St. Petersburg, Russia

Greetings from Saint Petersburg Russia. First off, we were warned over and over again about Russian immigration and how difficult it was going to be to get through customs if you didn’t do a tour through the cruise line. Not true – completely not true. Going through Russian immigration was a breeze. To be fair, we were booked with a tour company, but it was fast and easy and we’re both quite proud of having a Russian border entry stamp in our passports.

The tour was an all day tour which was exhausting. Traffic is a nightmare. Russians drive on the right hand side of the road…most of the time….unless they don’t feel like it. There was one point where we were coming back to the ship and we had people in cars going the opposite direction on both sides of the bus.

We saw Pushkin, the summer palace of the Tsars, which was looted and damaged significantly by the Nazis. They’re still in the process of restoring it and re-creating the furniture and artwork, but most of it is a replica of the original which was lost. Then we went to the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, where the Romanoff tsars are buried, and then went to see the Hermitage, which is the Russian equivalent of the Louve. It was once a winter home for the Catherine the Great but is now a major art museum – it was started with works of art that Catherine collected. It’s supposed to take 2 weeks to see. The tour guide did it in two hours. It was like aerobics on art. (Steph – I (Jim) thought of you the whole time – there’s a business concept here – it just needs the right beat behind it). What struck me most was the way the character of the rooms changed with the art. I don’t know if the palace was built that way, or was just decorated that way after it was turned into a museum. The artwork here is all the original – whatever had been in the palace was moved to the basement and hidden before the Nazis were due to arrive, but the Nazis never actually made it into the city of St. Petersburg so everything was saved.

We did have lunch in a Russian restaurant and Jim had caviar on hard boiled eggs – which he loves. His grandmother was Russian (native) and apparently as a small child discovered that he liked caviar. So she used to send it to him – by the case! He would eat it as an afternoon snack – to the shagrin of his mother who couldn’t believe how fast he could shovel the stuff down. Of course he had no idea of the cost at the time (not that he would have cared!!). He did find out over here that the caviar he prefers is from Salmon (not Sturgeon), which is MUCH less expensive, based on the restaurant prices. That’s not much comfort to Ray!

The tour guide was OK – he spoke very clear English. Jim had brought a copy of his grandmother’s baptismal certificate with me. She was born in Elizabethgrad, and was baptized in Petrograd (St. Petersburg). He said that the church was no longer there, but did know the site where it had been and was able to show it to us from a distance.

We’re were both exhausted by the end of the day. We napped for a bit, but we both decided to keep going. We had dinner with our friend Ti from Lafayette and ended the evening chatting with a guy from Los Angeles who runs an adolescent treatment center and gets lots of SAMHSA grants requiring an evaluator – so I ended up doing a little marketing for my business. We got up this morning at 7am to get ready for the trip and Jim commented that it felt like we were going to work. Between the time change the previous night and the grueling day yesterday, we were both exhausted. Ray’s really good about remembering that we’re on vacation and said “we don’t HAVE to go” and so we ended up skipping the tour today and went back to sleep – we didn’t wake up until almost 11am. The only downside here is that because we have to dock in the commercial shipping area, there’s no way to just get off and stroll about the city leisurely, although the Russian government wouldn’t allow it anyway – we have to have specific tours in Russia – no roaming about the streets looking for a Starbucks. So we’ll have a relaxing day aboard the ship – then we sail about 6pm for Helsinki.