Last year we got Russian visas for the kids and me. We visited Yulia's mom in Krasnoyarsk and Yulia and the girls spent a few weeks in the country visiting the extended family. Since we got three year multiple-entry visas, we decided to make a trip this summer to St. Petersburg and Moscow. The girls are old enough to appreciate it, and we wanted them to experience Russia. We also decided to make a trip to Krakow to take the girls to Auschwitz, and somehow we added a trip to Prague in the mix as well. It's a two-week adventure. Our friends, the Stices, who went to India with us in March wanted to come along, so it's a nine-person traveling party.
Our flight left Astana at 5:50 on Saturday morning (June 17), so we left our apartment in two taxis at 3:30. Our flight was out of the new terminal at the airport, and we enjoyed seeing the expanded airport. We flew for just over four hours to St. Petersburg on Rossiya airline - a previously independent airline that was bought by Aeroflot and which operates under the Aeroflot system, just under a different name.
We navigated the airport, transfer to the bus and subway, and finding out apartment quite easily. We checked into our apartments (after going to the wrong place first) with a very nice lady, and left our bags. We then went and ate breakfast at the KFC which was close to our apartment.
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| Breakfast of champions |
Our main objective for the day was to get through the hermitage museum. We took a bus from our apartment, and then walked across the palace square and got in line for tickets. We ran into a few kids from BYU in line - all three (two boys and a girl) were doing internships, and all three had served as missionaries in Russian-speaking countries. One of the kids had a friend who is living in Astana to work at the Expo, and who we had met the week before at church. We had a nice time visiting. Then after we got tickets and were entering the museum, we met a "volunteer" from Utah who was doing service with his companion at the Hermitage. It's fun to be a Mormon!
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| Palace Square |
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| The Line for tickets |
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| Waiting to get tickets |
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| In the Hermitage. The parquet floors were amazing. |
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| This mixed-media painting exhibition was one of the first. The paintings were very interesting. |
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| Kids for scale |
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| More of the amazing views of the Hermitage (Winter Palace) |
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| Portrait of Peter the Great |
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| Throne room |
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| Door Handle |
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| Jewelry collection of Catherine (Peter's wife) |
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| Chandeliers |
The Hermitage was different from when Yulia and I were there 13 years ago when I first came home from Iraq. We saw some familiar exhibits, but there were lots of new ones. My favorite was an exhibit about clocks and watches from the 17th and 18th centuries that had been collected by the royal family. The palace building itself is so beautiful, that I often looked more at it than at the art and exhibits. We spent about 3 hours going through the exhibits. The museum is so big and the layout is so confusing, that we are sure we missed a lot of things, but we got enough that the kids can appreciate the grandeur.
After we finished, we walked across the bridge to the Peter-Paul Fortress. Before we went inside, we spent about thirty minutes sitting in the shade in the grass.
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| At the Neva, Hermitage in upper left corner of picture. |
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| Lina really wanted to reach out and touch the water |
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| Sophie at the shore |
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| Hermitage from across the river |
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| Statue of Neptune |
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| Resting! |
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| Everyone enjoyed the shade |
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| Ice cream helps the resting process |
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| Walking to the Peter Paul Fortress (in the background) and stopping to see the Niva River. |
We spent some extra money to see the exhibit of the "Siberian Lefty" an artist that does work at the microscopic level. He does work like putting gold horseshoes on fleas, putting an entire camel caravan in the eye of a needle, and making earrings for bugs. His work is amazing and even though the museum was small, it was amazing - like his work.
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| Outside the Siberian Lefty museum |
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| Anti-Aircraft gun at the fortress |
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| Cathedral inside the Peter Paul fortress |
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| A little resting spot with fun chairs in the shade in the fortress |
We walked from there to the subway station through a park that had a zoo and a planetarium in it. We ate dinner at a Subway not too far from our apartment. It was graduation day for Navy Cadets and they were everywhere with their girlfriends drinking champagne and partying.
The day had been warm and long, and we were ready for bed when we got back to our apartment at about 7:30 local time (10:30 p.m. at home in Astana).
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