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Published: June 16th 2014
The flag of Saint Petersburg
The flag of Saint PetersburgIronically, the country that was the scariest to enter was the one I really didn't want to leave, so waking up on the final day of our time in Saint Petersburg was pretty sad. On our third day we would leave the city centre of Saint Petersburg and visit the Peterhof Palace and its gardens, which were beautiful, and the water features and pumps have not changed since the days in which they were built!
Before we got there, we took a few stops on the way associated with the old city of Leningrad. We went to see a memorial of the Siege of Leningrad, with the '900 days' representing the number of days between 1941 and 1944 costing the lives of some 1 million city people. It was quite interesting to see a different perspective of casualties during the war, and flowers had recently been put down, as well as lit candles, showing how the memorial is still visited today.
For me though, the statue of Lenin was one of the highlights, quite a few us described it as '
history geek mode' where we'd get pretty excited about certain things we saw, and this was definitely one of them!
900 Day Siege Memorial
900 Day Siege Memorial After leaving this bit of the city, we started to enter the outskirts, passing what are known as 'Stalin's Appartments' (buildings set up during Stalin's years in the Soviet Union) and continued to the Peterhof Palace.
The palace itself was amazing, and we had lovely weather which none of us took for granted, sun cream and hat on and off we went! It was pretty cool as we could run across a pile of cobbles, but had to try and avoid the uneven rocks which would set off a fountain and get soaked... I succeeded twice, the third time, I wasn't so lucky, but in the Russian heat, it wasn't a bad thing.
The end of day 5 of tour rounded up a brilliant day, but also ended a great experience in our 3 days in Russia. We continued our travels to Helsinki by ferry... It was here that I left a souvenir for Russia, returning the favour after getting many souvenirs myself... Only went and forgot my converse trainers!
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