St. Petersburg, Part 1: Egypt, Sunsets, Subway, Meals, and Lightning

So some French explorers found this 3500-year-old sphinx in Egypt and the Russians bought it from them in 1820 and set it up in St. Petersburg on the bank of the Neva River. An authentic ancient Egyptian statue that gets covered in snow annually...

 

At a wonderful restaurant where we ate dinner, this was painted on the ceiling:

 

 

10pm in St. Petersburg, a place known for "White Nights."

 

 

The St. Petersburg Metro (subway) is very deep (one of the stations is over 100 metres below ground; it's the deepest subway in the world if you measure by average depth of stations - built to double as bomb shelters during the Cold War - clever!). The escalator to get down from street level to the trains can be up to 142 metres long! It takes about three minutes to get up or down. You pretty much can't see the bottom from the top! Really strange feeling, just going down, down, down.

 

 

Lucky us, as of 2009 photography is allowed down in the subway stations...they have some real artwork down there, statues, columns, fancy lamps, etc.

 

 

Back up in the daylight: at the Naval Cathedral - traditional to build the bell tower as a separate building from the church. I liked the blue paint.

 

 

We had the most delicious pirogi (not dumplings, more a pie) for lunch one day (our choice of mushroom, onion, salmon, beef, apple, apricot, bilberry...), at a place called Stolle. I think we were at the Vasilievsky Ostrov location. So yummy, and beautiful, too, before they cut them into individual servings for us.

 

 

The stormy night we left St. Petersburg, David caught this from our stateroom balcony with one of many patient clicks:

 

 

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Posted via email from K's Café