Baltic Adventure - Day 8

Statue of Peter the Great in Decembrists Square

Tuesday, June 29: St. Petersburg, Russia

For our second day in St. Petersburg, Alexander and Luba met us at the berth terminal just outside the Westerdam, and we headed off into the city. We had seen several sites in the city the day before, so today we covered some additional sites we had not yet seen. Our schedule got shuffled a little bit when we received word that we would be going to the Hermitage Museum later than originally planned in order to meet up with other Red October tours so we could all visit the Gold Room at the museum as well, which required a minimum of 10 people in a private tour.

After a driving tour through the city, we headed off to Peter-and-Paul Fortress, the location where Peter the Great founded St. Petersburg in 1703. Inside the fortress, we also visited the Peter-and-Paul Cathedral, which is the burial place of the Romanovs, including the recovered remains of the last Russian Emperor, Tsar Nicholas II and his family. Nicholas II and his family were executed by the Bolshiviks in 1918.

Next we drove over for a quick photo opportunity at the Church of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, more commonly known as the Church of the Spilt Blood, built on the site where Emperor Alexander II was assasinated in 1881. Since this church wasn't on our original itenerary, we didn't have time to go inside, but it was well worth the stop to see the outside.

Our next stop was a visit to St. Isaac's Cathedral, one of the finest archetectural monuments of the 19th century, and the former principal cathederal of the Russian capital. As the largest cathedral in St. Petersburg, St. Isaac's was designed to accomodate a standing audience of 14,000 people. The building is beautifully decorated with marble of 13 different colors, malachite, lapis-lazuli, paintings and mosaics made by the most famous Russian artists, and an impressive stained-glass image of Christ seen through the open doors of the magnificent Icon-Stand.

Before going to lunch at a local restaurant arranged by our tour company, we made a quick stop at the Red October gift shop for some souviner shopping and to pay for our tours. I cannot speak highly enough of the folks at Red October for their hospitality and professionalism in arranging two wonderful days of tours for us in St. Petersburg. (If you ever have the opportunity to visit St. Petersberg, look them up! And if you arrive in St. Petersburg by ship, don't let your cruise line excursion office scare you into believing that you won't be allowed off the ship without a Russian visa, or only by booking your excursions exclusively through the cruise line, because it's not true. Red October arranges group visas for all their guests, and we didn't have a single problem being cleared by Russian customs and immigration to go ashore each day. And the cost of the tours was pretty much the same as what the ship was charging.)

After lunch we headed over to the Winter Palace, which is also The Hermitage Museum. The Hermitage occupies six buildings situated along the embankment of the River Neva, right in the heart of St Petersburg. Put together over two and a half centuries, the Hermitage collections of art and artifacts (over 3,000,000 items) represent the development of world culture and art from the Stone Age to the 20th century. The place is literally mind-boggling.

Our first stop at the Hermitage was a special tour of the Gold Rooms, which exhibits works from Eurasia, the Black Sea Littoral in antiquity, and the Orient. It consists of around 1,500 works made from gold and dating from the 7th century B.C. to the 19th century A.D.

Next, Luba took us on a walking tour through the numerous palace rooms and art galleries. I don't think we even scratched the surface. The place is enormous. You could spend a week at the Hermitage and still not see everything. And the rooms are so elaborately decorated, one after the other, that your head spins at the enormity of it all -- and the amazing wealth of the people who once lived here. We opted not to take photos inside the building, which is probably a good thing, because we would never have been able to do justice to the place -- and we would have ended up with 6,000 photos instead of 600! So we do encourage you to take a virtual tour through the Hermitage website. Especially the rooms of the Winter Palace and the numerous art galleries. We saw the works of Raphael, da Vinci, Rubens, Picasso, Renoir, van Gogh, Monet and many, many others. The galleries seem almost endless.

After two days of non-stop touring, we were exhausted. But our gracious tour guides agreed to make one last stop not officially scheduled on our itenerary: a local grocery store. I love to see how ordinary people live when I travel, and grocery stores reveal many things about the people, the culture, the cuisine, and the economy. Luba and Alexander took us to an upscale store on Nevsky Prospekt, which is probably the Russian equivalent of shopping for groceries on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, but it was fun. And I got to stock up on some more bottles of Russian vodka! We enjoyed our time with Luba and Alexander and getting to learn a little more about life in Russia today through their eyes. It seems Russia has made considerable strides since the collapse of the Soviet Union, although many of the hardships in the transition to democracy and a market economy have fallen hardest on the older generation. The younger people, however, seem quite optomistic about the opportunities that have come with the dramatic changes in their government, and seem to have great hope for the future.

When it came time to say "goodbye," we were all a little bit sad, but greatful we'd had this wonderful opportunity to visit St. Petersburg. It was genuinely the highlight of our vacation.