St. Petersburg Bus and Boat (July 7-8, 2019) #14

The Sapsan train from Moscow to St. Petersburg was a very different experience.  Averaging 200 kph, it takes 3.5-4 hours of very smooth and quiet travel and there you are.  And they wash the windows!  It's $130/ticket, and you can fly Aeroflot for $85, but the train is an experience and both stations are in city center, which saves at least an hour or two plus about another 3 hours for check-in and security.  The train is a much more convenient option if you're touristing.

Our apartment is perfectly acceptable other than the mandatory Beyond Thunderdome experience going up and down the stairwell, and it is an excellent location just a 10-minute walk from the Admiralty and the Hermitage.  By the time our Yandex gets us there it's late afternoon, but there's still plenty of time for an extended walkabout while we're looking for a place to eat.  Not being experienced European travelers, neither of us have seen anything like this place before.  Canals!  With miles and miles of  beautifully restored pre-Revolution apartments facing them!  And it's not raining!

(a few pics of the canal,etc)

Next morning dawns, and after a quick breakfast we're off to St Isaac's Cathedral as that's where the hop-on bus lives.  St. Petersburg has three hop-on hop-off bus routes, plus a hop-on Boat (!), and you can buy a ticket that includes all of them for 1, 2, or more days.  We bought the 1-day ticket as our other 2 days will be full of the Hermitage and the Peterhof and whatever else we can fit in.  On a nice day the bus is great, you can sit in the open air, watch the world go by, and listen to a canned commentary on everything you're seeing.  Steve could even plug his hearing-aids streamer in and listen along, so he didn't have to make stuff up like he usually does...  Needless to say, this city is stuffed to the gills with palaces, cathedrals, historic districts such as Nevsky Prospekt, parks, museums, etc.  We could easily spend a month here and not see everything.  After a month touring Russia, our overwhelming impression of St. Petersburg is that This Is Different.  Moscow was very different than the rest of Russia, but it was still essentially Russian.  This feels more like perhaps a European city that just happens to be in Russia.

(pics from the bus tour)

After the bus tour it was time for the boat tour, which covers some of the same ground (figure of speech) but from a completely different perspective.  And they have beer.

(pics from the boat tour)

One of the things we had noticed on the bus tour that very much piqued our interest was the Faberge Museum, so we decide to walk up Nevsky Prospekt to see if we could find it.  We did.  And boy, was it ever worth it!  It's an amazing place.

(pics from Faberge)

Then it was time for a slow walk home, dinner at a sidewalk restaurant, and early to bed.  Hermitage tomorrow!