CAHKT ПETEPБУPГA 

The second day in St. Petersburg we went on a cruise on the River Neva.
Peter and Paul Fortress. This is the oldest building in St. Petersburg, which is only about three hundred years old. It was built in 1703 by Peter the Great to protect the city from a possible attack by the Swedes. The tall spire belongs to the Peter and Paul Cathedral, a church where all the Russian emperors and empresses from Peter the Great to Alexander III are buried.
There's old V.I. again. (That's Vladimir Ilich for those who failed history.) This time he's a statue still in front of the Finland Station. It was here in April 1917 that Lenin arrived in St. Petersburg to get everyone riled up.
The cruiser Aurora. It has quite a bit of history. It was the Aurora that fired the opening shot at the Winter Palace at 9:00 pm on October 25, 1917. This was a signal to the Bolshevik Red Guards to storm the palace and capture the government. During the siege of Leningrad it was moored at the mouth of the Gulf of Finland and shelled the Nazi invaders, but it was sunk in 1941. It was raised in 1944 and moved here to the Neva where it is now a museum.
The cold brown building with the antenna towers on top is the former home of the KGB. It still houses whatever Russian spy agency it was that replaced the KGB.
I don't know if this large building is an office for the company whose sign is on the top. The sign says MEΓAΦOH or Megaphone in English.
Just to the left of the Megaphone building is this one. I make it out to be some sort of mobile tele systems.
The Neva is a pretty wide river that cuts right through the city.
More museums that were formerly palaces.
Look at the pretty colors.
The Winter Palace from the Neva. Maybe the Aurora was in this vicinity when it fired the shot that started the Bolshevik Revolution.
More large buildings on the river. These could be apartment buildings or a hotel. It's hard to tell. They looks sort of hotel-like.
An old factory or something.
Not everything on the river is an old palace or ugly Soviet-era building. Looks like they are putting up some new apartments or condominiums.
There were gypsies entertaining on the lower deck of the boat. I don't know if they were actual gypsies or just regular Russians dress like them. The violin player was cute.
The boat on the outside was the one on which we cruised. My Cyrillic alphabet was getting good at this point. I could tell that the boat company was called Baltica and the other boat was named Moskva 72.
In the trip back to the ship we hit rush hour in St. Petersburg. Traffic in this city is insane.
As we headed out of the port I noticed this sign at the entrance. It still says Leningrad.
I don't know what this structure is. It sits on a small island outside the entrance to the port. It could have been a fortification at one time.
This little pilot boat rode in the ship's wake for quite some time. Every now and again the bow of the boat would disappear under the stern of the ship. We kept expecting the pilot to step onto the deck at some point but he never did. Eventually the boat pulled along side and the pilot got on. I guess the pilot boat driver was just having fun surfing the wake while he waited for the pilot.

TO HELSINKI