Mon20Jun16: Sunshine! Beautiful sunshine!

Another sunny morning, but this time the clouds didn't start rolling in, so as we walked down to the Petrogradskaya Metro station we decided to go back to all the sites where we'd had lousy lighting for good photographs over the past three days.

Dismounted at Nevskiy Prospekt and walked along the canal to the Cathedral of Spilled Blood - golden domes shining in the morning sunshine;










to Palace Square where they were clearing away the remnants of the weekend music concert;


across to St. Isaac's Cathedral for the walkway around the upper dome which overlooks the entire city of St. Petersburg.








Noontime and that's enough with the re-runs - let's see something new.  Walked over to the Theatre District for a look at the Lion Bridge and a quick snack on the banks of the canal.

Then an extensive tour through Yusupov Palace - the place where certain nobility held a party in December 1916 and decided that Rasputin should be poisoned, shot, and drowned.  Interesting way to treat a guest.

After that it was past the Mariinskiy Concert Hall to St. Nicholas's Church, where we saw our first homeless people hanging out in the church grounds, smoking, and begging for spare change.

Only 3:40pm so we hopped a bus (yes, they have conductors on board!) to Sennaya, took the Metro to Nevskiy Prospekt, and were on a canal/river boat cruise by 4:30pm.  A bit expensive (800p) but it's nice to see this city's waterways from a different viewpoint, our boat with 50 passengers cruised the small canals and out along the Neva River, then around the island holding the Fortress of Peter and Paul.


Time for a change in diet, so after arriving back at Petrogradskaya Metro we checked out a couple of local restaurants - one was a karaoke bar, one served sushi - before settling on Pizza Hut.  Yeah, I know.  Good old Pizza Hut.  But after all, it's Monday and we usually have pizza on Monday back in Brandon.  Especially loved the 1L pitcher of lemonade, especially refreshing after a long day of walking.
After our experiences today, I've come to realise that all the 'scare stories' - about how cold and impersonal the Russian people would be, how dangerous it was to travel the Metro or walk the streets at night, and how hard it would be to communicate because none of the people spoke English and all the signs were in Cyrillic alphabet - is a bunch of crap.  Almost every person a tourist has to interact with speaks some English, and many people who speak English go out of their way to help us and talk with us, and all the signs that a tourist needs to get around and get things done are written in both Russian and English.  It ain't easy, but it's fun to encourage servers to test their English out on us.
Back to the Andersen Hotel for a final laundry wash, and another Euro2016 football game.  Television system in this hotel has 59 channels, but important things like Euro2016 may be on as many as 10 of those channels at the same time.  And Russian is the only language, except when foreign music videos show up on MY3 (channel29).  "The Simpsons" just don't seem the same when overlaid in Russian, since you can slightly hear the English dialogue in the background.