More fabulous St. Petersburg delights!
My other two guided tours in St. Petersburg were a city coach tour and a trip to the Gulf of Finland . The first mentioned tour gave me a 3
hour taste of the main public buildings which are absolutely fantastic
considering their age and the climate.
I’m very glad to have been given
a brief overview during the port talks by Ian Gunn and Simon Rees because I’d
otherwise not have realised that the fabulous buildings are brick built rather
than made of solid stone. The harsh winters must be severe on the facades of
the mainly neo-classical buildings but it’s clear that massive expense is being
shouldered to repaint them on a regular basis.
Being driven around the city
centre was actually a much more pleasant experience than in Copenhagen . There was a lot of traffic in St. Petersburg and some of the streets were also
relatively narrow but the traffic seemed to flow more easily in St. Petersburg . I will
have to find some time slots when I return home to make new Pinterest Boards
from my hundreds of photos taken in St.
Petersburg .
The second trip out to the Gulf
of Finland gave me the opportunity to see a lot of what’s considered the social
housing of St. Petersburg .
Our guide had said that almost everyone lived in apartment buildings and I was
keen to see if there was a big difference between those in the city centre and
the outskirts. I was delighted to find that the high-rises of the suburbs seem
to compete equally in terms of trying to make each building a tiny bit
different from its neighbour. Some post WWII housing was pointed out to us, but
it was clear that many of those blocks are undergoing current renovation
programmes and we drove through no areas of deprivation. That cannot be said for
a lot of UK
cities that I’ve been to in recent years.
Our Lady of Kazan |
Built in the traditional Russian Orthodox style, the church is an overload of fancy but amazing to look at. It wasn’t nearly as old as I thought, having been built at the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth centuries. Inside was a wealth of gilded Russian Orthodox iconography.
The road we took out of the city
to the Gulf of Finland was a single
carriageway road that was very busy but the fact that our tour left at 8 am
gave us an advantage in using the road early. Our guide pointed out that the
wide bay area from St. Petersburg around the Gulf of Finland is popular for
city dwellers to visit their ‘dachas’ or other second country homes- of varying
sizes. An escape to the forest and countryside is common but the fact that my
visit occurred during exceptionally fine weather meant more St. Petersburg dwellers were taking advantage
of the weather window.
We visited the Penaty Estate
‘Dacha’ Museum of famous Russian artist Ilya Repin. We were unable to gain
inside access but the building had a fascinating construction. I expect what I
saw was a simple and fairly typical frontage but the building had a most
impressive multiple-glazed roof area to the rear of the building which I
imagine maximised the light at all times of day in different rooms of the
house. Repin had also built a retreat in the garden, the front columns of which
resembled an Egyptian temple.
The last bit of the tour was a paddle in the Gulf of Finland at one of the tiny beach areas. Though
not compulsory at all, I dipped my toes into the Gulf but have to say it
actually wasn’t that clean. A greenish hue to it wasn’t particularly natural
though there were locals swimming in it. A fellow coach traveller pointed out a
dead fish floating only a quarter of a metre from my feet, so I decided that the
experience was over!
Slainthe!
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