Palace Square is presided over by the sea-green winter palace, which is the Hermitage Museum. Although it is just around a mile walk from our hotel and it's three layered arch leads to Nevsky Prospect, the street on which our hotel is located, we are going to see it today on our bus tour of the city. Nevsky Prospect is an elegant avenue which anchors the city. It was named for Prince Alexander Nevsky, so basically if we get lost, all we have to do is find this street and we have our bearings. Tomorrow the Victory Day Parade will travel the length of Nevsky Prospect past our hotel and end at Palace Square. When we drove by, we saw all the scaffolding, banners, and military vehicles for the Victory Day celebration.
Today we learned that the city is 310 years old, has 5 million people, has 500+ bridges, and was the capital of Russia until 1918. We learned that a palace has more than 50 rooms, and a mansion 30-50 rooms, both of which we are going to see many of on this trip. The town has many nicknames, two of which are Venice of the North and City of Islands. It has only 65 days of sunshine a year and we were lucky that today was one of them. I wonder what their suicide rate is like. Many people go to a house in the country, called a dacha, for weekends in the warmer months, but these houses are very very very small, in fact it sounded smaller than a park model. Many are not heated and most have gardens so that fresh produce can be grown. Their subway is the deepest in the world at 230-270 feet under the city because they had to get below both rivers and all the canals so as not to have a problems with water. The last item I had in my notes is that each 10 sq feet in an apartment would cost you $3000 American dollars, so space is very expensive. That may be why the buffet breakfast at our hotel costs $40. (Glad that was included in our tour price.)
We had lunch on our own and went to a blini restaurant and the pancakes were wonderful. Steph and I had mushroom and cheese, Evelyn had pork and horseradish, and Gary had ham, or at least I think it was ham. I do know Gary had banana and chocolate blini for dessert and it was heavenly.