#4 White Nights in St Petersburg, Russia (formerly Leningrad)

I never, never, never thought I would have the opportunity to visit Russia. How cool is that? My kids have a Russian stamp in their passport - crazy - and on the 4th of July. The other ports we visited have a open border with the cruise ships (no passport stamps), but Russia is a major pain to enter. The visas are so expensive. The tours are expensive. It is really difficult to do by yourself, so you almost have to go on an organized tour. Just getting through immigration alone was a huge ordeal. I think we probably got about 10 pages of instructions on how to enter, what to have with us, how to fill out the papers, etc. Our tour guide even met us right at the immigration desk to help us get through.
Our tour took us around the city, and it looks like nothing I ever imagined. In my mind Russia is a dirty, old, run down, grey city. However, St. Petersburg is a "palatial city" that reminds me of an old Paris with shades of Venice too. The guide told us that it is more sophisticated than the rest of Russia and that even 100 km outside of the city, they still use outhouses and such.
St Petersburg is made up of 42 islands that are all connected by bridges. Something I never knew about the city. We crossed the water over and over. It is also made up of several brightly painted palaces. Very picturesque.
The Summer Palace just outside of town was impressive (aka Catherine Palace). It was basically destroyed by the Germans in WWII, so we were even more overwhelmed that it had been so painstakingly restored. It's known as the Russian Versailles. If you've seen the kid's animated movie "Anastasia", it is based on Catherine Palace and the Alexander Palace.

The Ball room - hall of mirrors. So beautiful.
Getting inside the Summer Palace was a real pain. We were happy that we had a Russian tour guide that got us in without waiting in the 4 hour line. We saw the bureaucracy and corruption of their system at work!!!! Major bonus that our guide was a pit bull as far as getting things done. We would have been lost without her.
I got a kick out of the Russian McDonald's sign.
Lunch was at a great restaurant (not McDonald's). The food was surprisingly really tasty. The kids even found something they liked. B had the chicken cutlets and L ordered Russian meat dumplings. I was proud of them for trying something outside their comfort zone. No pasta today!
We also had a 2nd day in St. Petersburg where we saw more of the sites withing the city. The Hermitage (Winter Palace of the Romanovs) is beautiful - and HUGE. We walked through the palace part and the art museum part. Massive, massive museum with some of my favorite impressionist paintings included.
My favorite site in St. Petersburg was the "Cathedral on the Spilled Blood" which is gorgeous inside and out. It's only been open without scaffolding for the last 12 years, so relatively few people have seen it (built in the early 1900s immediately before the revolution). The outside is so neat with the onion domes covered in glazed tiles. Even better is the inside which is 100% covered in mosaics. So, so pretty. We thought it was actually a cathedral (hence the name), but religious services have never been held there - it's really a memorial building.
The one unexpected thing we saw were wedding parties. I bet we saw over 100 bride and grooms all over the city. They have a tradition where they get dressed in their wedding gowns and tuxes on their wedding day and go around the city to all the memorials and lay flowers in honor of soldiers and leaders - which is exactly the same spots we were visiting. Brides and grooms were ev -er -y -where! And limousines - crazy amount of limos. Lots of Hummer limos too - even pink ones. so funny.
For lunch we had the traditional Pirogi (pie). They had both savory and sweet pies. We ordered the mushroom pie and the minced meat pie. They were delicious. The sweet pies tasted just like regular pie at home even though the crust is different. The pies are very similar to the "pasty" that they sell in England. They became popular as a quick, easy way for cooks to serve left over meat the following day after a good dinner - meat enclosed in pastry.

We were in St. Petersburg at the end of their White Night season. It never gets totally dark during the night. So weird for the sunset to be around midnight and then the sky just stays a light grey the whole night long - like a rainy day in Texas. That is until the sun rose again at 3:30am. The kids really had a hard time going to bed. Seems like you are just taking an afternoon nap.

Our heads were spinning though about dealing with currency. We would convert from Russian Rubles to Euro to US dollar to GB pound (that last conversion to GB pounds because that is our most familiar currency and it would let us know how much something REALLY costs). We had all those currencies in our wallets and some vendors would accept either Rubles or Euro and since ATMS are NOT AT ALL readily available in Russia, we would borrow cash from one another and then repay in pounds and dollars. Trust me. It was a currency mess. Sounds silly, but I think we spent LOTS of our time doing conversions.

All in all, St Petersburg was a real highlight. So happy and grateful to have the opportunity to travel there.
(one note for the average historian. St Petersburg is named after St. Peter the apostle, but it is confusing to some because it was Peter the Great who built the city. Common misundstanding - some people think Peter the Great was called St Peter)