Khabarovsk

Khabarovsk City History Museum

Actually the youngest museum in town, only opened in 2004. A small museum which details the history of Khabarovsk from its inception up until today. Covering the pre-revolutionary period, the October Revolution and the civil war in Khabarovsk, the city during World War II, and up until the Perestroika and modern Khabarovsk. The collection is mainly made up of everyday items, photographs and documents from private donations.

Fedotov Exposition Hall

Temporary exhibitions of professional painters, sculptures, designers and other artists from the far east. The exhibits changes monthly.

Geological Museum

Housed in a beautiful 19th century building, once belonging to a prominent local merchant family. True to its name, this museum has a huge collection of rocks and minerals – some even some from outer space, like a few moon fragments brought home to Earth by automatic probes and one of the world's largest iron meteorites which crashed into the Sikhot-Ailin mountains in the forties. If you are not into stones, you could check out the small section on tools and equipment related to prospecting in the region or the collection of prehistoric plant and animal fossils. Outside the museum there are a few large monoliths of minerals, ores and rocks.

Dynamo Park

A quite attractive park spreading over 30 hectares, immensely popular with locals on sunny days. The water ponds to the south are popular for splashing and cooling down. There are several nice, quirky statues cut from huge wooden logs dotted all over the park which can be interesting to trace down in a small treasure hunt for adults. There are also a handful of running amusements, cafés and beer gardens. Just across the street from the eastern entrance, Khabarovsk's local ice-hockey team battles it out in the premier Russian league in the Platinum arena.

Cathedral of the Transfiguration

Christianity is alive and well in Russia, as this golden domed church towering above Khabarovsk is evidence of. Only completed in 2004, at 83 meters it's the 3rd tallest church in all of Rusia - inside it's not that impressive, just large. The monastery, or rather the Theological Seminary, right next to it is also worth a look a brief look from the outside. Opposite, facing the Amur is a war memorial "Вечный огонь" "the eternal flame", rather kitschy but has good Amur views. The whole thing is labeled as the Ploshchad Slavy or the Square of Glory.

Arboretum

Founded in 1896 as a experimental laboratory, it was transformed into an a 12 hectare 27 acre botanical garden in the thirties. It's a nice place for a stroll among the many trees, bushes and flowers, about 800 different kinds of them gathered from nearly every continent; some exotic medical plants also grow here.

One of the oldest museums in the Russian far east, laid out in 6 sections in an impressive 1894 red-brick building. For the most part it's leaps and bounds ahead of the region's other museums, and with nearly half a million artifacts in the collection, they can afford to be picky about what they display. The ethnographic section with displays of indigenous cultures from around the Amur is unusually informative, but the zoology section is also worth a look, stuffed animals galore! To top it off, it has actually seen some substantial renovations lately, and they even have a few English captions here and there. May be worth considering but the price for foreigners is high for what you see.

Far Eastern Art Museum

Established in the thirties and now housed in the building of a former officers' club. Them seem to take most pride in their collection of Far Eastern aboriginal art, but they also have a rare collection of ancient Russian religious icons and Japanese porcelain. In the classic exhibition they have a few painters you may have heard of like Titian and Garofalo, but also some lesser known Russian masters.

Far Eastern Military Museum

Another impressive building from the turn of the 20th century, this one was the state bank up until the 1930s. Weapons galore propped up by medals and other memorabilia. If you are not interested in these sort of things, you can probably give it a miss, but they have a few cool war propaganda posters from the Great Patriotic War and a luxury officers' railway carriage from the twenties in the courtyard, if you need to entertain yourself for a while while any male company goes into boy mode.

There is a fantastic cluster of top notch museums along Shevchenko Street, just behind the tall blue-domed Church of Theotokos on Komsomolskaya Square towards the river and stadium. Not only are the museums some of the best in the far east, they also make their home in some impressive century-old buildings dating back to before the revolution. After a visit, the nice river promenade is just a short walk away, so you can wash all that new found knowledge away with some pivos in good company.