Day 1: Saturday
We booked a week away in St Petersburg to go and take advantage of the White Nights!!
Judith and I left Moscow on the Night train for St Petersburg at 2am. We had a sleeper coach in a compartment with 2 other people. The trip was lovely and over very soon, when we woke up we were already in St Petersburg. Finding our way from the train station into the city was quite easy; you get onto the underground right there.
We were staying at the Cuba Hostel; it is right in the middle of the city at Nevskiy Prospect and right behind the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan.
The hostel is very cheap, central and it is lovely!! It has a small living room area where you can sit and read and FREE coffee all day long!!
After checking in we went for a walk around town, had lunch and then went on a river cruise through the city. It was fabulous seeing the whole city and just relaxing and taking in some of the sights from the water.
We walked down Nevskiy Prospect down to the Hermitage and across the bridge on to VasilevskiyIsland. Two of the most famous St Petersburg bridges, PalaceBridge and BlagoveshchenskyBridge, connect it with the mainland to the south here.
We stopped a while at the red coastal columns here in front of the Naval museum. Our exploring then took us along the river up to Blagoveshchenskiy Bridge (built in 1850) past Menshikov Palace (It was the first stone building in the city.
We visited St Andrews Cathedral on our walk. The Cathedral was commissioned at the time of Peter the Great as the chapter church of Russia's first chivalric order, that of Saint Andrew. We ended our day having a great dinner at Russian Kitsch before walking back.
The restaurant Kitsch is all it says it is, the interior is decorated in Russian Kitsch and actually makes it very lively and homely inside. Even the menus are covered in communist pictures and pictures of Lenin. The food was excellent, even tried the St Petersburg special desert named Rum Bubba, vanilla cake soaked in rum, and was good.
