today has been an eventful day. we toured the peter and paul fortress which is located at the fork of the neva river in downtown st petersburg. there's tons of history there and almost all of russian royalty was buried there. next we took a boat tour through all the canals of st pete. seeing everything from the water was pretty awesome. after that a few of us decided to check out the st petersburg gem and mineral expo. it was essentially a glorified flea market and all the vendors were way to intimidating to try and speak english with. the weather has been beautiful, the temperature is in the 60's or 70's and it is quite windy all the time. overall life in russia is pretty wonderful.