Saturday we visited St. Isaac's again with Sveta, only this time we went up to the colonnade around the dome to see a panoramic view of the city. The view was most excellent.
Here you can see Spilled Blood off in the distance:
I'm glad we waited until it was green to check out the view.
The whole group:
After visiting the dome, we walked over to New Holland Island, which is a nice park on an island. I have no idea why it is called "new holland" but it was a nice place to relax in the sun for a bit.
After New Holland, we walked over to get more delicious donuts and along the way passed Kazan Cathedral:
After donuts I headed home to eat a real meal and look up info on "Museum Night," which Sveta had told us about. Since the white nights have pretty much begun here in St. Pete (white nights = the sun doesn't set till around midnight and then rises at like 3 am) people stay out pretty late. Once a year most of the museums open from 6 pm till 6 am and you can buy one ticket that lets you into all of them. Sounded pretty great to me. The evening did not turn out quite as expected, but it sure was fun.
We visited Lenin Square on our way to go to the circus, which was listed as one of the museums.
The square has tons of fountains and lots of people were playing in them.
Me and Lenin:
We ended up having to walk for about 40 minutes or so to get to the "circus." I use quotation marks there because the circus ended up being much more of a carnival. It would have been great if we hadn't had to walk so far to get there. Oh well.
Not impressed:
A really nice lady helped us figure out how to take a bus back into the city and then some clown-type people gave us these nice mustaches that we sported for most of the evening.
Our next stop was a palace that I forget the name of. I had read that the Phantom of the Opera would give us a tour of it, so that sounded pretty cool. We ended up having to stand in this crowd for some 20 minutes listening to this woman speak in Russian about who knows what. I literally have no idea what she could have been talking about for that long, but oh well. I survived.
Finally we entered the palace and this man (the phantom?) began our tour. They played the theme from phantom of the opera as we ascended the stairs, which was pretty cool.
In each of the rooms we visited people performed scenes from different operas. It was actually super cool to watch. This is from Don Juan:
Carmen:
Maybe Madama Butterfly? All I got from the Russian introduction was "geisha" and "American" and I am no opera whiz.
The final room:
Samantha and I still rocking the staches:
On our way to the next museum we passed Spilled Blood. This photo was taken sometime around 11 pm. White Nights.
We tried to go to the printing museum, but it turned out it closed at 11. Worst thing ever. Then we tried to go to this Lutheran church, but the line was terribly long and we needed to leave before the metro closed.
Next time I would definitely plan a little better, but the Museum Night still turned out to be way fun.
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