Wanderung 31

The map above shows the network of canals that crisscross the Old Town section of St Petersburg. Our boat tour started on the canals but also used a section of the Neva River in order to make a complete loop.

I highly recommend seeing St Petersburg from one of the canal boat tours, especially if you are lucky enough to visit on a sunny day, because the architecture of the city is quite spectacular. We saw a (ahem!) boatload of graceful bridges!

Along the shoreline was an almost continuous parade of ornate buildings that seemed to be old palaces, and what I think were huge, impressive public buildings of some kind. Sometimes these buildings stretched as far as the eye could see, and the combined impact of it was almost overhwelming.

However, here and there this tableau of monumental buildings was broken up by some golden-domed churches and other slightly smaller buildings like theaters, etc.

When we looped out into a section of the big river, the Neva, we even saw high-performance sailing catamarans that seemed to be coming back into port after presumably having a regatta someplace either downstream on the Neva or maybe out in the Baltic Sea.

I was constantly swiveling my head around to take in the sights and take some pictures, and also now and then ducking my head to avoid being hit by the bridges overhead, because they were very close indeed! There even was a sign in Russian and English warning about the low bridges!

At the end of our boat ride we walked over to one final church and past a statue of Czar Nicholas I, and then climbed aboard the bus for the drive back to the cruise ship port. Our drive took us across some of the very same bridges we had just recently gone underneath!

We had to rest a bit before dinner, but I had enough time to update the journal before our evening meal. We had a quiet evening afterwards, mostly reading as we are very boring people and don't even watch television very much. But at one point I suddenly saw some bright lights on a highway on the nearby shore, and then I noticed some old, fortress-like islands sliding by quite closely in the darkness. Apparently we were sailing from St Petersburg to Helsinki in a very narrow channel of some kind. We also encountered some very dimly lit ships gliding by just off of our side, which was a ghostly experience. Deucedly hard to take a picture of, but magical, really.