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St Petersburg, Russia—Monday, May 26, 2014
Before we left home, Valerie and I had thoroughly studied the tour offerings for this port for 3 reasons. 1) We knew that we could only leave the ship without purchasing a Russian visa ($169 each and hassle) if we were with a sanctioned tour group; 2) We had spent several days in St. Petersburg before and wanted to now see something we hadn’t seen before; 3) We wanted to make sure we had tickets for tours we did want to see or we would be stuck on the ship for 3 days, if the tours were sold out.
We woke up on Monday morning with the ship docked right downtown with a glorious view of the city and its monuments and church spires. Our first tour wasn’t scheduled until early evening, so Valerie spent some time on the upper decks taking pictures of the shipyards and sites seen from our berth.
The beautiful city Peter the Great founded in 1703 was once swampland at the confluence of several rivers making their way to the Gulf of Finland. It has unbelievably sumptuous Czarist-era palaces, as well as, intricately designed buildings in a
wide palette of pastel colors, looking like someone had squeezed decorative frosting all along the doorways, windows and arches, and then added statues, friezes, medallions, and other embellishments. Golden onion-domed churches, some covered in bright colored tile, are dotted here and there in the city.
Peter the Great was inspired by his travels to London, Paris, and Vienna and carefully planned out his city. He created canals and passageways throughout the many river delta islands and linked them by ornate metal bridges that have the look of Venice. Most of his design and a good many of the buildings remain intact today (some in great need of restoration), but they are a testimony to St. Petersburg's pride -- and the inability of Hitler to destroy the city during World War II.
St. Petersburg was the capital of Imperial Russia from 1712 to 1914 and still remains Russia's cultural capital with an abundance of art work especially those pieces housed in the Hermitage and other Museums. All the big names in Russia have been affiliated with St. Petersburg, including Faberge, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Tchaikovsky and Tolstoy. The city itself is like a living museum.
Our tour was called a
“white nights canal tour”; the “white” referring to the fact that being so far north, sundown turning the sky to “black” comes very late at night. The canal tour gave us a chance to see it from the water after we were driven through the city by bus to the boat dock. See the photos for some of the highlights of our tour.
One thing on the tour that was kind of fun, was watching a young boy run along the street from bridge to bridge to wave at us as we motored underneath. It didn’t occur to us that he would be on the dock at the end of the tour, with his hand out, wanting a tip for amusing us. After we all loaded back on the bus, the driver took us by the gorgeous, brightly tiled, multi-domed Church of Our Savior of the Blood and then parked there while a large group of people got off and walked to a bookstore/souvenir shop about 3 blocks away. We stayed on the bus as, surprisingly, we had visited that same bookstore on our own, during our first trip to St. Pete.
As we drove back to the
ship along the shoreline, Valerie tried to capture the beauty of the lights of the City and its monuments, the Fortress of Peter and Paul, churches, palaces, and bridges reflected in the waters of the Neva River.
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