Email #4 - Novgorod and St Petersburg

In reviewing my emails for this blog posts, I noticed a major error. With the rapidity we moved from one city to the next, I became so confused that I wrongly attributed my experience at the Cathedral of Peter and Paul as being in Novgorod when it should be St Petersburg !

Memorial to all famous Russians !

Bell Tower.

Cathedral of Holy Wishdom (St Sophia)

Here I am in the Hermitage Museum of St Petersburg. St Petersburg is a beautiful city but probably has the world’s worst location and climate. It had been freezing each time we stepped outside, due not to the temperatures (probably 2 deg this morning) but the wind chill. Traffic jams have been worse than Bangkok because roads have to traverse the many rivers, canals and islands on which the city was built by the arbitrary decision of Peter the Great.

The Heritage Museum will take us weeks to properly cover, and we only had 2 hours to quickly look through the impressive palace of Catherine the Great and the huge collection of art and treasures. Free day tomorrow, we will come back on our own .

We arrived at St Petersburg yesterday after a stopover at Novgorod, the old capital, another beautiful city with the many magnificent buildings within the historic fortress, the Nizhni Kremlin.

In the afternoon in St Petersburg, we visited the Cathedral of Peter and Paul – and where’s Mary, some asked – to view the tombs of past royalties including Catherine the Great, Peter the Great as well as the Romanovs killed after the Bolshevik Revolution.

Unfortunately I have only have 20 min here in the Hermitage Coffee Shop before catching the bus to another palace, so more later.
cheers,
Kin Mun