Exploring St. Petersburg

We stayed for three full days in St. Petersburg.  The first day, we hired a guide and spent most of the day visiting various places around the city (although mostly in the city center).  It turned out to be quite a good decision: it was a Saturday, so the traffic was light, and the day was mostly sunny and relatively warm.

The next two days we spent mostly at the Hermitage (Sunday, which was May Day) and the Russian Museum (Monday).  More about those places later.

To keep track of where we went, take a look a the map below.  Our hotel is the tag that's farthest south:

See this map of St Petersburg in a seperate window.

One really great thing about St. Petersburg is how unified the streetscapes are.  The buildings all have a historic, cosmoploitan European feel, still true to Peter the Great's vision.  Here's a few buildings on the corner of Vladimirskiy and Nevskiy Prospekts, which is about a half mile north of our hotel. Nevskiy Prospekt is the main shopping district in the city, but other than that, there's nothing special about this corner:

Here's another scene, this time back along the side street that leads to our hotel:

St. Petersburg is full of similar streetscapes.  One thing that adds to the feel of the city are the canals that crisscross downtown:

Or, for a more panoramic view of another canal:

Here you have these historic buildings, all different but unified by their height, mass, and construction.  In addition, they're set back from the canal by a uniform distance, and you can see a graceful bridge in the background of both pictures.

But there are some special buildings in St. Petersburg.  My favorite was the Church on Spilled Blood, built on the site where Czar Alexander II was assasinated.  Here's a close-up of the church.  Note the tilework:

 A more interesting picture of the church, I think, is one taken from along the canal:

More of St. Petersburg after the cut.


St Petersburg is full of religious buildings.  In addition to the Church on Spilled Blood, there's Vladimirskaya Church, which was just north of our hotel:

St. Nicholas's Cathedral (yes, that St. Nicholas):

 And the largest church in St Petersburg, St. Isaac's Cathedral:

The Hermitage (originally the Czar's winter palace) isn't all that far from St Isaac's; here's a photo of the inner courtyard:

And this is the Palace Square, taken from inside the Hermitage itself:

We also stopped by the Smolnyy Convent, originally built by Czarina Elizabeth, supposedly when she was dabbling on becoming a nun:

And here's a good place to talk about an interesting St. Petersburg tradition.  It seems as though married couples after the wedding ceremony rent a limo, drunk chanpagne, and visit the most historic sites in the city.  Since we toured the city on a Saturday, we saw a lot of newlyweds.  Here's a bride at Smolnyy Convent:

We also caught a bride at the famous "Horseman" statue of Peter the Great (that's St Isaac's in the background):

And there were quite a few wedding parties at the rostral columns on Vasilevsky Island.  These columns were used  as lighthouses originally:

You can't see the wedding parties in the picture of the column, but check out this picture of me in the small plaza in front of the columns. The fortress of Peter and Paul is in the background, and....

 If you take a good hard look at the left-hand side of the picture above, you see this:

Yes, those are champagne bottles on the ground.  If you look extra-hard, there are two brides in the background: one on the right-hand side near the big granite ball, and one at the left top, in the trees.

Finally, a couple places on the Nevskiy Prospekt.  This is the arcade outside the Gostinyy Dvor, an upscale department store that's been in this building since the late 1700s.

 And the beautiful Moderne style Yeliseev's delicatessan (now a comedy club, I think):

Annnnnd...guess what this is: