St. Petersburg beyond museums

Today I'll show various sites in St. Petersburg which are not museums.

Along Nevsky Prospekt is a church that looks very much like the Vatican: Kazan cathedral.

During communism the Kazan cathedral was a museum of atheism, but it is now again a working religious building. Across the street from the cathedral is the St. Petersburg branch of the Dom Knigi bookstore, whose Moscow branch I had bought North American style erasers in:

The sign above the entrance says "Singer Company": this building was owned by the Singer sewing company before the Russian revolution. Inside the store I discovered that I had been ripped off in a nearby souvenir shop: what I had bought a few minutes earlier at the souvenir shop was on sale at the bookstore for less money.  

Further along the street, at 14 Nevsky Prospekt, is a blue sign left over from the Siege of Leningrad, when the Germans closed off all land routes to the city and attempted to take it over by basically starving everyone inside.  The sign says "Citizens! This side of the street is more dangerous under artillery shelling.''  I wonder if they always make sure there are flowers there.

There is nothing special drawing the pedestrian's attention to the sign, so you could walk right past it and go to a Bosco sports store nearby.

To the left of the artillery sign is an alley that leads into a courtyard where there is a globe:

Here is the globe from two sides, showing a scale model of the last ice age, when the northern hemisphere was covered by snow and ice thousands of miles thick:

In the background of the second photo are a father and son cleaning out a space to play basketball.  Notice the basketball court is basically a carpet, which the father is lifting up.

The son tries to imitate his father by whacking at the court/carpet with a stick.

The ad in the next photo, still on Nevsky Prospekt, is for the Rainbow shopping center. Who knew St. Petersburg had a gay-friendly place to shop?

Often the city name St. Petersburg is abbreviated to SPB (= СПБ).  But one business decided those letters stand for something else: Network of Beer Bars.

A couple of weeks later I found this chain of bars is in Moscow too.

Across the Neva river from the city center is a large mosque, whose construction started 100 years ago:

I first saw this mosque when I visited St. Petersburg in 2004, but I have never seen any people going into or out of it.  Across a park from the mosque is a very small chapel.

This marks the former spot of the first church in St. Petersburg, which the communists knocked down:

Not far from the chapel is a boulder that is a monument to the prisoners of the Gulag. The boulder is from the first Soviet prison camp.

The park containing the boulder and chapel is bounded on one its four sides by an elegant building.  Would you like to live there? It's an institute, so you can't.

More monuments to suffering: below is a memorial to the torpedo boat Strashny, which was sunk by the Japanese in 1904 during the Russo-Japanese war. The monument depicts several sailors unsuccessfully trying to prevent snow from coming into their ship.

The first location developed in St. Petersburg was the Peter and Paul fortress, which today is a complex of different tourist sites.  Here is the main building in the fortress, the Peter and Paul Cathedral, shot with the flash and without one:

Some more evening scenes of the cathedral:

Looking at the fortress from outside:

Here is the Church on Spilled Blood, built on the spot where tsar Alexander II was assassinated.

All the photos shown so far are in spots that are easily accessible by the metro.  The next ones are not: the Mariinsky Theater, which has opera and ballet performances. I was told that a metro line under construction will go out to this part of the city, but after finding the nearest metro station I still had to walk a while to reach the theater, which I shot from two angles:

Across the street from the theater are monuments to Glinka

and Rimsky-Korsakov, whose cemetery plot in the winter looks like an outhouse.

After taking these photos of the theater and the monuments I declared "Mission Accomplished" and went back to my hostel, since I had about two hours to catch my train back to Moscow.

One of the ads along the path I walked to reach the Mariinsky theater was promoting an upcoming benefit for childhood cancer and eye diseases:

Among the people who will attend the benefit you can see pictures some of today's hottest celebrities: Melanie Griffith, Kevin Costner, Kurt Russell, Monica Bellucci, and Paul Anka. Wow, Paul Anka!

(Added later:  The benefit has now taken place and Putin took the stage to sing a song in English:

            

It looks like Paul Anka has nothing to worry about.)


When I took the metro as far as I could to reach the Mariinsky Theater, I was in Sennaya Square. Before I started walking to the theater, I stood near a wall and shot a video of people walking past.  The music playing from the store behind me was all quite non-Russian:


            

Here is the St. Petersburg branch of the Goethe Institute, which are German cultural and information centers located in many countries:

I asked a German student in the Math in Moscow program about this institute, since I had never heard of it before. He said it was a German attempt to take over the world through friendship, since their first method didn't exactly work out too well.

Walking from the Mariinsky theater back to the city center (and my hostel) along the Moika river embankment, we come to another Mariinsky building: the Mariinsky Palace.

There are still shields with Lenin's face on them across the front of the building (look below the third floor windows in the center). The Mariinsky palace is facing the back of Saint Isaac's Cathedral

which took 40 years to build. During communism there was a museum of atheism here. A walkway outside the cathedral's rotunda offers one of the best spots to get a bird's eye view of the city during the daytime.