 1852. Its collections, of which only a small part is on permanent display, comprise over three million items including the largest...
As expected, the weather was a little cloudy so we decided to start with a couple in door activities in hopes that the weather would improve. St. Isaac’a Cathedral is the building we get look at everyday from our apartment so it was a short walk to get to it. It’s split into two areas, the museum and colonnade. We did the colonnade first to check out the...