The Best of St Petersburg Crammed Into One Weekend

For our upcoming Azamara Baltic cruise in June, we will be docking in St. Petersburg. I am so excited about this because I fell in love with this grand city when I visited it once before, in the autumn of 2013. There was a discounted fare available to Russia at the time, so I took the opportunity to fly to St. Petersburg for a self-indulgent weekend.

The city stands in sharp contrast to Moscow with regard to its culture, cuisine, and tourism (see the travel post on my Moscow trip here). Whereas it was difficult to find English speakers in Moscow, I had no trouble with language barriers in St. Petersburg as many people spoke English. The city has a European vibe and reminds me of Vienna.

With just two days to explore the city that weekend, I tried to include the most interesting experiences into my itinerary. I had a scrumptious breakfast each day at Coffeeshop (a Parisian style cafe), wandered the streets people watching, toured the Winter Palace and felt like a princess (alas no time for the Hermitage but I will see that on this upcoming trip), stood in awe before the Church of the Spilled Blood, dined at Cafe Baje for some spicy Caucasian cuisine, purchased a fur hat, climbed to the top of St. Issac’s Cathedral to watch the sunset, and took in the most beautiful dance performance I have ever seen at the Marinsky Theatre. It was an unforgettable solo trip, and one I’d recommend to anyone.

Church of the Spilled Blood

Hazelnut Torte at Coffeeshop

Assorted cakes at Coffeeshop

St. Issac's Cathedral

View from the top of the cathedral

Winter Palace

View from the Tsar's Box at Marinsky Theatre

Comments

Board Game Review: Anno 1800

Whenever Martin Wallace designs a new game, I am all over it. This is because I absolutely love Brass Birmingham (another MW designed game); in fact Brass Birmingham is my #1 board game of all time. Over the years, his other games I've tried have been pretty good, but not necessarily amazing must-buys. Still, I keep trying each new release of his, searching for that next star performer. That's why I'm excited to report that Anno 1800 is, in fact, a star performer, and an amazing must-buy board game. Anno 1800 was adapted by the publisher (Kosmos) from a Ubisoft video game of the same name. In the board game, players take on the role of industrialists, charged with developing their island economies and exploring other islands. Each player begins the game with a personal industry board with trade & exploration ships, a shipyard, and industrial goods tiles printed on the board. A starting collection of workers (wooden cubes) of various types to produce the goods is a...

Board Game Review: Expeditions

Expeditions is my favorite game in the Stonemaier Games portfolio to date. The game is a sequel to Scythe, and continues the narrative years in the future. It has taken everything I loved in Scythe and expanded on it, while chucking out everything I didn’t care for (the combat). Designed by Jamey Stegmaier, Expeditions brings us into an age when a meteorite has crash landed into Siberia and things begin to go sideways for all who encounter it. One team after another sets out to investigate the crash site and they are never heard from again. No one knows what happened to them. Now it’s our turn to find out what’s really going on, each of us leading a competing expedition team into Siberia to bring back desperately needed answers. During a game of Expeditions, all players are seated around the game board, which is made up of individually placed hex tiles laid out as shown above. At the bottom of the game board is an insert affectionately known as the base camp. The base camp holds ...

A Fortunate Trade, an Unexpected Pledge of Support, and a Win for Yin!

What follows is the true and unredacted account of my tour of duty as a command leader for the Yin Brotherhood. Map: 5p POK Kazadoom’s Notch Map generated on https://ti4-map-generator.derekpeterson.ca/ Factions: Yin, Yssaril, Nekro, Vuil’raith, Hacan. Round 1 objectives: Engineer a Marvel (R1-1); Push Boundaries (R1-2) Five experienced leaders gathered this weekend to prove themselves worthy. As the Yin, I found myself wedged between the Hacan (around the corner of a notch in the galaxy) and the Yssaril. Word had come down to the Blessed on Darien through our ambassadors and spies that both nearby factions were set on amassing larger fleets and armies, but to what end we were unsure. The Blessed discussed the matter at great length and decided our best defense was to rebuild our flagship the Van Hauge and to take control of as many planets as we could (more, at least, then our neighbors). That would allow us to stand firm in the face of any aggression. As a command leader, I...