saturday and sunday in st petersburg

we got to our hotel in st petersburg around 6 friday night... it is a marriott of course and after a yummy marriott burger and some olympics watching we planned our day for saturday and headed to bed.

we started our day on saturday at the hermitage... i am sure everyone knows this but it is HUGE i don't know how long we walked around there for, but it seemed like forever! room after room after room filled with rembrandt and davinci and all sorts of other things that i definitely remember from my college art history book, it is so big that after a while you just become desensitized to all the pretty things you are seeing... but a great and again huge museum.  i am sure that we missed many amazing things but really it was just too much to take in.

afterward we walked over toward the church on spilled blood which is probably the most famous church in st petersburg it was very pretty both inside and out, we had lunch in a cafe and went to a souvenir market.  we made the long walk back to our hotel and got ready to go to the ballet at the markiinsky theater.  we saw three one act ballets, the first one was a little modern but the second two were beautiful and it was really fun.  afterwards we had a dinner at a restaurant called sadko across the street... the waitresses there were all also actors and students at the opera so they would occasionally break into really impressive song!

today we got started a little later and it was really dark and rainy/snowy outside.  we walked over to st. andrews cathedral which had quite a few icons in it and then continued on to menshikov palace.  afterward we walked to the fortress of peter and paul where we saw the graves of both czar alexander and the remains of the last romanov family that were laid to rest in 1998.  we went to the commandents house which had a good history of the city and then after 6 hours out in the rain were definitely ready to come back to the hotel.

tomorrow we plan on going to the russian museum and st. isaac's cathedral which are nearby, and then my dad heads home, while mom and i get on a train to turku finland.