A walk in the park: zebras, octopus and squirrels

The weather forecasters promised the usual February weather: snow and rain. But are we always ready to believe promises? We did not want to sit at home all day, we wanted beautiful scenery and fresh air. Especially since it hasn't snowed or rained yet, and high up in the sky we could see breaks in the pall of clouds. What if the weather forecasters were wrong and we could walk in the park? We decided to take a chance and go for a walk. Getting ahead of myself, I'll tell you the bottom line (although it's against the rules of an exciting story) - the weather forecasters were almost right, but fortunately not quite. Only fine snow was falling from the sky, no rain.

We got to Petrovskaya Square by trolleybus, and then we had to cross the Great Petrovsky Bridge to get to the park. We specifically planned the route of the walk so that we could admire the view of the Gulf of Finland from the bridge. We had completely forgotten how badly the roads are cleaned in our city this winter. The sidewalk was covered with snow, but we were lucky that the ice crust hadn't formed, or we would have needed special equipment to cross the bridge.

In the meantime, the weather had settled. The sky was covered in a solid gray pall and it was starting to snow. The view from the bridge was still beautiful: light gray ice of the Malaya Nevka River in the foreground, light gray ice of the Gulf of Finland in the background, light gray sky in the upper part of the picture.

The same view, but a small island is in the foreground.

Alley in the park.

The central alley of Seaside Victory Park.

The central alley of Seaside Victory Park. If you look closely, you can see the bus stand in the back of the frame - we don't have to go back across the bridge, we take the bus right here after the walk.

Rain or snow, the training is on schedule.

Neither the fountain nor the rides work in winter.

The sculpture "Sailor of the Baltic Fleet". The author of the monument is sculptor L.I. Shterenshtein from Lviv.

Gazprom Arena Stadium. This is the furthest point of our walk. There is a metro station behind the stadium, but it works only on soccer game days.

The box office pavilions of the stadium. The multicolored billboard reads, "bright day in any weather".

Off to the side of the central alley, I noticed a brick bollard decorated with figures of zebras and rhinoceroses.

I turned onto the narrow path to get a closer look at the paintings. I stood still and looked at the murals, and my still figure almost blended in with the surrounding scenery, and a few squirrels were playing a game of catch-up quite close by. I immediately started taking pictures. Sometimes it turned out that way:

But much more often it came out something like this:

There is only one way to slow down this continuous movement, it is called "nuts".

The snow did not even think of stopping; on the contrary, there were more and more snow flakes, and we turned toward the bus station to go home. But on the way we met another member of the fauna: a giant snow octopus.