After sleeping on a overnight boat from Helsinki to St Petersburg, we took a shuttle from the boat terminal to a hotel, 20 minutes away. It was hard to get to the hotel because we had our big backpacks on. At the hotel we found out the that the room was not ready so we dropped off our bags and then went out into the city. After walking around the city for a little bit we bought tickets to go inside the Church of the Saviour on Spilled blood. The church was amazing because it was filled with Mosaics and gold. It was also gorgeous on the outside and it was VERY busy. We walked around a bit more and then we went back to the hotel and went to our room. The room was more than four times the size of the boats room and had a jaccuzzi bath (which my sisters and I really enjoyed as it was our first bath tub on this trip!) and two TV’s (we ended up not using them). We went out one more time to have diner, we had the typical russian dish stroganov and cow cheeks.

The next day we had breakfast at the hotel and went to the famous Hermitage museum (previously called the Winter Palace). We spent four hours and only saw most of the first floor of paintings and sculptures. We brought the camera and took tons of pictures. We also saw the Paul & Peter fortress and walked around some more. We had another typical Russian dinner (borscht, blood sausage, tongue and lentil soup) and went back to the hotel. On our last day, we had another breakfast at the hotel and we went to a church that we could see from the hotel, with beautiful blue domes. The church had 4 domes and one of them was larger than the rest. Inside the orthodox church there was a service happening and we stayed a little to watch. Later we walked to a bus stop and went to the boat terminal to get on ehe overnight boat back to Helsinki.

We really enjoyed St. Petersburg!