Saint Petersburg, Russia Day 1

St. Petersburg was only recently founded as a city around 1703 A.D. It is named after Peter the Great Tsar of Russia at the time. St. Petersburg has been renamed several times and most recently changed its name from Leningrad back to St. Petersburg. But we are told people who lived there when it was called Leningrad still refer to it as such. It’s situated on marshland and has a great maritime history. It is a desperately cold and dreary most of the year. That is why some of their buildings are painted in bright colors.

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We arrived in St. Petersburg with great anticipation. I was looking forward to this port most of all. Our ship was in port for 2 days, and we were going to make the most of it. We had a total of 4 excursions for both days planned. My wife had met a family, from Toronto, on Facebook that was looking for another family to fill their private excursion. The wife’s parents had to back out of the entire cruise for medical reasons, and they had to try to fill this excursion. We met the Martins face to face briefly before the actual tour. The Martin’s, Todd and Tanya, had two teenage daughters Olivia and Charlotte, who were scheduled to meet us early Sunday for our excursion. We thought the families would make a good match; their daughters were 16 and 14 years old while our kids were 14 and 12 years old.

We met our charming tour guide, Katya, promptly after we got off the ship and after we went through a passport control area. (Russia was the only stop on our cruise where you couldn’t get off the ship by yourself or without a guide unless you had a Visa). Since it was a private tour we could go wherever we wanted- although this was Russia so you really couldn’t go WHEREVER you wanted. Katya suggested we go to the Hermitage Museum first before it officially opened, but it would require a $10 per person extra fee, which we all readily agreed to. After the museum opened it would become so overcrowded it would be hard to see some of the exhibits.
When we arrived at the museum, there were hundreds of people already standing outside in line, but Katya said there were 4 entrances, and the lines become ridiculously longer later in the morning. Also, the museum was closed the following day, Monday. We spent a total of two hours inside the Hermitage, which is a series of 18th-century buildings, including Catherine the Great’s winter palace. The buildings were unbelievably massive, over 600 hundred rooms in total. I think the kids were ready to go long before the end of 2 hours. The number of paintings, sculptures, and artifacts were indeed dizzying.

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After, the fantastic tour at the Hermitage Museum, we made a stop at the Spilled Blood Church, which was the site where Alexander II was assassinated. We then stopped for shopping so we could pick up some Russian vodka and other gifts for the people back home. We wound up buying matryoshka (LINK) dolls and put some bottles of vodka in them to give as gifts.
Lunch was at a restaurant that Katya recommended called Tsar. I, along with everyone else, ordered a typical Russian dish, beef stroganoff, potato pancakes, but I did not order borsch, which is beet soup. We tried a drink which was made from a Russian ‘pinecone’ which you could eat because it had been soaking in the juice for many hours or days. It was different, and I think everyone liked it except, of course, the kids.

After lunch, we went to the Faberge Museum. My wife and I had sat for a lecture about the famous Faberge eggs earlier on in the cruise. I found it to be interesting loaded with history about Karl Faberge. We didn’t have a lot of time in the Faberge museum, but that was more than fine because it was a tiny museum. They only had 11 of the famed Faberge eggs while 14 were in private collections in the United States. The rest of the 54 eggs are scattered throughout the world in other collections, and several of them are still missing. Afterward, we were escorted back to the ship and had to go back through passport control and.

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Our tour guide, Katya, was terrific with her fantastic knowledge of the buildings, the paintings, and the culture of Russia. Everything we saw and drove past, she knew about. In college, she majored in Museum studies and then picked up English as a hobby, whereas most tour guides do the opposite.
Later that evening, we had a canal cruise from 7-10 pm. Coincidentally we had a friend from Denver who just went on the same canal cruise the week before. My wife spoke with her briefly while we were in Copenhagen, and she mentioned that the canal cruise was not very good. Probably a lot of you reading this have been on one of these types of tours before, and they are usually just so-so. But I was pleasantly surprised to say that we had a fantastic experience. We sat upstairs on the boat in the fresh air while there were seats downstairs with the tour guide with a very dry sense of humor. After a while, the tour guide invited everyone downstairs to enjoy the folk show with singing and dancing. So, my son and I decided to sit downstairs and were treated to a very animated woman and man dressed in traditional Russian costumes singing Russian folk songs. I, of course, got picked to dance with both of them, which made the trip very memorable.

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We got back to the boat around 10 pm and were pretty beat. We would get up early again the next day and have another full day ahead of us.