Monday: Church of the Spilled Blood, St. Isaac's Cathedral, Yusupov Palace

First we started by touring the Church of the Spilled Blood. This was built by Alexander III to commemorate the place where his father Alexander II was killed by a terrorist bomb. The Russian style of this church contrasts greatly with the rest of the city

Inside the church are incredible mosaics covering the walls and the ceiling. From a distance they looked like paintings because the mosaics are so intricate. During the Soviet regime, the building was used as a warehouse for a theater.

This is the monument marking the exact spot where the bomb placed by the terrorist exploded, killing Alexander II.

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On the way to St. Isaac's, we stopped at Baskin Robbins to have ice cream. Next we toured St. Isaac's Cathedral, a huge cathedral which can hold over ten thousand people.

First we climbed up the circular stairs to the rotunda and looked around the city.

This is the Mariinsky Palace with a statue of Nicholas I in front.  Astoria Hotel is the building on the left with the red awnings. Invitations to the Nazi victory party at Astoria Hotel were printed but never sent. These were found in Germany after the war.

Behind the trees is the statue of Peter the Great on horseback.

Then we toured the inside of the cathedral, decorated in neoclassical style. The dome was made of a mixture of gold and mercury which killed many of the workers but is apparently the original layer of gold from over a hundred and fifty years ago. The third largest dome in the world, it's actually a double dome with 120,000 clay pots inside to create unique acoustics. We didn't try yelling inside the cathedral to test them out. The cathedral took forty years to build and was finished in 1858; the first five years were spent placing 5,000 thirty foot long pylons to prevent the cathedral from sinking into the marsh. The columns are made from single pieces of red granite and weigh 80 tons each.

Our next stop was the Yusupov Palace where Rasputin was murdered.

We saw the bachelor apartment of Felix Yusupov and saw a wax representation of the story of Rasputin .

There were also displays of Rasputin's handwriting (he was mostly illiterate) and, elsewhere in the house, of letters written to the family by Alesandr Pushkin, Russia's favorite poet. Most of the 1200 paintings were nationalized in 1917 and went to other museums such as the Hermitage.

Some of the chandeliers were made from paper mache but made to look like bronze.

The billiard room had such perfect acoustics that a whisper anywhere in the room could be heard perfectly all over the room.

On the way to the train station we drove past the flat that Tchaikovsky rented and a block later the flat where Doestovesky lived when he wrote "White Nights."

After this tour we took the train back to Moscow, arriving at the apartment around 1 AM at which point I promptly discovered the only electrical outlet in the apartment which was malfunctioning and caused all the electricity in the apartment to go out. Fixing it involved a trip to the manager who had to call in an electrician.