Day 4 6/2 Friday

About St. Petersburg. On 40 islands with 340 bridges. The metro is very deep – 300 ft. Weather is terrible. There are 2 seasons – July and winter or green winter and white winter. This morning we went to Tsarskoye Selo in the village of Puskin to see Katherine’s summer palace, and there was snow on the ground and we froze and there were snow flurries. We should have brought winter clothing. The palace started as a small cottage – Katherine’s gift to her husband Peter the great. Now it’s a huge baroque palace after all the improvements done by their daughter Elizabeth and Katherine the Great. We got there right at the opening time at 9:30 am and the place was very crowded with dozen of tour groups from everywhere, including lots of Chinese tourists. On the way to the palace, they had a couple of veteran groups playing traditional Russian music, a nice touch. After touring the inside, we also walked through the gardens, which would be a pleasure under normal circumstances, but not in these weather conditions. The guide told us that normally at this time of year trees are blooming already, but not this year… In the afternoon, we had a city tour. It was good to finally get an overview of the whole historical center because we walked through parts of the downtown , but didn’t have a good general idea of the city layout. It is a really magnificent city, the first planned city in Russia.. “only” 300 years old. The architecture, the number of truly incredible buildings, palaces, churches, museums and other structures, and the mixture of streets and canals, and the huge, wide Neva river with its various off-shoots make it unique and most impressive. We visited the relatively new, but very picturesque church of Spilled blood where tsar Alexander was assassinated, the St. Isaac’s Cathedral – the largest orthodox cathedral in the world, which also has a great view of the city from the colonnade, the Vasylevsky Island and the Peter and Paul fort and cathedral where all the Romanov tsars are buried, and we passed by many historical sites that we had no time to visit… It would take weeks to see everything. Tourism must be one of the city’s main sources of revenue because there are tons of tourists everywhere, but there’s also a lot of industry here, outside the historic core. We were told that ship building is one of the biggest. We were also surprised that St. Petersburg doesn’t cut itself from the communist past. Yes, the name has been changed (based on the referendum), but they still call the city Leningrad when they talk about the siege and the war and even on the airport building they have “Leningrad, the hero city” in addition to St. Petersburg. There are also statues of Lenin in the city and the ship “Aurora” the supposedly started the revolution of 1917 occupies a place of honor anchored on the Neva. People from St. Petersburg say that this city is different from any other Russian city, the most western of them all.

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