Nevsky Prospect

Done with Zachary

Nevsky Prospect is one of the main streets in St. Petersburg, so let's take a walk on a beautiful Wednesday since everything in the city is closed! There are at least 6 cathedrals on Nevsky Prospect. One is called the Armenian cathedral and another is called the Kazan cathedral. On Nevsky prospect we found a Lego store. It was very small but  everything was close together so there was a lot of Lego. They had lots of different sets and they had some Lego games. On Nevsky Prospect there are also a lot of restaurants and shops. We walked down this street the day we got to St. petersburg and it was dark and rainy and we were all tired. Also on Nevsky Prospect is an 18th century shopping mall and it is a kilometer deep. It is called Gostiny Dvor and started out as a place where tradesmen lived and worked. There is also a Monument to Catherine the Great and it is beside the Russian National Library. Across from the Catherine the Great monument is the Stragonoff Palace. Behind the yellow building is the huge Alexander Theatre.

Our St. Petersburg Flickr Album

The Bridge across the Fontanka River is called the Anichkov Bridge. It has 4 horse statues named the Horse Tamers, designed by Pyotr Klodt and an intricate iron railing.

It is said that the Armenian Cathedral was paid for by the sale of one diamond by Catherine the Great. That must be one big rock!

This is a statue of the famous poet Alexander Pushkin, who died in a pistol duel. He's in front of the massive Russian Museum, which is guarded by these tough-looking lion statues.

The Kazan Cathedral took 10 years to build; it took from 1801 till 1811. It is a Russian Orthodox church and was modeled after St. Peter Basilica in Rome. It also has approximately 90 columns outside. 

Peter and Paul Fortress

Here is a handstand picture at
Peter and Paul fortress (with the
top of the pointy spire cut out of the picture).

One of the places that was closed on Wednesdays was Peter and Paul Fortress. The grounds were open but the cathedral and the museums that were in the fortress were all closed. The fortress was founded in 1703 as a core structure in Peter the Great's new capital it takes up almost all the space on an island called Zayachy Ostrov, the island is opposite the winter palace. The fortress has a lot of buildings worth seeing including the Peter and Paul cathedral at the cathedral are the graves of all but two of the Russian tzars. the tall golden spire is as far away as you can get from the normal Russian union domes on almost all of the other cathedrals in St Petersburg (if not all) and can be seen from far across city. In summer the island becomes a magnet for sunbathers with its pebbly beaches and in winter swimmers who are known as morzhi or Walruses break through the ice and swimming on the south side of the island, you can even see a blue painted walrus symbolizing them on the wall of the fortress.

at the bottom of this picture there is the two headed eagle (the symbol of the romanov family).

Here are some more pictures of the cathedral at Peter and Paul fortress, you can see from these pictures that it does not have any onion domes!

Here is a picture of mommy with Peter the great when he is old .

Yikes! tortures of the middle ages! Ok it is just fake. on the left is a picture of part of the fortress.

family picture with the Hermitage in the background.

The Kindness of Strangers...

Getting dropped off by the ferry's bus at St. Isaac's Cathedral, we were perusing a large city map when an older gentleman asked in broken English where we were going. When we told him the Hermitage, Anatoli's eyes lit up and he insisted on taking us on an extended walk around the Embankment, pointing out historic buildings like where Doestoevsky and Nabokov used to live, where Rasputin was ambushed and murdered, the famous Bronze Horseman statue of Peter the Great, around the Admiralty, and around the exteriors of the different Hermitage complex to show us some out-of-the-way gems like these giant statues. He also pointed out all the buildings on the other side of the Neva.

How large were those giants? My fist is the size of their big toe to the first knuckle!

Our gigantic St. Petersburg flickr album!

Then on Wednesday, we saw this young mom and her adorable boy on the canal next to the Church on the Spilled Blood. She took our picture too and, when I had finished killing myself with the handstand, came back to us with a present of a fridge magnet for the boys! Spaseeba! (Grazie pa-Russki) Thus, we ended up with a pleasant slap to the face of our preconceptions of "foreigners" and the Russian stereotype of being tough to get to know. Of course, I have a history with Russians and know that they're wonderfully open and friendly people, but some of you out there already know that story...

House of Horrors - Luckily Not!

