On our third morning in St Petersburg it was time to move our luggage to the accomodation where we would be meeting up with the tour. The distance - which seemed managable when viewed on a map - turned out to be longer than we expected, especially with the amount of luggage we were carrying (or in Megan's case, dragging). After a quality session of arm-toning we made it to the hotel, only to buzz on the wrong door and have a wonderfully confused conversation with the doorman on the otherside. Eventually he took pity on us and let us into the hotel's complex, or it is certain we would still be standing out on the street today.
Relieved of our luggage, we decided to go all out and have breakfast at Cafe Singer, an upmarket cafe located on Nevesky Pr. and with prime views of the Kazan Cathedral.
For the princely sum of 300 roubles each we splurged and got both a coffee and a danish.
With food in our bellies we were energised enough to continue to walk once again. We pulled out our scrap of white paper to check what sights were on the list for today. Museums are closed on Mondays and we only had a few hours left before we were due to meet our tour group so a relaxing day of churches was the go. We headed for the most famous church in St Petersburg first. It has a ridiculously long name and usually when refered to tourists such as ourselves abbreviate it weirdly and differently each time. Were we headed to the Church of Spilled Blood, Christ our bloody Saviour? the Spilled Blood Church. We took beautiful photos and walked around the exhibition for a long enough time that befits the church and eventually knew it was called the Church of Christ our Saviour on the Spilled Blood. So called because it was built on the site where Tsar Alexander II was assassinated.
We ticked off several other sights (and saw other famous sights that we didnt realise were famous until later that evening) and trekked across the city following the trail of statues and palaces. Finally we ended up at St Isaac's Cathedral, one of the largest domed buildings in the world, and visible all over St Petersburg. We climbed to the top, where we were faced with a horde of other tourists hogging all the best photo spots. We started off all sugar and spice, and all things nice, but after waiting for one Russian pose too many (and two girls in particular who just stood there chatting with their backs to the view) we employed the use of a few elbows and managed to get right to the front.
We decided that shopping would get us through the remainder of the day. We didn't buy anything but found a shop dedicated to Russian sportwear featuring the Olympic Mascot (Chiberouska maybe?) as a really cute cuddly toy and a heavily advertised chocolate museum which we were almost suffocated in by the sheer number of bodies in a tiny, badly ventilated room. We were well exhausted by the time we made it back to the hotel to check into our room and meet our travelling companions for the next 22days.
We enjoyed our first Russian buffet dinner (even if we weren't entirely sure what we were eating) and joined the rest of the group for a brief walking tour in the rain of all the sites we had already seen (this is how we discovered that you just don't say no to a Russian tour guide). Finally we were allowed to go back our hotel room, and enjoy the luxury of beds that didn't squeak, space to unpack our luggage and -best of all- our very own ensuite shower.
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