ST PETERSBURG IN FOUR DAYS|DAY ONE - ST PETERSBURG AT A GLANCE

Hello, dear friends,

We are in St Petersburg, at long last.  This city,which is quite often referred to as Venice of the North, is the renowned for its art and culture.

Our plane landed in mid-afternoon and it was well past four pm when we finally left the hotel.  We booked into the Demetra Art Hotel, an elegantly styled boutique hotel situated in walking distance to Nevsky Prospect, the main street of St Petersburg.  

Not wanting to waste another minute, we had a quick bite and asked, as we do the first thing in any new place, for directions to the nearest Hop-on Hop-off bus.  

Although we only had four days here, we were heavily counting on the fact that it was during the period of White Nights, "near-midnight sun phenomena due to its location near the arctic circle; each year between around April 21 and August 21, the skies only reach twilight and never reach complete darkness" and a lot of museums, art galleries, cathedrals and other places of interest were open for extended hours as part of White Night Festival celebrations.

Sitting on the top deck of the bus gives you an amazing opportunity to see the city from a different perspective and also see some architectural details and features which escape your eye when you are down below.  

I kept taking photos of buildings facades, wide streets, shops, people etc.  When the tour ended, we disembarked in front of St Isaac'sCathedral that, with its Neoclassical style architecture and a gilded dome, has been dominating the city's skyline for over 180 years.

 

It was well past eight o'clock in the evening when we stepped outside the cathedral not expecting that it would be still light outside that gave us a great opportunity to continue exploring this incredible city with which we were quickly falling in love.  

Thousands of people were milling about, you can hear the music played by street bands, see people dancing on the streets, having drinks and generally enjoying being out and about.

True to the old English adage that a picture is worth a thousand words, I am sharing with you these image which we took on our first day in the hope that they will convey to you the message about how beautiful this place is.

There are over more then 300 hundreds bridges in St Petersburg and this is another reason thy it is being compared to Venice.

 

It was very close to midnight when we finally hailed a cab, which are awfully cheap there, by the way, to take us to our hotel where in total exhaustion we crashed the bed. 

The next day on our agenda was a visit to the Winter Palace, former a main residence of Russian Tsars but currently is the home to the Hermitage Museum and its vast art collection which will be the subject of my next post.

Until then

Anna

xoxo

PS If you missed the beginning of my recounting on our 2019 holidays, you can catch up with it in my previous posts 😊

OUR 2019 HOLIDAYS - WE ARE IN MUSCAT, OMAN

Hello friends,

My narrative about our 2019 holidays continues.  Thanks to my visa fiasco, the full story of which you can read in Part One , our wandering through the Middle East continues.  We spend a first few days of our holidays in Doha and then we flew to Muscat, the port capital of Oman that sits on the Gulf of Oman and surrounded by the mountains and the desert which means that we continued to experience an extremely hot, up to 45 degrees C, weather.

We stayed at Kempinski hotel in Doha and liked it so much that we booked it in Muscat too.  It's situated right on the beach which we were able to see from our room and that remained absolutely deserted during the day and only in the evening, when the heat would subside, few people would come outside to have a swim.

We didn't want to have dinner at the hotel  and asked the concierge where the locals eat.  He suggested that we should try the The Walk, a pedestrian mall with many shops and eateries frequented by locals and tourists alike serving food from all corners of the world, some of them with prime waterfront locations.  We reached it in about 10 minutes after a slow walk and joined the throng of local men and women dressed in their national dress walking up and down the drag enjoying each other’s company on the way to their dinners.  

After a few minutes of walking up and down the street, we settled on a place that was serving local food which was absolutely delicious. 

Since the consumption of alcohol in public places is totally prohibited, except at the Western hotels and resorts, the locals like to spend their evenings over a cup of tea, coffee or some other non-alcoholic beverages and a plate of a delectable sweets in one of the many desert places that you can find along the mall.

Earlier on, as we were walking along The Walk, I looked through one of the shopping windows, I saw a beautifully decorated sweet shop and mentioned to my husband that we should go there after dinner for something sweet. 

Walking back to our hotel, we stopped at the marina to admire a beautiful sunset over the Gulf.

Since we didn't have a car, and public transport is scarce in Muscat and given the extreme weather conditions, we ruled out the possibility of exploring the capital of Oman on our own and let a professional tour guide help us. We contacted the agency called Zahara Tours and for the next two were driven everywhere by an extremely polite and knowledgeable driver/tour guide in a luxury air-conditioned car.  

Our tour began by visiting by visiting Royal Opera House of Oman.  As it was a summer season, there were no performances but it was open for excursions and we went inside.  

It was built on the royal order of Sultan Qaboos of Oman in in a unique Omani contemporary architecture.  Our next stop was a visit to the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque, the main mosque in the Sultanate of Oman.  It was the middle of the day and the Mosque was closed but it looked beautiful from the outside, its golden dome glittering under the hot sun.   

Our last stop for the day was at Alam Palace, ceremonial residence of the Sultan known for its facade with bright blue and gold columns.

The following day our guide took us outside Muscat so we could see some old forts which played an important role in the country's history.  After an hours drive, we reached Al Mirani Fort built by the Portuguese in the 16th century.  Although closed to the public, its formidable structure looms large over the harbour and it is noted as one of the iconic landmarks of Muscat.

Luckily for us the nearby Al Jalali Fort built around the same time as the nearby Al Mirani Fort to protect the harbour was open and we went inside.

The last stop on our daily itinerary was a visit to Oman's Grand Canyon.  It is often referred as Grand Canyon of Arabia and is regarded as one of the best natural attractions in the country.  Our driver carefully and expertly drove the car close to the rocky rim of the canyon and invited us to step out onto so called Balcony Walk.  As we did, we were greeted by the breathtaking view over the canyon, the surrounding mountains and the villages below.

It was late in the afternoon that our guide took us back to the hotel with a short stop at the souk where he took us to the shop that was selling nothing but the dates.  Apparently, there are over 200 types of dates in Oman

I have never seen so many varieties of this fruit.  The owner insists that we tasted as many different types as we wished but they were so sweet, even for me, that after tasting just a few we thank him and left.  And on this sweet note our Middle East adventure came to an end.  At long last our really holiday has begun but all about it in the next post.

Until then
Anna
xoxo