Exploring Russia: St Petersburg

Hello!

I hope you saw and enjoyed my recent post about my time in Moscow. Now, I am going to write about St Petersburg. St Petersburg is a beautiful city and we visited so many attractions during our short time there. We arrived in St Petersburg after an interesting night on the overnight train from Moscow. We were all very tired, however we were filled with excitement and eager to explore the city. I'm going to write about the Hermitage museum and the Palace Square.

We spent a large amount of our time in St Petersburg visiting the Hermitage museum. This is the second largest museum in the world! The museum is made up of six buildings and there are millions of pieces of art in different collections. Our guide told us that it would take almost fifteen years to see all of the exhibits! We were shown the highlights of the main collections and it was so interesting to see and learn about all of the artwork, including pieces by Rembrandt, Picasso and Michael Angelo. The buildings themselves were beautiful and exquisitely decorated and I kept wanting to take photos of everything! It was a fascinating place to visit and we could have easily spent all of our time there!

Palace Square was also a highlight for me. This is considered to be the main square of the city, just as Red Square is the main square of Moscow. On one side of Palace Square there was a huge, picturesque building which is called the Winter Palace. This building is part of the Hermitage museum and some tsars used to live there. On the other side there was a curved yellow and white building which was called the General Staff building. In the centre of the square was a large column called Alexander column which commemorates the victory over Napolean. When we visited Palace Square, there were three military brass bands playing! As a trumpet player, I was very excited about this and I really enjoyed listening to the music.

I absolutely loved St Petersburg and would definitely recommend it to anyone planning a trip to Russia.