Happy Easter!

Sunday, Apr 19th – Easter (Russian Orthodox) – 4:30pm

Today can be summed up with one word…walking. We walked everywhere today. We met up with our friends at 9am and walked to a local coffee place. We had a great cappuccino and pastry to start our day. The barista even put a lion face in our foam.
Then we walked across 3 bridges to Peter and Paul fortress which is an entire island in the Neva River. Here is a picture of it from one of the bridges.
We went into the Peter and Paul Church where all of the Tsars and Tsarinas are buried…the last Tsarina to be laid to rest there had her remains moved from Denmark to join her husband in 2006. We walked through a building that had showed the history of St Petersburg and walked along the outside of the fortress walls.
There were multiple people lying against the walls sunbathing…it was not above 40 degrees and the wind was really blowing…not sure I would have needed vitamin D that bad. I spared you the picture. We exited the fortress through Peter’s gate.
We then walked back across the Neva to go to our favorite place for lunch…Stolle…the pie place. We all needed to sit down and warm up. After lunch we went to St Isaac’s Cathedral and climbed the dome for a spectacular view of St Petersburg. You could see every major landmark today as the sky was clear. We took a picture from there of our hotel (Petro Palace) to show you all how close we are to the city center.
Tonight we are off to find a restaurant that was recommended to us last trip. We decided to have one more nice dinner before tomorrow. We are still hoping to pick up Maddox tomorrow afternoon, but we haven’t heard from our coordinator as to a time yet. We are praying that our blog update tomorrow will include Maddox in our room :)