I recently visited Russia. More specifically, I visited Saint Petersburg and Novgorod.

The reasons for the trip were many, my wife, Svetlana is from Novgorod and goes every summer with our son, Max, to visit her parents. This year happened to provide the World Cup Soccer spectacle in Russia, and so we entered a lottery, (never expecting to win) for a semi-final match, on July 10th, (which is Max’s birthday), and we won!

Winning in this sense meant that we were now allowed to purchase the tickets for the game!

And so we received our tickets and booked the flights to St Pete.

My brief stay in the city took us to several wonderful spots where I managed a few images. Here are two random shots from the streets.

One of the places we visited was St Isaac’s Cathedral. Here is the info on the place from Wikipedia.

Saint Isaac’s Cathedral or Isaakievskiy Sobor (Russian: Исаа́киевский Собо́р) in Saint Petersburg, Russia, is the largest Russian Orthodox cathedral (sobor) in the city. It is the largest orthodox basilica and the fourth largest (by the volume under the cupola) cathedral in the world.^[5] It is dedicated to Saint Isaac of Dalmatia, a patron saint of Peter the Great, who had been born on the feast day of that saint.

And here are some of my images. You can tour inside, AND navigate the stairs to the roof as well!

Next we visited the Peterhof Palace. Again, info from Wikipedia here.

The Peterhof Palace (Russian: Петерго́ф, IPA: [pʲɪtʲɪrˈɡof],^[1] German for Peter’s Court)^[2] is a series of palaces and gardens located in Petergof, Saint Petersburg, Russia, laid out on the orders of Peter the Great. These palaces and gardens are sometimes referred as the “Russian Versailles“.

And a few images from our self guided tour!

That’s it for now, stay tuned for the next installment, Veliky Novgorod!