White Nights and Windmills

White Nights in St Petersburg

We are writing this on the train to Helsinki Finland on Sunday

Thursday

Thursday morning came too soon....partiers right outside our windows were up til about 2 and we had to get up at 6am.......we headed to the bus station in 4 taxis at 7:30 and we aboard a very fancy bus leaving the station at precisely 8am!!!

Not our bus!

This bus had screens in the back of the seats with great movies (better than Icelandic Air!) I watched Frozen, and Carol watched Life of Pi, it had lots of games and wifi on the scree n(you didn't have to waste your batteries....and free coffee/cappicino/exspresso!....oh and a tiny (clean) bathroom (WC in Europe) which the Soviet border guards checked to make sure no one was hiding in.

Estonian exit border crossing

Exiting Estonia and entering Russia was about an hour......a check point to leave Estonia, where they board the bus and collect all our passports then someone else boards and hands them back....with an exit stamp. Next is the Russian Customs......We had to wait til the bus in frony had all cleared (hot and stuffy) then we all got off....lined up with all our hand luggage and our passport and the Arrival/Departure card that we filled out on the bus.

Look closely by the door...barbed wire.....

To get into Russia we had to get a letter of invitation...put out by a tour company in Russia, once we got that we had to get a visa, which we had sent away through a 3^rd party company to Ottawa...price $250. When we got our passports back we had a visa with the dates we were to be in Russia. If we were on a cruise that came to St Petersburg and took the tours through the cruise line we didn't need a visa...or so we have been told.. So everyone lines up in the customs office and each person gets questioned and stamped in and the arrival card taken then go through a turnstile and into another room to wait to get back on the bus. While we are in Russia we need to carry the departure card and passport with you all the time. Once on the bus it moves to another check point where someone comes on again and checks our passports again. Whew we were in!

But the trucks getting out of Russian....looked like one crossing for them ........there must have been 50 or 60 trucks lined up.....they must be there for days!!!

Lots of trucks

We finally arrived in St Petersburg at about 3pm....drop off was the Metro station....Nevey went in to get us our tokens......went into the station and promptly had buzzers and bells setting off all over the place as the 15 of us tried to get through the turnstiles with all our backpacks and luggage!!!! There was a certain one we needed to get through. Then onto an escalator the went down down down down!!!! I'd guesstimate 500meters.....but my unit converter says 325 ft is only 99m!!!

Waiting in the rain

Hurrying through the Metro

The stations down below are beautiful each one and we went through 4 before we got off, were spotless and bright and had lots of people rushing in and out. When we got on and off we were rushing so much I really didn't get any good pictures (I'm hoping some of our tour group that is staying in St Petersburg will send me some) When we got off we and out of our station we walked a couple of blocks to our hotel.

First impressions busy, people rushing, traffic either stopped in a traffic jam or racing at top speed down the street......we are on Nevsky Prospekt...the main street of SP. Oh and no cobblestones.....in the Tallin, Riga and Vilnius, there was cobblestones in the areas we toured and had hotels.

Our room

We dropped our luggage and some went off to get Rubles.....(500 rubles is about $15 Canadian). We had bought our money that we needed in Vancouver and hopefully we wouldn't need anymore for the couple of days we were there. We were booked to have a waking tour at 5.

Mikjailovsky castle

Summer Palace

Vera was our guide this time.......St Petersburg's sites are wider spread than the other towns we have been in....so we walked a good 6kms......we passed by different churches and palaces and walked through the Summer Garden and past the Summer Palace. Then over to the Mars field with an eternal flame commemorating something. Then on to the Church on Spilled Blood....that's the famous church with the colourful spirals (oh and a cache site!) then on to the Palace Square, where the Hermitage a very famous art and history museum, which was built by Elizabeth but Catherine the Great filled it with her collection of art......it now fills 5 buildings. Which we visited the next day.

We continued our walk back down Nevsky Prospekt towards our hotel.....the tour was 3 hours so by this time we were famished and found andate at the first restaurant we came to.....Then we split up some opting to go pubbing and some back to the hotel.

We went back to the hotel to check wifi which was iffy all the time we were there.......tomorrow the Hermitage