Viborg

From St Petersburg we went four hours north to Viborg (Выборг), a small city close to the Finnish border. I expected a Soviet-era garrison town, but in fact it is quite a pleasant city. Centretown has handsome Finnish buildings along an inlet, with two large parks. On the outskirts is a 13th-century castle and other fortifications (the region was contested between the Swedish and Russian empires).

Here is one of the two parks. Elsewhere there are a few statues and some rusting carnival equipment.
Here is the Orthodox cathedral. There was also a Lutheran church in disrepair.
This is the view from the bridge, 15 minutes' walk from our hotel. As you can see, it a rural sort of city. I thought we took a picture of Castle Viborg, but I can't find it.
This is the detail of one of the downtown buildings.
We walked around the outskirts of the city for several hours. It reminds me a lot of Northern Ontario. Unfortunately, the area was thickly littered with broken bottles and sundry trash; apparently it is used by Finns for bush parties.

Our hotel was functional but expensive and unpleasantly bland. We had a reservation under Hotel Karelia, but it was also variously called Hotel Viborg and Hotel Druzhba.

Viborg is very far north by Canadian standards. St Petersburg is already at 60 N--the boundary between Canadian provinces and territories--and Viborg is four hours north of there. Consequently, in mid-summer, days are about 22 hours long. We didn't go out late at night because of the unfamiliar and probably unsafe surroundings, but we could see out the window through most of the night. In St Petersburg there is a 2-week long White Nights festival related to that, and in June and July the locals often meet downtown at 2am for the raising of the bridges because it is still light outside.

Being so far north, the population is essentially 100% white. Manual labourers were usually "little Russians," ie one of the non-Russian ethnicities of the Russian Federation.

For some reason, Viborgites dressed very oddly. Many young women had garish blue, purple, or orange clothes or hair, while the young men dressed like off-duty sailors. Yikes. I was afraid that would be the case across Russia, but I only really saw it in Viborg.