View outside on the Fontanka

There are many mini-hotels in St. Petersburg that are established in apartment building that were built in Soviet times. There apartments would be divided into sections that contained several rooms (up to 10 or so) that an entire family would live in and then a shared kitchen and bathroom. Now these have been converted into small hotel rooms that still use the shared kitchen and bath.

Our "not so mini" St. Petersburg flickr album!

It's always nice to have your stereotypes and pre-conceptions shot down in flames. We had read reviews of dirty, dark stairways to micro-hotels on the 5th floor because the hotel doesn't actually own the stairwell and with more than a little trepidation booked at Hotel Adagio - it had no reviews at all and was cheaper than several others with dodgy reviews! We were well pleased though - it was located within walking distance to the heart of Nevsky Prospekt along the Fontanka River. It had a large, nicely decorated room with 3 beds and a sofa. Although the bathrooms were shared they were very clean and there was a large shared kitchen where we were served a small continental breakfast in the morning. There was even a washing machine and bath tub in the bathroom.  The hotel administrator Xenia was friendly and spoke reasonably good English.

We would stay again or recommend our friends to stay at Hotel Adagio ($96 CDN on Expedia). What could have been a bit scary turned out terrific! But to live here as a family in a communal apartment of maybe 20-40 people total, with no choice in neighbours, could be another matter altogether! Apparently that's still common practice even post-USSR in St. Petersburg, with some of the areas outside the city amongst the worst slums in Europe.

Big Ears, Jaybob's new cuddle friend, seems to quite like it at the Adagio!

Alexander's Column

Alexander's column and Rossi's arch!

Alexander's Column (Aleksandrovskaya Kolonna) stands in the middle of Palace Square in between the Hermitage Museum and Rossi's arch. It was built after 1812 as a triumphal monument to commemorate the victory of Russia over the French when Napoleon was in power. The funny part is that the person who won the contest for the best design was a French architect named Auguste Montferrand, who also designed St. Issac's Cathedral. The column was made with a granite monolith that came from the north shore of the Gulf of Finland.

Look up there! It's a giant 'Peter' flickr album!

The base of the column with
Rossi's arch behind.

In 1832, supervised by the craftsmen who put in the columns at St. Issac's, 2000 volunteers (who were mostly veterans from the war) and 400 other workers raised the column onto the base using a big system of scaffolding, ropes and pulleys. The column is one of the highest of its kind in the world. It is 47.5 meters high. It is taller than most of the its rivals including the 44.5 meter Trojan column that is in Rome and the 46 meter Vendome Column that is in Paris. The bronze angel that is on the top of it symbolizes the peace that came over Europe after the final defeat of Napoleon.

Here is the base of the column, where the
round part is is where the balanced top starts.

Rossi's Arch

The base is decorated with bas-reliefs of people representing the rivers that the Russian soldiers had to cross while fighting Napoleon as well as allegories of Wisdom, Peace, Plenty, Victory and Justice. The top of the column is not attached to the base, so I don't want to be standing under there during an earthquake! It stands on its own 650 ton weight!

Our Young Backpacking Padowins

Walking down Nevsky Prospekt (the main street) in St. Petersburg, I had this wonderful experience watching Zachary and Jacob walking a metre ahead of me and a decade ahead of their times. Here they were with their backpacks, wandering down the street chatting away as brothers do. Just another day like every day for young boys, right? Only they were wandering down St. Petersburg in RUSSIA and not thinking of it as anything crazy or unusual! They've already been to the other St. Petersburg in Florida too. So when it comes time that they want to backpack through Europe as young twenty-somethings, we can show them this picture and tell them they've already done it! Indeed, later at a cafe, the boys said that they should go into business planning homeschool tours in Europe for kids! One option would just be to sell their tickets to our next sabbatical trip!

Your visual guide to St. Petersburg!

Your homeschool guides to Europe!

The Hermitage Museum

The Hermitage Museum is one of the world's largest art collections housed in a magnificent palace and inspires awe in the 3 million visitors who come here every year. The halls and hundreds of rooms of the museum cover 20 km and can only display 5% of the 3 million piece collection. It is said that if you looked at each item in the museum for only a few seconds it would take over 11 years to see it all.

