So here are some pictures from St. Pete. Nothing too too exciting unless you really know what you're looking at, but they're pretty none the less.

So this first one is of the Hermitage Museum, which was formerly the Tzar's summer palace. An imposing building on a large square which has a big monument in the middle of it. I have a picture of the square, maybe I'll put it on facebook or something. The Palace/Museum itself is big, probably about the size of the Met in NY, but the collection, in my opinion, is not as good. That's not to say there wasn't a ton of great art, it just didn't really do it for me. Maybe I was too hungover to really appreciate it.



This shot is just a random canal in the city. I thought it would make a good picture, so I snapped it. Pretty picturesque. The city is filled with these kinds of canals, and lots of bridges of varying sizes, most of which are quite beautiful in their own right. You'll notice that the architechture here is a lot more like in a western-European city. You can thank Peter the Great for that one. Pity he didn't make it to Vladimir.



Here's me and some of the girls in front of the River Neva. It's big, it's cold, and it's pretty damn sweet. There are bridges that run across the river all the way through the city. They're draw bridges that go up a couple of times a night to let commercial traffic through on the river. In the summer, they have what is called the White Nights, where, due to the proximity to the arctic circle, it never really gets dark. Supposedly viewing the bridges raised at this time is something really special, but I couldn't tell you. They just looked like a bunch of bridges to me, not nearly as beautiful as the smaller ones on the canals.



Here, we're taking a plunge into the river. Nah, I can't pretend. I wanted it to look that way, but it didn't really come out the way I wanted it to. I still think it's a nice picture though.



Here's another Palace, this one was built originally by Catherine thr great, and each Tsar who followed, added a little something something. It is ginormous. The whole thing was completely ravaged by the Germans during the Second World War, but it has since, been restored to most of it's former glory. They have pictures all over the place of how terrible it looked after the Nazis had finished with it. It's really amazing how much work has been done to fix it up. The grounds were also quite impressive. Gardens and beautiful ponds and theaters and such abounded, though the theaters and small buildings out and about were not in such good shape, many boarded up and crumbling. Sorry about the slant in this shot. I was in motion.



So there's a taste of what I did in St. Petersburg. I have, of course, many other pictures, but I don't feel like posting them on here. That's it for now. It's snowing again, this time more than before.