St. Petersburg, Russia, Asia

Today was a great day of sightseeing! The started out with breakfast at Zoom Cafe with the aussies (Ben and Sam). We were trying to catch the train at 11:07am to Peterhof, but we showed up at the train station to find out that the schedule online is wrong and the next train was actually leaving at 1pm. We checked out the busses and there was one leaving in about two minutes going to Peterhof so we jumped on it, paid our 55 rubles (€1.10) and in 45 minutes we were in Peterhof.

This is a town west of St. Petersburg that is filled with parks, fountains and palaces. We checked out Upper Park, Lower Park, and walked around to see all the fountains and the few palaces that were in the parks. We got a perfect day for it with blue skies and sunshine, albeit a pretty cool breeze coming off the Gulf of Finland. It was a little pricey to get into Lower Park (500 rubles, €10), but it was pretty impressive. Unfortunately this didn’t allow us to go inside the Grand Palace, and after spending so much to get in the park, we didn’t really want to spend any more to go in the palace.

We spent a couple hours walking around the park and then flagged down a bus to get us back to St. Petersburg. The bus was a lot cheaper than we had expected to pay for the train or to go by ferry, so it was good to save a bit of money that way. We got back into the city around 3pm and went for a late lunch at a nice place called Pepper Moon. We didn’t waste any time after we finished eating and hopped on the metro to get back into the city center. The Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood was a sight that all of us wanted to see, but hadn’t managed to get inside of yet, so we got over there just in time before it closed.

I’m so glad I didn’t miss seeing the inside of this church. It might be the most impressive church I’ve ever been in. It’s pretty big inside, but by no means the biggest church I’ve seen. The thing that blew me away was that there were no paintings inside the church at all. Not one. But everything in the church was covered with mosaics. EVERYTHING! It was incredible! And because all the pictures were made of tiles instead of paintings, the colors didn’t fade and everything was really vibrant. To think about how much work went into making all this artwork is just mindboggling.

After seeing the church we parted ways and I came back to the hostel. Another big day of walking around and my knees are really starting to feel it. I spent some time back at the hostel sewing some patches onto my bag that I’ve picked up along the way. I still have four patches to put on, but I’m started to find it difficult to fit them on somewhere. I’ll figure something out. And I’m happy that tomorrow my knees will get a pretty good rest while I sit on the bus to Tallinn, Estonia. It should be about seven hours. Perfect time to reenergize!