Our big St. Petersburg flickr album

Entry was only 400 rubles (~$13 CAN) for adults (Russian citizens 100) and free for kids. Since forever, there's been a huge price discrepancy in Russia for citizens vs foreigners. I read that a group of foreigners actually won a court case about this, but many places still keep the practice going. Anyway, there were treasures everywhere you turned in the Hermitage. On the right is a shot of a basement hall, where there were all these storage boxes crammed in amongst the displays!

The Hermitage Museum is made up of 4 buildings. The first and largest is the green, white and gold Winter Palace (Zimney dvorets), build on the banks of the Neva River. It is the grandest building in St. Petersburg and was commissioned by Peter the Great's daughter Elizabeth and designed by the Italian architect, Bartolomeo Rastrelli. The other buildings are called the Small Hermitage, the Large Hermitage and the New Hermitage. The buildings themselves are as much masterpieces as the art housed inside of them.

Obviously, it is impossible to describe it all but suffice it to say we have never been in such a place as this or seen so many art masterpieces. Here are some of the highlights:

THE JORDAN STAIRCASE
This beautiful twin curved staircase was designed by Rastrelli in 1762.  Jacob counted 79 marble stairs leading to the top. It is made of Carrara marble and has decorative balustrades, mirrors, gilded trim and statues. It was once the staircase used by ambassadors and diplomats visiting the Tsars and Tsarinas here. It has survived destruction by both Catherine the Great (who didn't like the Baroque style) and the fire of 1837 that destroyed parts of the palace.

THE STATE ROOMS

Nicolaev Hall, known as the Great Hall, is a magnificent gold and white room with huge crystal chandeliers. It used to be the scene of lavish balls. The blue and white Concert Hall currently displays Russian silverware and the centrepiece is Alexander Nevsky's silver sarcophagus. This room connects to the Malachite Hall which is the smaller but possibly the most impressive. It was desined in 1839 as a drawing room for Nicholas I's wife, Alexandra. It is decorated with more than 2 tons of green malachite from the Ural Mountains. It was also where the counter-revolutionary Provisional Government had their final meeting in 1921 before they were arrested by the Bolsheviks in the dining room next door. We wandered through the Portrait Gallery of the Romanov's, Field Marshall's Hall, The Small Throne Room

On the left is the Chamber of Columns, for obvious reasons. On the right is Nicolaev Hall.

THE ART

Considering that the Italian art collection from between the 13th -18th century spans over 30 rooms, a short description isn't going to do justice to all that we saw. I was just amazed by the amount of incredible artwork that we saw. During my "formal education years", I somehow missed out on learning anything about famous art or artists and it is only now, during our homeschooling years that I am learning to appreciate great art. Needless to say, by the end of the day, I was overwhelmed and things started to blur together but I was thinking that it would take years just studying the history, stories and people portrayed in this gallery.

The Italian Rooms included works by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Botticelli and Caravaggio. In the Flemish and Dutch room there are an astounding collection by Rubens and Rembrandt. Unfortunately, we realized at the end of the day we had missed room 254 (Rembrandt) in our meanderings and were all too footsore, foggy and headachy to make the 1/2 km trek back there. We did see several painting by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, which I recognized instantly thanks to our art appreciation classes with Karen. Also thanks to Karen, I had an idea about what is meant by French rococo, with works by Watteau, Boucher and Fragonard.

The Impressionists and post-Impressionists take up most of the third floor - Monet, Renoir, Degas, Van Gogh, Cezanne. There are rooms each full of paintings by Gauguin (15), Matisse, Picasso, Kandinsky.

And I haven't mentioned the ancient artifacts  from Egypt, Greece, Rome to Siberia on the first floor. One of the most remarkable things was an ancient Scythian woolen carpet from approx. 400 BCE that was large enough to cover an entire wall up to the vaulted ceiling. It had been preserved by a thick layer of frozen ground over the burial mound it was recovered from. Although we kept an eye peeled for it all day, I don't think we saw the 19-ton Kolyvan Vase, although we did see immense vases made from malachite and lapis lazuli among other precious stones.

The Hermitage is a place you could go again and again and likely never see everything. I am just glad that we were able to spend a day here and to see as much as we did.

St. Petersburg: closed on Wednesdays!

We didn't plan out our Tallinn posts very well so we are planing these St. Petersburg posts a little bit better.

