Day 203: Seeing St Petersburg

After a late breakfast in the hotel, we walked down to Nevsky Prospect, St Petersburg's main shopping street. It was a lovely, sunny day, but quite cold – about 6C, with a biting wind. Kate has taught herself to read the Cyrillic alphabet, and as we walked along the street, dodging the young men dressed in animal costumes handing out fliers, we could hear her quietly sounding out the street signs and the names of the shops. 

Looking up a side street, we spotted a big, impressive church – one of St Petersburg's most impressive landmarks, the Saviour on the Spilled Blood, said to have been built on the exact spot where Emperor Alexander II was severely wounded and died in March 1881. We turned off and walked down to the church, stopping off on the way for a really good espresso made by a man with a generator-powered coffee machine in the back of his van. At the church, we bought the girls some candyfloss, which took an age to make, probably because it was so cold. 

Continuing on, we soon reached the Neva River, across which we could see the impressive Peter and Paul Fortress. We walked along the river until we reached the Winter Palace, which houses part of the State Hermitage Museum. There, we bought some hot dogs from a street vendor and then headed across the enormous Palace Square and back to Nevsky Prospect. 

On the way home, we headed back off the main road to explore some of the back streets. We were getting pretty parched by now, so we stopped in at a little supermarket, which turned out to be housed in a series of small brightly lit rooms connected by narrow corridors. This made it rather difficult to actually find anything and we did a few circuits before we came across the section with the bottled water. Our next conundrum involved figuring out which was still and which sparkling – Kate eventually tried asking one of the ladies manning the checkouts, using a combination of hand gestures and the odd 'nyet' and 'da' to elicit the required information.