Do svidanya, St. Petersburg!

We are back on the open ocean, heading away from St. Petersburg to Hamburg, Germany. I think both of us are excited to back on the ship so we have an excuse not to walk 10+ miles every day! Being in port is exhausting in the best of ways. Here are a few things we learned in Russia:

1) Russian is HARD. I think we only figured out 4 or 5 words, although we're much better at deciphering Cyrillic now. Da, nyet, and spasiba (thank you) were pretty much all of our vocabulary. Between that, some English-speaking folks, and sign language, we managed to get around.
2) Everyone in St. Petersburg gets married in August. They only get 50-60 days of sunshine a year and much of the year is freezing cold, so we literally saw 5-12 weddings EVERY DAY. Brides everywhere!
3) St. Petersburg-ites love cats. Everywhere we went there were cat t-shirts, cat pictures, chocolate with cats on it, etc. Apparently there are cats that live in the basement in one of the museums and have the run of the place at night. They've become a sort of symbol of the town.
4) Russian women generally are very dressed up and wear a lot of makeup - we saw lots of 4-5 inch heels on cobblestone streets.

We also know tons more Russian history now. All in all we had a wonderful stay with beautiful weather (sorry St. Pete for taking all your sunny days this year!). On to Germany!

Church of the Spilled Blood - all the color on the walls is mosaics. 7000 square meters of it!

View from the ship as we pulled out of port. On the right in St. Isaac's Cathedral. We climbed to the top (just below the dome) and had great views from there.