When: February, 2004
A three-day visit to St Petersburg (formerly known at Petrograd and Leningrad) in Russia with one of my best Swedish-Finnish friends starts with an overnight cruise on a nearly-empty, but well-designed cruise ship. Dubbed the ‘Venice of the North’, these days St. Petersburg may smell (a combination of sewage and petrol fill the air), but evidence of it’s tsarist past remain intact.
We visited the sprawling Hermitage – next to the Winter Palace - with it’s countless pieces of priceless art, walked along the River Neva and the never-ending commercial street of Nevsky prospect before ascending to the top of St. Isaacs Cathedral to admire the view. Later on, we visited the Peter & Paul Fortress, burial site of the last of the Russian Czars.'
As a destination: Full of so much history, three days doesn’t give you enough time to do the place justice. If you want to absorb the grandeur that once fell over this country, St. Petersburg is certainly worth a vist! I don’t think much of the food though!
