Have you heard, we're going to St. Petersburg!

Last weekend, we had a short vacation to St. Petersburg in Russia. It may not seem like a lot to have three days off in a row, but when you’re in class six days a week, it feels like forever. We took an overnight train Thursday night with beds so small I felt I was almost too tall to sleep in, and I’m only 5’2”! We got to go on an excursion to a town called Pushkin where Catherine’s palace resides, and we saw the Hermitage, and many other beautiful places St. Petersburg is known for. It’s known as the Venice of the North because there are about 300 bridges in St. Petersburg. The weather was a little cold and rainy, but it was still gorgeous. St. Petersburg is known for looking a little more European than Moscow. While Moscow was a city that grew into being, St. Petersburg was planned out inch by inch to be a very organized capital (when it was planned, Moscow is now again the capital city of Russia). It’s definitely a little more touristy than Moscow, and I feel like it’d be a lot harder to live there than Moscow. Being 400 miles north from Moscow really makes a difference in the weather.

It was really wonderful to have some time off from school in St. Petersburg, and to have the chance to explore a different piece of Russia. The sights were gorgeous, the food was amazing, and it was really wonderful and necessary to have a bit of downtime together before finals and the end of our trip. I think my favorite part of being in St. Petersburg was just walking through the city. A lot of the museums we wanted to go to were closed, so we spent a lot of time just walking down the streets together, laughing and enjoying traveling while being abroad. 

School here is amazing, but it can be brutal to work as often as we do, and I feel like we really got to spend some great time together in St. Petersburg. I also feel like three days was a perfect amount of time to be a tourist in St. Petersburg, and then come back to Moscow to finish our work here. It also made me appreciate how accustomed we’ve all become to Moscow. When we were leaving St. Petersburg to come back to Moscow, we called it home. And after all this time here in Russia, it really has become another home to me in my heart.