1. city: St. Petersburg

I arrived 1st of July a bit in advance of the official start of the SU. However, I enjoyed my time together with very nice Russian organizers and early-participants!

The first impressions... A soviet building with Lenin statue:

Tsarskoe Selo - the town of Pushkin with a beautiful palace where we went in with Russian student ticket ;)

and had a lot of fun while playing Russian children games in the magnificent park

After the trip we ate in a Chaina Loska (чаина ложка) the unique pancake restaurant chain... oh it was sooo good with mushroom and bacon (and cheap!)

On 3rd July, the SU officially started.
The city of St. Petersburg with a lot of water and channels...

What I liked the most... The Church of the Saviour of Spilled Blood:

St. Isaac Cathedral:

We also went up to the top of the Cathedral:

The 2nd biggest museum of the world:

by the way, this was approx 1/10 of the queue to get in... we waited 3 hours and started from the half of the queue :) but unfortunately still we had too little time inside the museum... with really famous paintings!!!!

And the Hermitage inside so full with peintings that is hard to imagine!

Every night around 1:30 am the bridges of St. Petersburg are opened... this is the time when all the tourists say "WOW" and all the Russians (who live on the other side of the river) say "FUCK". It is not possible to imagine how many toursits were there on the side of the river to watch this unique moment...

Metro... strategic importance to Russians (in case of a war) therefore it is forbidden to take pictures down there... let me correct... nothing is impossible in Russia... just a matter of money ;)
but back to the story of Metro: same vagons as in Budapest Metro (of course we also have the Russian ones) but the way between stations are sooooo long (in average 5 minutes going really fast) and the Metro goes really deep down the earth...
And Russians know how to build Metro... in 1 year they build a whole long line... not like in Budapest... :)
In Moscow Metro is a different story... with 20 million people... so crowded in every moment of the day even when the metro is coming in every minute. And most of the stations are really special... you feel like being in a museum: statues, mosaics, huge columns: everything is nice!