Getting Lost in a Beautiful Place.

Yesterday some of the girls went on an adventure. We planned to just go hang out around the Gulf of Finland and eat lunch there, but our day turned out much different from that, which was actually pretty amazing.

As soon as we got off at the metro stop we decided would probably be the closest walk to the Gulf we could see some sort of amusement park ride, we walked a little further and found the cutest amusement park. So we went and explored it.

 We rode the ferris wheel in hopes of seeing where the Gulf of Finland was and we didn't really see much (we sort of saw what we thought might have been the coast so we decided after we were done to go toward that direction).

We decided to walk through a pretty awesome park and stumbled upon what we called Swan Lake, it was so pretty and we fed some swans animal crackers and just enjoyed the scenery.

Photo courtesy of Jess

We decided it was probably time we got back to the metro so we could go meet our mother/guide Sveta so she could show us around the Peter and Paul Fortress. Once we met up with Sveta we got to go to this little monument area that is a layout of St. Petersburg. It's a mini-model of all of the sites here in town. Some of them we've already been to so it was pretty cool seeing them like that. It also had black marble around which represented bodies of water.

Mini Savior on Spilled Blood

Large Scale Savior on Spilled Blood 

Mini Winter Palace

Large Scale Winter Palace

Mini Our Lady of Kazan Cathedral

Large Scale Our Lady of Kazan Cathedral

Mini St. Isaacs Cathedral

Looking out from the top of the large scale St. Isaacs Cathedral

Up close details of the angels.

My boyfriend (one of the architects of these historical buildings)

Our excursion group

From there we went over the the Peter and Paul Fortress and learned some pretty interesting history.

This little guy is a symbol for the island, the Peter and Paul Fortress is located on Hare Island and so this guy was constructed, we also learned that if you throw a coin and it lands on the wood it brings good luck!

This is the final resting place of the Romanov family (which includes the infamous Anastasia)

All of the "gold" on this was carved out of wood.

There's a sculpture outside that represents time, there are twelve different chairs located around the center that represent hours, months, etc.

Our sweet group picture sitting in some of the chairs.

Outside the fortress

Pirate Ship on the Neva River

We ended our day there (well we went and got some pretty awesome pizza) and then went back to the apartment, it was an extremely awesome day of sight-seeing and learning more about this crazy Russian city I've been living in, it still seems a little unreal at times, but I'm so blessed to have this experience.