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Published: August 27th 2013
St Isaac's Cathedral
St Petersburg, RussiaThe St Petersburg story continues at about 30 minutes past midnight (nominally thought of as "last night"). That’s when we got back to the cabin, set the wake-up call for 5:30 in the morning, and went straight to bed. That first day had been phenomenal, but was really exhausting.
The alarm went off as scheduled and we sprang spryly out of bed (if you believe that we should talk about some hot investments), got dressed and the carry-bag repacked for another day. We went up for a quick breakfast and headed off the ship again. We got through immigration quickly this time (everyone seemed to have been ashore the day before so the line went fast) and found the right place for our tour bus. All this was before the 7:00 AM departure time. And once again our bus was one of the first ones to leave (second today), but that got us ahead of the pack. But today is Monday and the local folks were also on the road going to their work.
Something we failed to mention yesterday is that each of the tour groups use little radio transmitters from the guide and
St Nicholas - maybe
St Petersburg, Russia each person in the group have small ear pieces. Always before they had been little ear plugs that David could never keep in his ear, but in St Petersburg they have something which hangs over the ear lob with a miniature speaker pointed to the ear – these worked just fine for David and he did not have to use his “dorky” headphones.
Today the skies were cloudy in the morning, but cleared partially during the later morning, and by mid afternoon it was pretty clear. At first we were concerned that maybe we should have brought our jackets, but we didn’t. Happily it was nice temperatures and we had comfortable temps all day.
Our first stop was a photo-op outside St Isaac’s Cathedral. This is mostly because we were early for the first appointment and had time. The difference today is that the bus was able to park across the square and we were far enough back from the building to get good pictures. Also, when we got off the bus someone asked if it had rained and the guide said “No, they wash the street at night to keep it clean”. We
Hermitage
St Petersburg, Russia suspect they are just sprucing things up for the G20 meeting coming here soon, but he said it happens all the time. Anyway, we got some photos and got back on the bus.
Then we had another photo-op stop at St Nicholas Church – again because we were early, and because it was near our next destination. We were scheduled to visit the Yusupov Palace at 8:00. Our tour (and others) were granted an exceptional opportunity because they opened the palace (a privately owned facility – not government or church owned) 2 hours early for us. Leo had never heard of them doing this ever before and we all tried to express proper appreciation. This is the place where Rasputin was killed. We learned the whole story of Rasputin and his dealings with the Czar. There is also a conspiracy theory that it was actually a British agent who killed him, but those stories are too long to include here. Anyway, Yusupov is one palace which did not survive the war very well. Much of the belongings were taken when the family fled, but rumor was that 4 treasure box were hidden in the palace, which meant
people tore it to pieces until the found all 4 of them.. Now it has been gradually been repaired and refurbished. Quite a few of the furnishing have been replaced and it gave us a fairly good idea what the palace had looked like originally.
Then we were off to the Hermitage Museum. It is closed to the public on Mondays, but was open for tours only – that reduced the size of the crowds (people we talked to later who had been there on Sunday said it was totally jammed). This place is enormous and we were already warned that we could not possibly see all of it. There was a line outside (probably a couple of hundred people), but they moved along fairly quickly and we were inside in about 20 minutes. Before entering, everyone who was going to take a photo or movie needed a sticker (ordinarily you would have paid an extra fee for the sticker, but it was part of our tour fee). We seemed to walk all over the place – up and down stairs, along corridors and display rooms, yet Leo said that we only saw the tip of the
iceberg when we were finished. We did see the Gold Room (absolutely NO photos allowed in there), saw the 2 DaVinci paintings of the Madonna, saw the final painting done by Rembrandt, saw the painting which had been defaced with acid (which caused all the greatest paintings to be covered with a sheet of glass), and we saw many highly decorative rooms This had been the Czar’s Winter Palace and had appropriately ornate walls, ceilings, and floors. We saw so much that it is difficult to report it all here. Bottom line is that Leo knows an awful lot about Russian History, and about art history, and there really wasn’t any question he couldn’t answer. About 11:45 Leo’s phone rang and the other guide said her group had formed a revolution and wanted to leave. We were thoroughly exhausted too, but didn’t have the initiative to revolt until then. Anyway we had been getting more and more spread out as we walked through the rooms with tired legs and sore feet causing us to almost lose track of the rest of our group. Finally we ended with a visit to a gift shop (also closed on Monday but opened for
Dancers at Lunch
St Petersburg, Russia us) while we waited for the bus to come pick us up. We were tired to start with and we walked a long way, but with every step we saw something new and interesting, and learned more and more about the Russian noble life. It was definitely better to be a noble as opposes to the peasant.
