The Sights

I love Saint Petersburg!  There is so much to see!  I have already seen quite a few things and there is still more that I have left to see.  This week I started a second memory card.  I finished my first 2 gig memory card.  I already had some pictures on my card from camp and so I wasn’t sure how much memory my pictures have taken up.  But after today I have taken 2.01 gigs of pictures.   I was working it out and I started taking pictures on the 5^th.  So I have taken that many pictures in 2 ½ weeks.  Wow!  I don’t know that I have ever taken so many pictures so quickly.

So you ask, “Well, what have you taken pictures of?”

Of course I had some pictures from the flights that I had and the airports that I was in flying to St Petes.  But that isn’t very many pictures.  Where have all the pictures come from?  We have been doing excursions.  I have been to the Cathedral on Spilled Blood (Спас на Крови) which is the church signifying the place that Tsar Alexander II was assassinated.  It was built by his son Alexander III.

I also found the forever flame.  Every Russian City (I have been in) has a flame that is always burning in memory of the people that died during WWII.

No good visit to St Petersburg would be complete without a visit to the Winter Palace which doubles as the Hermitage, one of the biggest museums in the world.  There a ton to see!  There are the exhibits, the walls, the ceiling, the floors.  Everything is decorated and intricate.

 It's impossible to see the Hermitage without seeing Alexandrian column which is crazy as to how tall it is.  The column is 47.5 m which makes it the tallest in the world.  The column was build when Russia beat Napoleon's forces.

 We have walked by Kazan Cathedral multiple times on Nevsky Prospekt but haven't gone inside yet.

 We always take the metro to get places because you can get to the majority of the city using the metro.  This is because all 5 lines are connected and transfers are free and frequent.

We have also walked through a couple parks like this one above.  Some we purposely find and others we stumble upon them.  Either way its awesome.

Then we also went to this park.  It was called Miracle Island and it was awesome!  It was a normal park but it had all of these amusement rides.  Each time you ride a ride you have to pay and so that could add up pretty fast.

Since the Neva River runs straight through the center of the city and it is like 8 stories deep there are huge ships that just sit on the river.  This boat for example is a night club.  There are others that are restaurants and other things.

There was one day we were looking for the Summer Gardens but didn't really know the way.  So we just started walking and stumbled upon this might cathedral in all its glory.  This cathedral is called Smolny Cathedral and it was so tall!

On Saturdays we go with Sveta on excursions.  For this excursion we went to Peterhof which is a collection of palaces, gardens and fountains.  Peter the Great wanted something similar, but better of course, to the gardens in Versailles.  It was really pretty.  The canal actually goes all the way out to the Gulf of Finland.  So in the distance of the picture you can actually see Finland.

Another Saturday excursion.  This is Saint Isaac's Cathedral.  The cathedral took 40 years (1818-1858) to build and is the biggest cathedral in St Petes.

We passed the statue of Alexander Serveyevich Pushkin.  Russian adore his poetry and author.  There is museum of the last place that his lived.

Here we have Peter I.  He is also called the bronze horseman.  He is pointing the way to Asia.  The statue was constructed by Katherine the Great.

I found my namesake.  This sign says that in this house lived Nikolai Nikolaiovich Petrov who was a fantastic surgeon and oncology professor.

There are a lot of bridges in St Petes and here is one of them at night.

On a weekday morning we decided that we would go to the Summer Gardens and this time I actually knew the way that I was supposed to take in order to walk there.  We found it and I was very happy and took lots of pictures.

The next place to show is the Finlandsky Voksal, Finland train station.  We didn't go there to go to Finland but just to look around and see what a train station looks like because the people I was with hadn't been in one yet.

Really close to the Finland train station there is this statue of Lenin.  He immortalized himself all over Russia.

We also saw the Cruiser Aurora.  Unfortunately we got there too late to actually get on so that is still on our bucket list to do.  This cruiser is a memorial to the navy and also the October Revolution.

Facing the Cruiser Aurora is a Navy Academy.

We also found the Saint Petersburg Mosque.

Then the last sight for this post is a picture from the boat tour that I went on.