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 😊