Saint Petersburg vs Moscow: What are the main differences between the two?

Firstly, Saint Petersburg is an easy city, easily navigable on foot. Moscow is a complex city, still walkable with some extra effort and time. To give you an idea: in Saint Petersburg, we walked a maximum of 13 km a day and never needed the metro, in Moscow the maximum distance we were able to cover on foot was 23 km, plus we had to use metro once or twice a day.

Moscow streets are impressively clean and elaborately decorated, and even on ice-cold winter days, it’s an uttermost joy to explore the city on foot. Saint Petersburg tries to keep up, though it’s not exactly visually appealing. And unlike the common misperception, Moscow has a much longer and much more chaotic architectural history (over five centuries older than Saint Petersburg).

Both Moscow and St. Petersburg have a wealth of attractions, including museums, palaces, churches as well as remarkable culinary and nightlife scenes but Moscow is by far more variegated. It’s one of those cities in the world I’d love to visit again and again.