St. Petersburg & Moscow

Privyet!

St. Petersburg

There is not much to tell about this city. I was glad to leave after spending 1.5 day in this metropole. But what I did get is the special Dutch taste in the city. The canals and tall houses alongside the river are definitely inspired by the Dutch. Also it is similar to Helsinki. The city is rich in architecture and inhabits the famous Hermitage museum. A fantastic collection of arts, including a large section of Dutch art. The streets are usually busy and filty. With weather conditions being grey even giving the city a worse look. The best attraction for me was finding the LEGO Store 🙂 With heart beat raising when inside I saw the Lego Minifig Collection 3 presented. They offered me to buy alle these opend bags with minifigs. The tric is as followes: there are 15 different special edition minifigs, but you don’t know which one is in the litlle bag…. so this was a once in a life time chance. The guys from the shop helped me to open many bags to get the very rare minifigs from the collection…. Okay, St. Petersburg wasn’t maybe that bad at all 😉

Moscow

In St. Petersburg I got on the night train service to the capital city. In the famous Trans Siberean train… so awesome. Everything was very neat. I had my own flip flops, soap, drinks, breakfast, and a provodnitsa (train attendant) to serve drinks and to wake me up before arriving in Moscow. A nice experience I would recommend every traveller to have done at least once.

In Moscow I had only one goal: going to my ice cream church (St. Basil’s Cathedral) next to the Red Square. This building is best seen during dusk and when illuminated. It gave me a very nice feeling to see this building and bringing back memories of what I had seen on TV when I was much younger. The second thing I did was the visit of the Statue Peter the Great. This tall rising statue is even taller than Miss Liberty and in this way Peter overlooks the city.

For the rest Moscow really sucked. Busy roads, a lot of traffic, air pollution, and snobby people. During my visit I was not able to visit a single museum, since they close at any time or on any day they want. I left this crazy place and took the train to the much more quite town, Suzdal.

Suzdal is one of the oldest cities in Russia and hasa nice location in an idyllic river valley. Alongside the steep river hills the town is decorated by over 30 church towers, with domes shaped like onions and ice creams. The peacefulness is no wonder inspiring to write fairy tails. even now the town is part of the “Golden Ring” of cities around Moscow.

Because the town is not too large I decided to stay here only for one day and then head to Yekaterinburg. Finally a real highlight in Russia!

I found the first answers to my research questions and I did the first crazy things I had in my mind before going to Russia! Yeahhh 🙂

Research questions

1. How Dutch feels St. Petersburg?
   Not so much

2. Meeting Peter in Moscow.
   Yes I did, very tall man!

3. Standing in front of my ice cream church!
   Accomplished

4. Experiencing the lux Trans Siberean (TB) train, The Rossiya.
   Super cool

Ciau,

Amar