St Pete – the skyscrapers, the bridges, the palaces

St Petersburg, one of my favourite cities where I lived for three years, never explored as an adult and without being accompanied by a parent. So now, when I needed (well, wanted) to visit a foreign place which didn’t involve flying, what better choice than this cultural capital of Russia, just three hours train ride away, home of mine in the first years of this millennium?

For me this trip meant many things. It was a nostalgia trip into the land of my childhood, to the city with the deep metros, the endless fancy buildings and the Pizza Hut where I first encountered the famous poster ‘Lunch Atop A Skyscraper’, an image which made an everlasting impression. It was also a trip to see dear old friends who I hadn’t seen for nearly ten years. It was a trip to see if I was still able to make new friends (travelling alone and making travel friends – a blog article which has been in the making for years now). And it was a trip to do some exploration alone.

So, this entry has now been split into two – food-related experiences will come in a separate entry. But voilà, a few memorable things I recommend doing in St Pete!

Walk.

Walk down Nevski Prospekt. My sense of appropriate time spent walking was completely warped. “Oh, it’s just a quick walk down Nevski,” can easily mean a 45-minute walk. Somehow it just doesn’t seem like that, as there is ALWAYS stuff to look at.

I also walked a long way down the Neva, watching the lights go on and the deep blue sky be taken over, bit by bit, by the darkness. Unfortunately the bridges don’t go up in winter, but they looked ok down low, too.

Explore Vasiliy Ostrov beach.

Don’t have expectations of beauty. Regardless of the eye of the beholder, it is not what one may call beautiful, and probably even during the summer you’d be better off visiting Langkawi for a beach hol. But let me tell you what Vasiliy Ostrov has and Langkawi doesn’t have – a canal which is built on a bridge above a road. Get that? So the canal is a level higher than this main road. During my time (early 2000s) I think it was just a canal. But now there’s a road underneath it. Strange.

Find the tallest building in Europe.

462 metres tall, this was a skyscraper I did not know existed until I saw it rise into the clouds on the horizon whilst I was exploring my old hoods on Vasiliy Ostrov. So I grabbed a raspberry pastry and a dragon fruit from our old local shop and off I headed towards the skyscraper. This beauty called the Lakhta Centre was built in 2018 after long debate about its location – apparently it had been planned to be built on a small, more centrally located island called New Holland (causing a very confusing conversation as I hadn’t heard the word ‘new’ and figured they were evidently quite desperate to get it built since they didn’t even care which country it’d be in…). New Holland was deemed too central, so Lakhta was built near Begovaya, more out of the way and less detrimental to the historic skyline.

Admire the architecture.

Coz yeah, for historical buildings, St P is your place to go.

Travel to the end of the metro.

As a child, one of my dreams was to travel the metro to the end of the line. It never happened in 2000, as I don’t think my parents prioritised it as an activity worth doing, but since then I’ve been trying to explore ends of metro lines in various cities I’ve been to, most recently in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Well, the end of metro I managed this time round was Begovaya, at the end of the green line. Go visit the 300-year park nearby, and you will be down for some cool views over the bay.

Again, nothing particularly beautiful this time round, in the grey pre-winter bare mist, but it was ATMOSPHERIC. And then the lights went on.

And last but not least…

• Visit churches. Which I’ll dedicate its own entry to. (To be linked)

• Be entertained by Russian.

Already having the skill of reading the Cyrillic alphabet is a great benefit, as you’ll suddenly be able to read words like ланч (“lunch”) and Флэт уайт (“flet white”) and realise how much is just Russianised English.

• Practise Russian.

I don’t know how it is in Moscow, but I was happy about how little English I heard spoken around. Everyone happily spoke to me in Russian regardless of my sometimes halting replies, and some of the friends I met up with I spent hours conversing in Russian – yes, iffy Russian, but Russian all the same!

• Play Settlers.

And conquer your apprehension of new games and conquer Settlers – Seafarers. Played with one of my favourite families ever. (In the end yours truly did not conquer the game due to yours truly’s own cauliflower-brained stupidity, but what an intense game it was!)

• Experience public transport. More to come on this in a later entry.

• And visit the railway museum! More about that later, too.

До свидания !

Emzy

xxx