[Dmitry Markov]

I live in Moscow, but my wife and I like to visit Petersburg couple times a year on weekends. My impressions of center parts of the city are that it was not built to live in - it was built as a showcase. So it has some phantasmagoric ghostly appearance - lines of sidestreets with faded colors of the houses where no life seem to dwell (especially strong these feelings are when walking the streets in early morning - about 5 to 7 o'clock). But the palaces, cathedrals, museums on the contrary look more alive than common houses. It gets into the eye that Petersburg was built for them - and they are the truly inhabitants of the central parts of the city. Suburbs look more like the normal city - you can see that people came there to live and work, but the center... Sometimes I think that palaces and official buildings where built first and after that some will have brought citizens, houses and so on to be the background of the first ones.
Nevertheless I do like the city indeed - walking the streets in the night and in early morning, sitting in multiple cafes, visiting museums and suburban parks - Tzarskoe Selo and Pavlovsk and so on...