At 11:45 we got picked up by the bus. At noon we heard the fortress cannon (see yesterday’s reference) and soon we arrived at our lunch restaurant. This time the meal was served in a 3
rd floor ballroom – happily there was a small elevator which Janet was able to take instead of climbing the stairs. Today we started with a shot of Vodka or glass of Champagne, and David got a glass of wine too. Again we had a salad and crêpes with caviar, mushroom soup, beef stroganoff, and ice cream. During the meal, we were entertained by Russian folk musicians, who actually drafted a few people from the audience to join on the dance stage – it was pretty funny. We enjoyed the meal and music, and relaxed until 1:30, at which time we were back on the
bus.
The next stop was a Shopping Visit where we were given 30 minutes in the souvenir stores. This would have been an ideal time to stay on the bus and take a short nap, but Janet had seen music boxes elsewhere that she wanted, so we went shopping with everyone else. Besides, David wanted a souvenir T-shirt for himself too. So we helped keep the Russian economy alive, spending more than 2200 rubles. We will find out how much that was when the transaction hits our credit card in dollars.
All aboard back on the bus for our final excursion visit. This was to the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood. This is where we finally hit all the crowds. Everywhere before Leo kept saying how lucky we were not to be crowded, even if it seemed a little crowded to us. Here it really was crowded, crowded, crowded! We were lucky that the bus was able to find a parking place. Leo got us tickets as usual and led us inside. This is where Alexander II was killed in 1881. In tribute to him they subsequently covered all the walls, ceilings,
floors, pillars, and posts with mosaics. Leo said there were 70,000 square feet of religious mosaics inside. That sounds like a huge number, but looking around it seems quite possible. The outside has giant onion-shaped domes in spectacular colors. We had seen the church from many view-points over the two days, but this was really a unique church. Unfortunately we were so tired that we probably didn’t appreciate it as much as we would have earlier in the day.
Janet was not too tired to remember to ask the question from yesterday. We had been told that two tombs in Peter and Paul were a different color than the rest. They are the tombs of Alexander and has wife. Even Leo had forgotten to mention it while we were inside, but Janet didn’t forget.
Then it was back on the ship and back to the port. We said our goodbyes to Leo and gave him plenty of appreciation for his excellent guidance the past 2 days. We were really tired, and had worried at some times that we might not be up to the physical challenges, but it was a spectacular two day visit.
We got through immigration one more time, on the ship without any trouble, and back to our cabin about 4:15. David went up to the Horizon Court to get us lemonade and iced tea (with a couple of cookies) and Janet was sound asleep by the time he got back at 4:30. She had a little nap which gave her just enough energy to go to dinner. David got started working on the day-1 blog but didn’t get it finished.
We and our neighbors all shared our experiences while we were eating. For appetizer, Janet had the Shrimp Cocktail and David had the Fettuccini Alfredo again. Janet had the Alaskan Seafood soup and David had the Cold Coconut Soup. We both had the Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding. For dessert, Janet had the cheesecake and David had Chocolate Praline Tart. No wine. No Vodka. No Champagne tonight.
After dinner, Janet went back to the cabin for more sleep. We do get an extra hour on the clock tonight (going West through the time zone tonight), but we will need an early wake-up call Tuesday morning in our next port. David didn’t
find the show in the Princess Theater to sound very interesting, but there was one on the Explorer Lounge which he really enjoyed. It was a pianist who played well, but was primarily a comedian. It was a good way to finish the day and get back into the cruising lifestyle.
However, after the show it was time to get to sleep and be ready for Estonia tomorrow. It is going to take a quite awhile to process all the pictures from St Petersburg, but we will try to get a few of them posted before too long. As for now, we will say goodbye to Russia and good night to all you blog readers.
Our 2-day St Petersburg tour was advertized to last 23.5 hours over the two days, with the ship being in port for just 35.5 hours. That’s packing about as much as possible in a port call. Watch for pictures sometime in the future, but there are so many we are still working on them.
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