TRAVEL PLAN 7: St. Petersburg (Russia)

Mónika Csapó- All Rights Reserved 

I was in 2008 in St. Petersburg, when I was on ERASMUS student exchange in Kuopio (Finland). It was not so far by bus and also from Helsinki as far as I know the train ticket is around 100 EUR, which is quite reasonable price I think. There is also some ferries going,but I have no info about them.


You need a visa to enter Russia and it is depending on your country of origin how much it costs (as far as I remember). When I was in Russia, I went with an organized tour, so the tourist agency was applying for the visa for us and we did not have to do the official stuff ourselves.


Even though we went with an organized tour, we could be quite independent from the group and it was good that I collected some info beforehand, so we could see much more things than the group which was moving in the speed of a snail sometimes. I did not went to ballet or theater,but I would go if I would visit St. Petersburg again and would have more time and cash to spend on the trip.


I liked the orthodox churches a lot, they have some sort of mystical flair to me, the Hermitage of course and we were even visiting the flat where Dostojevskij used to live with his family.


I remember two funny things especially: one was that you could get red (!) banana in the shop and the other was when my friend`s shoe fall under the metro and we had to search someone who can take it out from there. We did not speak any Russian and did not know where to find this person.. But  somehow we managed to find a woman  and she was fishing out the shoe for us with some long stick.


We even took a kind of local bus, which was a bit more like a taxi-bus full of local Russian people.

Here is the plan what I made for myself before our trip (I spent only couple of days there, so I was focusing on visiting as many places as I can):


Sights

• Peter and Paul Cathedral
• Church of Our Savior on the Spilled Blood (Symbol of St. Petersburg, very must to see sight)
• Peter and Paul Fortress
• Hermitage Museum 
• Admirality
• Peterhof (30 km from the center)
• Central Naval Museum
• Kazan Cathedral
• Tsarskoe Celo (summer palace, called also as The Catherine Palace)
• St. Petersburg metro
• Mariinsky Opera and Balett Theather (Kirov)
• Cruiser Aurora Museum
• Field of Mars
• Smolny Cathedral
• Alexander Nevsky Monastery
• Nevsky Prospekt
• Dostoyevsky Museum
• Russian Museum (Mikhailovsky Palace)
• Lazarus and Thikvin Cemetery

I will continue the description soon and add some more detailed info on the sights.