St Peterburg’s City Day 2010

St Peterburg Celebrated its 307th Birthday on Thursday 27th May 2010, however the celebrations went on for 4 days until Sunday 30th May, however we arrived in St Petersburg the morning after the official City day, but after a day of work, food, drink we didn’t see much of the events of the weekend until the next day.

We got up on Saturday and immediately saw part of the regatta in the Fontanka outside the hotel, we were on our way out to pick-up next week’s Prodigy Tickets, so we just stayed to see a few of the kayaking races but it was interesting to watch.  We were intending on going to  Yusupov Palace, so off we walked in the downpour stopping off to see some cool graffiti (interestingly that all around the city we saw some stencils related to British Street artist ‘Banksy’ too), when we got to  Yusupov Gardens we had a look around and it did stop raining, the Palace in the gardens that appeared to be closed was actually the Old  Yusupov Palace, the  Yusupov Palace we were looking for was on Moika, but to be fair we didn’t have any sort of guide book and just saw the name on the map and figured it was the place, so we have somewhere else to visit nex ttime we go. We then went for a walk around the city heading towards the blood church (the subject of the previous blog post), when we got to Nevksy Prospect  it was closed to traffic and very busy with people despite the earlier downpour, we headed down the street towards the blood church enjoying the music, people, and dancers.  When we did get to the Blood Church though, it was closed, due to technical reasons, we were not having much luck that day.  We decided to go and soak in the atmosphere of Nevsky Prospect once again, and go to enjoy a nice bar, on this occasion we headed for ‘Idiot Bar’ on Moika (and no doubt passed the actual  Yusupov Palace we were looking for earlier).  When we arrived at the Cafe bar it was very interesting insidce with lots of old machines such as telphones and typewriters, we had a beer each and were treated to a complimentary Vodka which was served nice and cold, and just in time to see the last of my hangover off.  That night we ate in Stroganoff which had visited previously and loved the food, very much recommended for meat eaters, but Lou loved her Halibut too.

The next day we did eventually get inside the blood Church and as you can see from my previous post it was well worth it, it was beautiful! What we were not expecting happened after walking through the Gardens to Palace Square, a huge spectacle covering many areas with interesting characters such as foil clad weird lookign men, huge red Giraffes operated by two people each that were part of what appeared to be some kind of operatic performance.  All in all it was a nice accident that we were there over City Day weekend, I would recommend it, and more relaxed than Moscow’s city day.

Click through to the shots to see the full size version.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 1st, 2010 at 10:04 am. It is filed under Blog, Photography, Travel and tagged with Banksy, Bar, Blood Church, City Day, Fontanka, Idiot, Idiot Bar, Kayaking, Performers, Regatta, Russia, Russian Federation, St Petersburg, Stroganoff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.