St. Petersburg Hermitage (July 9, 2019) #15

After a leisurely breakfast in the apartment it's time to stroll down to the Alexandre Column in Palace Square, where we will meet our guide.  We purchased a Skip-The-Line small-group tour as that is one of the better ways to see this place during the summer, when there can be quite a crush.  Spoiler Alert!  Do not, under any circumstances, go to the Hermitage on a Tuesday.  (This is Tuesday.)  The museum is closed on Sunday and Monday, it is July, and there are ravening hordes of tourists beating on the doors, wanting to Get In!  Our skip-the-line tickets bought us 40 minutes in the skip-the-line line, which admittedly was better than the poor people waiting in the other lines who may still be out there for all I know.  Did I mention it was starting to rain?  Really really rain?  We endure these hardships and indignities so that you don't have to.  Please leave a suitable donation at the door on your way out.

Peter the Great built his Winter Palace along the Neva River in the early 18th century, and Catherine the Great turned it into a more-or-less art gallery during her reign.  So the Winter Palace and the Hermitage were more or less the same thing, or not, or both.  Now it's an art museum, and a pretty incredible one.  When the museum outgrew the original Winter Palace they just bought or took the building next door and bolted it on, and this happened a number of times until it reached its present size.  Which is big.  It's also bewildering; after a couple hours in the place I didn't have the foggiest idea where I was or where I'd been or how to get back there to take another look!

The rooms are worth the visit all by themselves.

(pics of the rooms)

Then there's the art.

(pic of Art)

And then there's history or something.

(pics of something)

After 3 hours the tour ended at the coffee shop, which was great as we were starved.  Steve managed to ferret out a small table and Deb stood in line for 30 minutes to get some snacks, and we found an outlet to recharge our cameras.  Pro tip!  Buy an extra battery for your camera if you come to St. Petersburg.  One isn't enough.

Our cunning plan was to rest, refresh, and return to the galleries to revisit a few things, but we found that our feet were done and the crush of people in the galleries was very daunting.  Don't go to the Hermitage on Tuesday.  Having said all of that, it was a wonderful experience not to be missed.  It's an amazing place.

Once we staggered out of the building on the river side we immediately regained some our energy and decided to stroll up the embankment past the Admiralty Building, through the gardens, and around St. Isaac's Cathedral.  

(pics of the area)

By then it was half past dinnertime, so we found a lovely sidewalk restaurant, then a slow walk home and done for the day.  Peterhof tomorrow!

St. Petersburg Bus and Boat (July 7-8, 2019) #14

The Sapsan train from Moscow to St. Petersburg was a very different experience.  Averaging 200 kph, it takes 3.5-4 hours of very smooth and quiet travel and there you are.  And they wash the windows!  It's $130/ticket, and you can fly Aeroflot for $85, but the train is an experience and both stations are in city center, which saves at least an hour or two plus about another 3 hours for check-in and security.  The train is a much more convenient option if you're touristing.

Our apartment is perfectly acceptable other than the mandatory Beyond Thunderdome experience going up and down the stairwell, and it is an excellent location just a 10-minute walk from the Admiralty and the Hermitage.  By the time our Yandex gets us there it's late afternoon, but there's still plenty of time for an extended walkabout while we're looking for a place to eat.  Not being experienced European travelers, neither of us have seen anything like this place before.  Canals!  With miles and miles of  beautifully restored pre-Revolution apartments facing them!  And it's not raining!

(a few pics of the canal,etc)

Next morning dawns, and after a quick breakfast we're off to St Isaac's Cathedral as that's where the hop-on bus lives.  St. Petersburg has three hop-on hop-off bus routes, plus a hop-on Boat (!), and you can buy a ticket that includes all of them for 1, 2, or more days.  We bought the 1-day ticket as our other 2 days will be full of the Hermitage and the Peterhof and whatever else we can fit in.  On a nice day the bus is great, you can sit in the open air, watch the world go by, and listen to a canned commentary on everything you're seeing.  Steve could even plug his hearing-aids streamer in and listen along, so he didn't have to make stuff up like he usually does...  Needless to say, this city is stuffed to the gills with palaces, cathedrals, historic districts such as Nevsky Prospekt, parks, museums, etc.  We could easily spend a month here and not see everything.  After a month touring Russia, our overwhelming impression of St. Petersburg is that This Is Different.  Moscow was very different than the rest of Russia, but it was still essentially Russian.  This feels more like perhaps a European city that just happens to be in Russia.

(pics from the bus tour)

After the bus tour it was time for the boat tour, which covers some of the same ground (figure of speech) but from a completely different perspective.  And they have beer.

(pics from the boat tour)

One of the things we had noticed on the bus tour that very much piqued our interest was the Faberge Museum, so we decide to walk up Nevsky Prospekt to see if we could find it.  We did.  And boy, was it ever worth it!  It's an amazing place.

(pics from Faberge)

Then it was time for a slow walk home, dinner at a sidewalk restaurant, and early to bed.  Hermitage tomorrow!