St Petersburg
Trip Start
May 09, 2005
1
24
63
Trip End
Ongoing
St Petersburg,
Russia
Sunday, July 10, 2005
Locating our accommodation in St Petes was simple, we paid the lady and were led to a lovely little apartment in an 1850's style courtyard. We were stoked, same price as a hostel but we had our own kitchen and bathroom.
Straight into the tourist sight seeing, we did a less than traditional walking tour with a group called 'Peters walking tours' with a PhD student Nick, who had excellent English. These tours are fantastic. They will judge what you are interested in and take you to those places, after asking us what we wanted to see. Our tour was 5 hours long. We saw the back allies and secret historical places: where Rasputin was murdered, the setting of 'Crime and punishment', bath houses, little cafes, market places etc. It was a great way to see a lot of St Petes that you otherwise wouldn't see.
Besides walking the streets we did a couple of the main tourist things. Most importantly a visit to the Hermitage. This place was magnificent. So much art it was mind blowing. We pretty much saw all of the exhibits saving the great masters till last. Wow, you wouldn't believe it unless you saw yourself, at least 15 works each of Picasso, Matisse, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Rembrant, Monet, Renior more for some artists. None of them greatly protected, windows open, some famous Picasso without even glass covering it. I couldn't believe it, the work was incredible though. The building itself was spectacular, art on the roof, massive chandeliers, white and gold, duck egg blue, very grandiose. However, after 4 1\2 hours we were exhausted.
St Isaacs is a massive Cathedral in central St Petes and the public is able to climb up it to get a birds eye view of the city. This is well worth a visit. Stewart was especially interested in the port and its thousands of cranes. For my benefit we made a special visit to the Zoological museum. This was, in Russian style, HUGE. It had every possible animal on exhibit, stuffed or preserved in some way. It was sad to see the 8 stuffed Kiwi and 2 Moa skeletons. Another amazing exhibit was of these tiny birds, I never realised that birds came so small, they were the size of some big insects.
After training from Hong Kong all the way to St Petersburg we decided it was time for a change of transport so we took a bus to Riga, Latvia. In our next log we will tell you whether this was a wise decision or not.
See you
Debbie and Stewart
