Pyotr Alexeyevich Romanov. You can read all about him on the wiki pages. He founded St.Petersburg. A truly charming town and probably the most European’ised in Russia. It is probably the nicest place I visited West of the Urals.

I also think this town is preserved better than most other places after the great Wars. There seems to be some authenticity to the architecture and the tallest structures seem to be the one constructed by Peter. And the other tall structure is that or Peter himself. History has it that he fought the Swedes here and made St. Petersburg an important port town too. Incidentally, St. Petersburg was meant to be a model of Modern Russian in the 17th Century.

Since I was in the mode of shooting panoramas, I shot this one as a 7 shot sequence too and made a deepzoom composition. I wished there were some people for scale but it was a sunny but cold and windy day, so no luck there. It is really a tall structure, you can observe the apartments at the background for scale.

If you are reading via a rss reader, please visit the site for the deep-zoom content.

I wrote about the Hermitage in St Petersburg earlier. The place overwhelms the senses and once can pass by a Monet or Picasso and miss it completely. Here are some pictures I managed to shoot.

Click through to picasaweb and watch the slideshow in full screen.

The Trans-Siberian trip revolves around taking the long train Journey. We spent almost 7 days in the trains and traveled nearly 11,000 KM across Asia and Europe. The journey was incredible and more importantly comfortable. Meeting people on the train for a chat. Running out of stations in the freezing weather to take pictures, stretch and get some fresh air etc… was the common theme. I don’t know how it is in the Summer but the experience of going across Siberia in Winter is unique and needs to be experienced.

Here are some pictures to remember the train journey.

As always, click through for full screen slide shows.