June 10 2012 A day in St Petersburg and church

The train left Velikiye Luki at 8:10pm Saturday Night and arrived in St Petersburg at 6:00am Sunday morning.  We slept fairly well even with all of the click click click click noise and very frequent stops.  Lewis and I got on the train in very casual clothes so that we could sleep in them and wore those same clothes all morning while walking around St Petersburg before changing for church service around noon. 
Of course the first thing on our agenda was to find somewhere to eat......we walked across the street to McDonald's where there was about 8 people in line at the "walk up" window that hadn't even opened yet.....inside was still closed, so we walked down the street to a cafe for breakfast.

For those of you who know me, you will know exactly why I took this picture of the playroom at the cafe where we ate breakfast.

We then went to the Metro station where we would actually spend a lot of time off and on throughout the day.  This is the longest escalator I have ever been on in my life.  The picture doesn't really do it justice, but this metro station is very far underground.  We rode the metro to the other train station in St Petersburg which is the newer one.  This is where we left our bags for the morning so that we did not have to carry everything around with us.  We decided to keep the locker until Tuesday night so that we would not have to take our church clothes with us on the bus later tonight to Helsinki and anywhere in the city we would be going.  We got lucky because the first place we went to leave our things was an open area and had very strange hours that if you needed your things and they weren't open you were out of luck.  They also charged 100 rubles per bag, so we would have paid 300 rubles for a few hours.  The man told Yulia about the lockers and we paid just a little more than that for 3 days worth of use and it was enclosed and more secure.

One observation we have made while walking around everywhere is that there are very few if any wheelchair accessible areas.  We are not sure how disabled people even get around because most every building inside have stairs, no elevators.  Even the metro area has only escalators, but otherwise stairs everywhere.  I did notice these contraptions occasionally on the stairways and noticed people with strollers using them, but never any wheelchairs.

Yulia used to work as a tour guide in St Petersburg, so in addition to knowing a lot of the country's history, she is very knowledgable of everything in this city.  Here are some of the highlights, but unfortunately all of the stories can not be remembered.  She told us about the littlest monument......a bird called Chizhik.  If you drop a coin and it hits the head and lands between his feet your wish will come true.  I tried it, but did not make it.......Lewis tried several times and the last time he made it with a 5 ruble coin.  He dropped the coin, it hit the base bounced up hit the head and slid down between the feet.......I hope he wished for something really good!!!

We went to a very famous church to tour inside but had to wait for about 45 minutes because an actual church service was taking place inside.  While we waited we took several pictures of the outside of this church which was called "Saviour of the Blood Church"

Inside all the walls and ceilings are covered in pictures made completely out of mosaic.  It was very beautiful.  We had earphones on so that we could do a walk around tour and hear it in English. Lewis made a short video to give some perspective of all of it at one time.

This building is where the Singer machines were made, it is now a bookstore.

We visited Catherine the Great's summer garden and Summer Palace.  Yulia said that Catherine would have parties at her Summer Palace and then go to the Winter Palace to rest........Winter Palace is shown below the Summer Palace.

Of course, a picture of  Peter the Great......very important in St Petersburg Russia

Various sites and streets in St Petersburg

With all this walking we were very thirsty, stopped into McDonald's and got a Sprite.....this is the first drink with ice in it we have had since leaving the states. Took a few pics inside McDonald's.

We walked to the metro, got our bags and clothes and headed out to find the church.  As we were leaving the metro station we saw 3 or 4 women and an adorable little girl walking out too.  Lewis said "I bet they are going where we are going"  Yulia asked them and they said yes, they were going to the same church meeting that we were going to.  We decided to just follow them, but since this little girl was with them, they were moving very slowly so we relied on Yulia's map.  It was about a 3/4 mile walk and we were so hot and sweaty by the time we got there that it was very difficult to change clothes.  But we did and enjoyed the meeting with about 500-550 other people.  One of the church leaders from Salt Lake City Utah came to visit and speak so it was quite an honor to be there.  Yulia came with us and that was the first time she had attended an LDS meeting.  She was surprised that everyone looked so happy.

For the walk back to the station to drop our things off, Lewis got innovative so that he could be "hands free"

We decided to go on a boat tour and see things Yulia had talked about in a diffeent way and rest our feet and legs which were getting very tired at this point.  The sky turned dark while out on this 1.5 hour excursion and as you can see many people went downstairs for shelter but we just braved the rain and used the provided blankets.  Pretty rainbow came out, and when the tour was over the sky was clear again.  The tour was interesting although we had no idea what was being said most of the time.  The speaker system was not very good so Yulia couldn't hear it well enough to translate and we couldn't understand it whether we could hear it or not. 

We always have fun seeing "restaurants" that we are familiar with in another language.  Burger King.......First in Russian, and next sign it is translated "Steak House"

Carl's Jr

KFC

For your own imagination.........

We would see these men and women in several different spots around town, when they would see you pull out your camera they would turn around because they want you to pay for a photo of them or with them.  Lewis happened to get a couple of photos without them realizing it.  Also a couple of cute monkeys we saw while walking around.

Everywhere we went Yulia wanted to take a photograph.......I gave in most of the time......hard to get Lewis to behave in the pictures though.......Looks like the Avatar hit him with his spear by the look on Lewis' face!!!

We went to a French restaurant before leaving for Helsinki.  Here is part of the menu and Lewis' yummy salmon dinner.  He had ice cream and I had cheesecake for dessert. 

We were so tired at the end of this day, our legs hurt from walking nearly 15 miles.  My left foot was very swollen and I was limping.  We walked to the bus and we were not too happy when we saw what we would be riding in.  It was basically a van that had 2 seats on one side and 1 seat on the other side......5 rows total and the very back had 4 seats all the way across.  This was going to be a long night.  It was 11pm and we had a 6 hour drive ahead of us.