Russia - Happy International Labour Day!

We have been having a hard time finding inexpensive train tickets for our return trip to Moscow because of the holiday. We kept asking the consierge which holiday, but she didn't know. Lonely Planet mentions Victory Day on May 9th, but nothing on May 1st, but according the section on Belarus it is International Labour Day. I'm guessing that Russia must celebrate this too since they are a nation. The real question is, why don't we get this day off in the States? We're a nation too, right?

We had to go to the train station to purchase train tickets for Saturday night since the ticket center that the consierge uses is closed today for the holiday. She wrote down the information that we needed, but without the help of a friendly Russian, we would have failed for sure. Even with her help, we ended up on the slowest overnight train (12 hours) arriving in Moscow at 2:00 PM. It was either this or pay 12,000 Rubles each for an 8 hour train. At least, we will get to see some of the country-side during the ride.

After our adventure at the train station, we took the metro to Vasilesvsky Island. This is just across the Neva river from the Historic District of St. Petersburg. We walked through the Menshikov Palace which is free the first Thursday fo the month and attempted, against Tracy and Andy's advice, to go to the Museum of Anthropology & Ethnography. The attempt failed because the museum was closed for the holiday.

We walked around the tip of the island and made our way to the Peter & Paul Fortress. There is a small beach there and much of the town was sunbathing along the river, including men that really shouldn't be wearing speedos and women that really shouldn't be wearing bikinis. Once inside the fortress it was really no surprise to find it under construction. We were still able to go inside the Cathedral, which was fabulous in all it's golden glory.

After leaving the fortress we walked across a few bridges and found ourselves near the entrance to the Summer Garden and this time it was open, and there were May flowers. The Summer Palace isn't really that impressive, especially after the last few palaces that we've seen, but we took pictures all the same.

We had a delicious lunch of Georgian dumplings (something between a ravioli and a pot sticker) and are currently killing some time until our scheduled evening entertainment. We will be taking in the ballet Cinderella at the Mariinsky Theater.