My exactness with the maps isn't great but St. Peterburg is in that general area.

We made it to St. Petersburg and we were picked up from the train station and brought to our hotel which was a good thing because it would have taken us a long time to find it otherwise. We went for a walk along Nevsky Prospect, which is the main street in St.Petersburg and we were amazed at how beautiful the city is. The are elegant buildings everywhere and the architecture is so detailed. At the end of Nevsky Prospect is the Winter Palace. It's mint green and stunning. This was the last residence of the Tsar and place where he surrendered to the Bolsheviks in 1917. As it gets dark at 4.30ish we wandered back to our hotel and stopped in a nice bar along the way.

We left our hotel, or should that be oven and went to see the Saviour on Spilled blood Cathedral. At this point it was snowing lightly and it was damn freezing but we stocked up on enough winter woolies in China to survive. The Cathedral is so impressive. The interior is decorated intirely with mosaics and the exterior is loosely designed on St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow. We walked through the Field of Mars, where St. Petersburg's eternal flame is on our way to the St. Peter and Paul fortress. This flame is for all the soldiers that died in various wars.

St. Peter and Paul fortress is built on a small island connected by a bridge. It is the oldest building in St. Peterburg, appartently it was founded here in 1703. We went to see the cathedral and a museum on St. Petersburg at the fortress. No point in boring you with the details but it was good. From there we went to the Museum of Political History and seen that Communism is good and Stalin was bad, all very intersting however.

The next day we spent the whole day in the Hermitage. This is a museum housed in the Winter Palace and the buildings beside it. The building itself is fantastic, the photo attached to this blog is the Marble Staircase in the Palace and the rooms are so lavishly decorated. The range of art work there is phenomenal, from Da Vinci, Renoir, Raphael and loads more. It is really well laid out because it kept our attention for the whole day and when we left it was snowing again but it made the palace look lovely.

Our final day in St. Petersburg was miserable. It was snowing once again and there was black slush everywhere so it was like an ice rink. Also it was freezing and this was the day we were meant to be taking photos outside. However we heard the gun salute at St. Peter and Paul fortress, seen the Marble Palace, took pictures of the Winter Palace, went to St. Isaac's Cathedral, walked along Nevsky Prospect, walked backed along it when we realised what we thought was the Bronze horseman statue wasn't and it's a big St. Petersburg icon and by this stage we were wet and tried so we returned to our hotel.

We changed our bus to Tallinn from a night bus to a day bus because it was too long to hang around, so we boarded it at 11.15am and said good bye to Russia and good bye to our Trans Siberian trip, hello Europe and 2 hours time difference from home