St. Petersburg Feature

St. Petersburg's mighty Neva River creates some of its most picturesque views, making it easy to forget that it is a working river and transport route for the import and export of many goods and raw materials. A working river, yes, but not during winter when it freezes over. This means that during the navigation season (April-November), the Neva is crowded with ships making up for the winter months. However, since its bridges are too low to allow ships to pass and it would cripple the city to lift them frequently during the day, the city's bridges are raised at night from 1 am to about 5 am. There are published schedules for each bridge, some of which are lowered once during the night, but these are notoriously unreliable. If you don't want to get caught on the wrong side of the river from where you are staying and be stuck until morning, think about heading home before 1 am. What at first sounds like a terrific inconvenience for a large, busy city has been turned into something positive by St. Petersburgers: during White Nights the raising of attractively illuminated bridges has become a crowd-pleasing ritual and "I missed the bridges" has become the perfect excuse to party until dawn.