The city built on bones

Incredible city, 300 years old this year, don't miss it! Unpleasant trivia: Peter the Great built the city using forced labour, when people died they were just buried in the foundations of the city -- hence the built on bones thing.

Quick Tips:

Go and see: Hermitage, Palace Square, Russian Museum, St. Isaac's Cathedral, Kazan Cathedral, The Palaces: Peterhof, Tsarskoe Tselo, Pavlovsk, Gatchina, Oranienbaum, Dostoevsky's flat, The Church on Spilled Blood, Mariinskii theatre

Best Way To Get Around:

Metro is best transport, though you can't see much! There's plenty to see down there though. Public transport excellent, though not always very comfortable. You cna buy a map with all transport routes anywhere, e.g. Dom knigi on Nevsky. Watch your pockets, especially during rush hour, and only use official taxis if you don't speak the language.

One of the best museums I went to in Russia, for the simple reasons I could take my mum and not have to explain everything. Very well designed for foreigners -- exhibit cards in good English, something often lacking in other Russian museums. Also interesting, both in terms of his life and literature.

Incredible doesn't even begin to describe the Hermitage. It has the most fantastic collection of art, all in the historic Winter Palace. They say it would take you seven years to see verything if you spent around 10 seconds looking at each exhibit, and it's true. I went seven times and still didn't see anywhere near everything. I'm a big fan of beautiful buildings so the first few time I just looked at the parquet floors and marble pillars. My best memories of the place were playing hide and seek in the hall of pillars, and getting into trouble from the babushka -- and the day we danced in the great ballroom. Well, what else do you do there? This was made even more entertaining by the fact that Russian school children are taken on trips to museums MUCH more regularly than Western kids, so there are always school parties, and one of them was up the other end of the ballroom, facing us, with a guide who had her back to us, so the kids saw the whole thing and they were in stiches. By the time the guide turned around, we were innocently looking around the hall! Who says museums and galleries should be boring!

A note: if you're into the Old Masters, the Hermitage is the place for you, go round, look at the incredible pictures and laugh at the labels which tell you the painting is of the Holly Family -- English can be a bit dodgy sometimes. If you're into imperssionists, although The Hermitage is wonderful and you get so much closer to the paintings than other galleries -- the Pushkin Museum of Fine Art in Moscow will blow your mind. Worth seeing also is Rembrandt's Danae, which was put back on show in 1998 after being vandalised and restored, along with a big display about how the restoration was done -- very good translation there. The guard sitting in front of the painting with a semi-automatic is a little bit distracting though!

Everyone has seen this church, known in Russian as Spas na Krovi. Even if only when playing Tetris, it's one of the best known Russian landmarks. It should, however, be pointed out, that Peter the Great must have been turning in his grave as it was being built in his 'European city'! Stand between the church and Kazan cathedral on Nevsky and compare the architectural influences!

It was build by Aleksandr III to commemorate his father Aleksandr II who was assasinated where the church now stands. He was so determined that the altar would be on the very spot that his father was killed that the church was built jutting out into the canal.

It was not completed in time to be used as a church for long, and the Communists just ignored it and allowed it to fall into disrepair. It has not been restored and is the most incredible thing I've ever seen! It's even more ornate inside than out, full of mosaics depicting Bible scenes, right up into the domes.

A few recommendations -- you MUST travel by underground -- the metro is incredible! Some advice: look after your belongings, and learn the alphabet. Stations can be hard to identify when on the train, so count how many stations you need to pass through. Don't get in the way of the doors as they are closing. The metro is incredibly deep, and you go down for ages on very steep, fast-moving escalators. There are some stations where it is hard to see the bottom from the top -- and that is not a joke! Most of the stations are incredibly ornate, particulary see Dostoyevsky station for the gold fish scales, or Avtovo for the huge pillars. A ticket is very cheap, so buy one and ride around where ever you want. A wee warning, the red line has a break in it, so you can't go further than Lesnaia without coming out of the underground and getting a bus to the next station - don't bother. Also the interchange station technologicheskii prospekt doesn't work like all the others. The system there is that the north bound trains pull into one platform and the south bound into another -- so if you go a station too far, don't get off and get in the train on the other side of the platform thinking you'll get back to where you came from! One of the new stations on the yellow line has the same system, but it's less hassle and the other line isn't built yet!

St. Isaac's Cathedral has a colonnade around the top, you can buy a ticket and climb up to see the whole city as it's so flat. Beware the 'babuski' as you're not really supposed to take photos from up there.

St. Isaac's was built before there was such a thing as a crane, and given the weight of the marble pillars around the colonnade, building it was a pretty dangerous job. So many people were killed in the process that the locals refused for years to actually use it as a church.

Peterhof, the palace on the shore of the Gulf of Finland with fountains and gold statues, incredibly ornate and beautiful.

It was occupied by Nazi forces during WWII, who set up their guns to bombard St. Petersburg, and when they left, they took the gold statues with them. About 20 years later, they found the original moulds for the statues and recast them in plaster and covered them with gold leaf.

The fountains were all designed and engineered by Peter the Great -- a pretty good engineer by all accounts.

The Catherine Palace was built not by Catherine the Great, but the previous Catherine. She had the roof covered with gold leaf, and the locals were all convinced that the roof was made of solid gold. Catherine the Great thought it was all a bit showy and had it removed.

Amber room: the amber was removed by the Nazis and the room is still being redone as the museum gets enough money.

Under the communists, St. Petersburg was not a popular city for large part of the last century. Stalin saw it as the power base of one of his main rivals, the murder of whom led to the beginning of the Great Terror. The city, while accepting a change to its new name of Leningrad, refused to accept other changes, like changing Nevsky Prospect to Lenin Street -- Nevsky was a monk, not a hero the leaders of a state with no god wanted folk remembering. Stalin also tried to move the centre of the city from nevksy down to the south -- get the metro to Moskovsaia station and have a look around, this was to have been part of the new centre of Leningrad. Moskovskaia is also good as you can then walk south a bit further, or get a bus (turn right as you come out of the station) to the War Memorial, which marks where the Nazi forces reached in their blockade of the city. There's a museum under the monument, in the middle of a roundabout, which includes things like Stravinskii's violin. Moskovskaia is also the station from which you can get a bus to the airport -- number 13.