I am calling this post St. Petersburg: Closed on Wednesday because we had a big laugh when we noticed that everything was closed on Wednesdays. These are some of the things that were closed: the Church on the Spilled Blood, Peter and Paul Fortress, St. Issac's Cathedral, and many others places!

Our flickr album is never closed!

We took the Monday night St. Peters Line ferry and got to St. Petersburg Tuesday morning, then we had from 12:00 to 6:00 at the Hermitage Museum. First though, we had a tour of the city courtesy of Anatoli (see Daddy's future post). The Hermitage is one of the largest art museums in the world but it isn't just all art there (but more about that later). We got a really nice room in a micro hotel where we were pleasantly surprised after reading some reviews of other hotels on the web (more on THAT later too!).

Although there was hard rain on Tuesday while we were at the Hermitage, it was sunny on Wednesday while we were walking around the city, and the fall colours made it really pretty. We walked around the city all day and saw lots of cathedrals, monuments, and important sites We found a great restaurant for lunch me and dad had Russian style fish and Jacob and mom had Chicken kiev.

We also went to Peter and Paul fortress to walk around. We took the metro and took that 1 stop and then we walked around the fortress then we walked back near St. Issac's cathedral and found a coffee shop and had dinner. The escalator at the metro was the longest one I have ever seen and it and the metro were very fast. Then at 6:00 we had to head back for the ferry and it started to rain. We got the last bus for the ferry and the driver really wanted to get us there on time. It felt like we were going faster than on a highway through the crowded streets.

On the left we're all together (upright) with St. Isaac's Cathedral behind - 200 kg of gold on that dome! On the right we're on the Peter and Paul beach with the Neva river and the Hermitage behind us.

This picture is to show the mix of cars with the old Lada on the left (like Uncle Steve had) and the limo
hummer on the right side of the picture and on the far side of the limo hummer there
is another limo. Some people really wanted to keep their nice cars safe because they some of them
were actually parking them totally on the sidewalk like they're in Greece or something!

Here is a picture of Jacob's chicken kiev. OK so Kiev's now part of Ukraine and not officially Russian, but it's still authentic and yummy!  

Here is the huge escalator at the metro. It was crazy long, and makes the one at Kamppi in Helsinki seem like a toy slide! The Metro is just packed with people, and only cost 25 rubbles (80 cents)

Another un-Daddy perfect handstand in front of the statue to Catherine the Great, with the Alexandrisky Theatre behind.

I really like the picture on the left, where it looks like the lion figurehead on the ship's prow is leaping over the Winter Palace. The two-headed eagle is the symbol of the Romanovs, the family of the tsars, and are everywhere in the city.

The famous Bronze Horseman statue of Peter the Great, made in his memory by Catherine the Great. Here on the right I'm tree-hugging this huge column at the Kazan Cathedral.

St. Petersburg was founded in 1703 by guess who? Peter the Great of course! Many people were forced into labour and died to build the city, so it was not always a happy memory of Peter. It was the capital of Russia until the Soviets moved it to Moscow. There was so much to see in St. Petersburg that we'll have at least one more post of just the sights - stay tuned!

We almost spilled blood at the Church on Spilled Blood!

Here is Daddy doing a handstand, almost spilling some blood himself! Good thing he didn't or we'd have to build him a monument too! 

Yesterday we went to Saint Petersburg Russia! One of my favorite sites was the Church on the Spilled Blood. You might think that that is a weird name, but it is actually named after Tsar Alexander the second, because his legs got blown off by a bomb in a terrorist attack on March 1, 1881, at that place and he bled to death. There is also a statue of Alexander II in Helsinki on Senate Square in front of the big cathedral. The church is also known as the Church of the Resurrection of Christ. The church was started by Alexander the third in memory of his father. The funds were provided by the imperial family and private donations but the money was stolen by a member of the tsars family so it took 24 years to build the church. It took from 1883 till 1907 to finish.

Peek here for more on St. Pete's!

This is a another Handstand shot, (it is a bit better than Daddys!)  with the Church on Spilled Blood in the background. and the other is a picture of all of us, all upright!

We figured out that those domes on the top are called onion domes. The bright colours are made of jewelers enamel.

On the left is a picture of a wedding with the Church on Spilled Blood in the background, and on the right is a picture of the wedding couple holding doves and they let them go.

This is a picture of a bridge where people  have placed all different kinds of locks.