We spent the July 4th weekend in St Petersburg, Russia this year. It was a great thing to do in hindsight because Germany was in the grips of a serious heat wave and it was sunny and mid 70's in St Petersburg. We definitely won.
We stayed in the Hotel Helvetia, which was a great hotel. I'd highly recommend it. It's not right downtown but St Petersburg is enormous and it's impossible to stay in a hotel that's near to all the sites. Most sites you want to see are outside of town and require day trips so I'd choose a hotel near a metro station before worrying about where the sites are. We used the metro multiple times per day to get around and we still easily walked up to 10 miles each day.
On our first day we set out to see Peterhof, which was the summer palace of Peter the Great. This requires a half-hour boat ride and at least $100 by the time you've bought the boat tickets, garden tickets, and palace tickets. They really charge you for every little thing. Also, pack a lunch, snack, water, etc when you go because once you're there your only option for food and beverages are little kiosks that charge exorbitant prices.
What's amazing about Peterhof are all the fountains. The palace is impressive but the fountains are what makes it really special. There are miles of walkways through the gardens as well that are filled with fountains. Below are some pictures of the palace and the main fountains along with pictures of the crowds. This is a very popular site but there's no good time to go because it's only open 10-6 so there are always tons of tourists there.
There was this neat fountain cascading down a checkerboard-patterned runway with dragons at the top of it. Neat.
A few more fountains. Really, there were fountains around every corner of the gardens.
There were bird houses in some areas of the gardens as well. Here is a picture of one of them - they were really nice little buildings - but the little old ladies guarding them made you pay to enter so we stayed out.
After touring Peterhof, we had a late lunch/early dinner at Terrassa. This restaurant is on the 6th floor of a building (no buildings in St Petersburg go higher) and it had a very extensive menu with reasonable prices. Definitely worth a lunch visit if you're in the area. Martin, of course, got borscht. He can't get enough of that stuff. I got this amazing garden salad that was just cucumbers, radishes, and tomatoes topped with sun-dried tomatoes and some herbs and a vinaigrette. Really amazing. We topped it off with pizza and beer.
After our lunch/dinner we wandered over to the church of the savior on spilled blood, so named because Alexander II was assassinated on the spot that the church was built around. On the way to the church, there were tons of kiosks selling touristy things and several people making espresso from the backs of their vans:
The church of the savior on spilled blood was really impressive on both the outside and the inside. It could be seen from all over St Petersburg. On the inside, all the walls and ceilings were vibrantly-colored mosaics and, right at the apex of the church was Jesus looking down at you. A really beautiful church. Sorry some of the pics below are a little blurry.
This is a picture of the ceiling.
Later in the evening, we attended a St Petersburg Philharmonic concert in the venue below. It was the last concert of the season for the Philharmonic and they had a guest pianist who was absolutely amazing. After the concert, we enjoyed wine and dessert at Claret, which is one of the restaurants attached to the Hotel Helvetia. We enjoyed a glass of wine there almost every night of our trip because it had a cute terrace to sit on while we drank our wine.
No comments:
Post a Comment