St Petersburg Part Dva

Where we get to tell you about how you can't move in St Pete's for sushi bars...

After the first day wandering about generally being amazed by the beauty of the whole of central St Petersburg (or at least the half that isn't being renovated), the second day we went into St Isaac's (no pictures inside, as usual, sorry) which was spangly. From there we went into the Hermitage (defo no pictures!), which was somewhat overwhelming. We didn't even go into the Gold Room (the room with all the gold). But we saw the 25 Rembrandts and however many Van Goghs, Picassos, Matisses, Monets & Manets etc etc... No glass covers on any of them, not really anything to stop you touching them, save a stern old lady in the corner of the room. It's all a bit jammed in across 3 palaces walls, but if you've got that much stuff (and only about 1/20th of their art collection is on show), it's going to get crowded, even if your palaces are massive and 3 stories high. It seems that Catherine 2 was a bit of an art collector - she certainly wasn't a looker, despite all those stories about her many lovers.

We wandered through the Mars field after, with its eternal flame. The Russians seem quite keen on eternal flames. We had to come back the next day for the Summer Gardens next door, which were in fact, somewhat autumnal:


Peter's Summer Palace is in the Gardens, but isn't very big unlike the Winter Palace of the Hermitage. So on we went ovber the river Neva to the Saints Peter & Paul Fortress. Peter I - the Great - established St Petersburg roughly 300 years ago after taking the area off the Swedes. To make sure they never took it back he built the fortress, with the centrepiece being this cathedral:


Orthodox churches are quite different, there are no pews - except one for the tsar, and one for the patriarch, and they are more thrones. Here's the view down the middle: (photos inside - yay!)


Here's the pulpit - would the Reverend Doctor David Clark like to preach from here we wondered?


All but 2 of the tsars since Peter I have been laid to rest here so the church is full of sarcophagi - and here's the great man himself:


It's hard to move around St Petersburg without bumping into Peter reminders. Indeed the whole of Russia has its share - even Moscow who he snubbed by moving the capital to St Petersburg. At that point it was just a swamp that he was having drained into canals, so the bureaucratic civil servants complained - but he didn't really like them anyway... Who'd have thought victory over Sweden would make you the country's number 1 hero?

Just outside the fort's walls we spotted these late September sun worshippers. Apparently in St Petersburg the only way to get a proper tan is to stand, tan lines just won't do!


Ben didn't get to go to the Liverpool Bar around the corner from our hostel, but they've not been doing so well since we came to Russia anyway. And we're not even mentioning the All Blacks.