Vladimir for a Year

We started our last day in St. Petersburg at the Hermitage. I said we could have spent our whole trip there, right? My sister and I went to an interesting, if poorly done, exhibit of Lissitzky's work. and my parents saw more of the palace interiors and a collection of ancient artifacts from people who lived in the area that is now Russia around 2,000 BCE. We then visited the Peter and Paul Fortress, one of the first structures built in St. Petersburg. We toured a prison that was used to house political prisoners in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I'm sure those prisoners never imagines that a bunch of foreign tourists would be traipsing around their cells.

In the late afternoon, we headed to the train station to catch our overnight train to Vladimir. An overnight train is an essentially Russian experience; we opted for the second-class kupe compartment (a compartment with four bunked beds), and it was clean and fairly comfortable. Our train left St. Petersburg a little after 5pm and arrived in Vladimir at 4:15am. In theory, this allowed time for at least a little sleep, but I think none of us really slept very much. The combination of frequent passing trains, occasional stops, and constant lurching and bumping didn't make for good sleep. But, after brushing our teeth in the train bathroom (which fortunately was nice and clean) and eating the oranges that we brought with us for breakfast, we got off the train in Vladimir, ready to begin the next part of our trip.

In a historic grocery story on Nevsky Prospekt