It is still cold and overcast and intermittently raining. Today we did a lot of walking. St Petersburg is a beautiful, if slightly faded, city with grand boulevards lined with classical and baroque buildings. Situated at the mouth of the River Neva it spreads across a number of islands and has a network of canals which gives it a feeling of being a cross between Venice and Amsterdam.
We spent the morning browsing the shopping district and visiting the main shopping malls on Nevsky Prospekt, most of which are well concealed from the street and are packed with upmarket designer boutiques. The largest is Bolshoy Goztiny Dvor a huge 18th century yellow building with a colonnaded outer terrace around each floor. One circuit of the building passing dozens of designer shops and stalls is 1km!
In the afternoon we went to the gardens of the Summer Palace of Peter the Great and stopped to listen to a military brass band and witness elderly Russians partaking in a outdoor tea dance. Finally we went on the look round the Peter & Paul fortress on the opposite side of the River Neva.
The most disorienting and difficult thing to get used to here is not being able to read and understand anything at all. A few places have English menus and we came across a local English language newspaper but otherwise its a case of hoping to find people who speak English or simply pointing at things.