St Petersburg Day Three

On our third day in St Petersburg, we realized that we had way too much left to see in and around the city. We ended up not doing any of the day trips or farther-away sites and instead wandering around the summer gardens and climbing St Isaac's cathedral and just wandering through all the streets that we could downtown. So we have to go back to see everything we missed this trip!

We started the morning in the summer gardens. Took a picture of a building along the way (left).



After wandering through all the gardens, we wandered over to St Isaac's cathedral again to climb to the top of it and get a view of the city. Well, first we stopped for lunch at an asian restaurant called King Pong. The food was really good - great place for lunch. Anyway, on the left below is just a street view from our walk to the cathedral, followed by views from the top of the cathedral:



This is the Mariinsky Palace, directly across from the cathedral.



Our poor attempt at a selfie:



After climbing the cathedral we just wandered the streets for awhile. Found some USSR buildings and cars.



Then we found the four lion bridge, which I failed to get a decent picture of without other people in it.



You could see the church of the savior on spilled blood from the four lion bridge:



Later, we had dinner at Gastronomica, which is a restaurant on the 6th floor of a small shopping mall. They serve traditional russian food with a modern twist. The view from here was nice - it was more a view of the residential part of the city than downtown. Martin got borscht again, of course, and I had a "beet cutlet" starter - I have no idea what was in it - followed by a pumpkin and goat cheese pizza that apparently came with raw quail eggs on it but the eggs weren't listed on the english menu. It was quite tasty, once I scraped the raw eggs off of it.



Since it was Saturday night, we explored some streets we were told had good restaurants and bars on them and found a fun little tapas bar where I got a sizable glass of very tasty sangria.



Good thing sangria is in english!



The vodka selection at the grocery store!



We used the metro (subway) a lot on this trip. It was really fun because it's really, really, REALLY deep underground and every time you go to take the subway you have to ride an escalator several minutes underground.



And, finally, just some random street views we took during all of our wanderings.

St Petersburg Day Two

We started out our second day in St Petersburg at the Hermitage Museum which is housed in the winter palace and its adjoining buildings. We spent our time in the rooms that showed Russian Palace Interiors ... and there was a ton of gold everywhere. It was really grandiose. Below are some pictures of the outside of the museum/palace and some of the rooms we walked through. The pictures don't do any of it justice, fyi.



Somebody's (Catherine the Great's) boudoir. Martin made me stand in it for a picture so I gave him an "I'm barely tolerating you today" smile.



Some more golden rooms:



The church and the throne room. We didn't get a picture of it but the throne room was enormous. I would totally hold court there. I know we've seen tons of castles but this is the first throne room I've ever seen.



A few more fun pics:



After spending several hours at the museum (you could spend days there) we headed over to our chosen lunch spot, a restaurant called "The Idiot". It has a mostly vegetarian menu (no worries there's lots of fish and some meat too) and they served us free shots of vodka with our meal. Which really ruined the rest of my day! Being drunk after lunch when you have more sites to see isn't much fun.



First is a pic of some buildings we walked by on our way to lunch. On the right is a picture of one of our beers, a shot of vodka, and the bread basket. We really loved the dark russian breads. Martin's going to try to duplicate them.



Next up was St Isaac's cathedral. Everybody says this is the church to see but the spilled blood church was much more impressive, in my opinion, both inside and out. The advantage to Isaac's cathedral is that you can climb it but we didn't do that until day 3 so you'll have to go there to see pictures of the view from the top.



There's a big Jesus in the front of the church, staring at you. We couldn't get an in-focus picture of him but it was imposing.



After a brief siesta back at our hotel, we headed out to dinner at a restaurant called Tsar. The food there was really good and the service was excellent. Martin ordered beef stroganoff, his fave thing after borscht, and I ordered chicken kiev. I ordered the chicken kiev because I wanted to see if it was the same as what I had eaten in the BC dining hall 15 years earlier. Martin called it "chicken football". And, you know, that's actually what arrived on my plate! The only difference was that the chef had somehow attached a smaller bird's leg to the end of the chicken football to make it look artsy. The potatoes it was on were also delicious.



Some more free shots of vodka, these had a drop of cranberry juice in them. Just enough to take the edge off.



The throne toilets at Tsar. We were amused by a lot of things after our vodka ...



... including this hysterical Putin mug. It's so great. And, interestingly, we saw a lot of Russian men wandering around the streets shirtless during the heat of the day (it was, max, 80 degrees, with a stiff breeze, so not really that warm) so it seems to just be a Russian thing to go shirtless whenever you can. I'm generalizing here.



A few random street views from throughout the day: