20120630 St Petersburg, Russia Saturday Clear, Cool
What a day.
I woke up at 0545 Russia time. The ship was headed into St Petersburg in a narrow channel. I took a few pictures out the balcony door of people fishing from the bank, then decided to get dressed. I came back and shot some more and in the process awakened D, who got up and shot some pictures as well.
We went to breakfast and watched as we passed by an old Russian submarine. Darned if we didn’t turn around and moor to the same pier. It’s an old Whiskey-class boat that is now a museum piece.
We sat in the waiting place for quite a while because the Russian authorities had not yet “cleared” the ship for entry. We hopped up at the first call, since we are using a private tour vendor, not the ships tours. Hiked up the pier past the “Whiskey” and through immigration. Russian bureaucrat treatment. Stern, no smile, no nonsense, go bang-bang-bang with the ink stamp and throw the passport back at you.
As we left that drill hall, we came to our tour leader, Kate, and the Mercedes mini-van that is ours with driver for two days. She has the flexibility to change our tour to suit conditions and she did. The conditions are these; a) a beautiful summer day at 60*N, (b) the first one in weeks, (c) it’s Saturday, (d) the whole damn town is out for recreation.
We traveled first to the fortress and cathedral of Peter and Paul. The fortress was really the start of St Petersburg, as it became the center of the town and prevented raids by the Swedes, thus providing security. Later, the cathedral was begun and has become a great attraction. All the major nobility are buried here, including Peter the Great and Catherine, down to Tsar Nicolas with his entire family, executed after the 1917 revolution.
We then turned around and went to a local gift shop (probably a kickback arrangement in here somewhere). But we looked and bought a few small items, and enjoyed looking at the nested Russian eggs and so forth.
Then we bussed off to the local hydrofoil dock and boarded. The thing got underway with a lot of shaking and banging, but settled down and scurried right along. We headed out into the Baltic, some 98 km from the heart of St Petersburg (hereafter StP). We pulled up to a pier and walked ashore. We saw way up a canal, a castle. Gold. Big. We walked a long way along the canal and finally approached the castle; this is Peter The Great’s Summer Castle, or Peterhof. The size of this place is amazing. To think that a small family could occupy several hundred rooms is mind-boggling. But it was (a) residence of the monarch and had to fit him, should he invite guests of sufficient rank to join him.
At one time, we were told, the canal actually ran into the lower level of the castle so guests could disembark within it. Later, when 15 miles of pipe were run from a natural spring at a greater height, a garden filled in the head of the canal, the castle filled in underneath it, and some 45 or 50 fountains were bronzed and gilded to decorate the place and amaze the guests.
You’ll have to look at the pictures, which I will try to annotate within a week or so to get the scale of this place. The whole estate is something like 15,000 acres and contains five full castles. Some of the other castles were guest houses. Some were favorite places of the monarch to spend time in. Incredible.
Andrew drove our Mercedes Benz Sprinter mini-van to a place called “Hotel” (no other names shown) for lunch. It was a set lunch of borscht, beef stroganoff, and caramel-vanilla ice cream. I wasn’t all that enthused about the borscht and the stroganoff had a little too much dill for my taste, but it was interesting.
Then, off to Catherine’s Palace, another nearly unbelievable place. There were tremendous crowds, since the day was nice and Saturday. Kate said this is a more popular attraction than Peterhof for the residents. Valerie’s knee hurt her during all the standing waiting for admission so Kate took her to a place to sit; we met later. Our tour of the palace ran all along the first floor, then back on the second and it’s a long house. Room after room of spectacular decorations, the most spectacular of which was the Amber Room - everything in amber but the mirrors. You’ll have to consult the pictures to believe the place, but photography of the Amber Room is prohibited.
Back on the ship (after passing the immigration person again), we dumped stuff in the stateroom and went up to the “international buffet” on the pool deck. It was nice, but I didn’t want much food, nor did D. So we took a few things and got wine. We were just about finished when Dmitry came along with a bottle of Stoli Elit and sold us on the idea of a shot apiece. He did this long spiel about how the russians judge decent vodka, and toasting with it, and on and on. It was nice. Then Doug and Joyce came along and we got to chatting and drinking more wine. We had a nice time and then went to the stateroom to start these notes.
We called son and family in the states to say “hi”. We chatted (for not too long) and said hi to Jamie. Good to hear their voices.
I took the notion to do some laundry, and started it. Then I forgot it. Finally, after laundry closing time, I remembered and dashed across the hall. The door was locked, but then a person let me in. Seems he was finishing his stuff when they locked the door, so he stayed to finish it. I put my stuff in the dryer for pickup in the morning.
Now I’m going to bed to finish filling in the blanks tomorrow; I really will catch up.
Picture Link OPicture Link D20120701 St Petersburg 59.932*N, 30.27578*E Rain, then clear & cool
Canal Cruise - we started the day by being taken to a canal boat up the Neva River. We scurried aboard to get seats out of the rain. The boat took us up the Neva, then into a side canal that ultimately let us out into the Neva downstream. Many interesting buildings - almost all 18th/19th century.
Hermitage Museum - we would have been taken to the Hermitage, but there was a marathon in progress. So we walked to the marathon track around the Hermitage, and a guard let us cross when there were no runners in range. The Hermitage Museum is the old Winter Palace, consisting of nine buildings, that was turned into a museum after the 1917 revolution. They claim it’s the second largest museum in the world in terms of items held.
Kate took us all around the first floor formal rooms to see their magnificence (see pictures). Then she conducted us through the second floor of the main building, which contains most of the art collection. We saw all the French impressionists in detail. There were exhibits of gold tableware, huge tapestries, and statuary. All in all, quite a place.
Lunch at Pie Place - our bus took us to a little restaurant which makes pies. I had a little chicken pie that was fabulous, and a cheese pie that tasted like our cheesecake. D had a chicken and a blueberry. Quite good, but the place was utter bedlam with take-out trade in addition to the sit-down tables.
St Isaac’s Church - Andrew, our driver, took us to St Isaac’s church, another fantastic pile of stone with a gold interior. We learned that Orthodox churches are all laid out east-west, with the icon screen obscuring the altar always on the east end. One stands through the whole service.
Rasputin Death Scene - by the time we arrived, the day had warmed and many, many, people came out. The minor palace we entered was impressive. The owners were not Romanovs but were wealthy. The house tour would have been interesting just by itself. The owners were collectors of art and built into the house several hiding places for the things they bought. The library had a concealed door to a storage space. The game room has a hemispherical far end where in people can sit and talk, but their voices will not be heard into the room. The pool table conceals a trap door into a basement. There is a Moorish room that has Arabic raised writing vertically laid out on the walls between vertical panels with designs.
You’ll have to google Rasputin for an overview of him. He was a mad-monk type who weaseled his way into the royal family and influenced them, particularly Alexandra. Others feared he would influence them in the matter of the war in progress, and they wanted the status quo. So a cabal decided to kill him. Kate noted they were not professional killers and didn’t do it well. They were dining with him in a basement dining room; one person was to have put poison into his glass. He kept dining. When they saw the poison hadn’t worked, they jumped him and stabbed him many times then went back upstairs. They came back later and found he had crawled down the hallway into the rest of the basement and was still alive. They shot him in the forehead (but it glanced off the skull). Some say he died there. Others say he crawled out an exterior basement door and died in the front yard of the adjacent house. Others say the perpetrators threw him into the canal to drown.
In any case, his body was found. The autopsy showed no poison in him. Several of the perpetrators wrote (conflicting) stories of his end, so you’ll have plenty of analysis to do if you get into this.
On the way to the next place Kate served us vodka (for the guys) or kirsch (for the ladies) and chocolate. Interesting tastes.
Church on Spilled Blood - the first bomb that went off hurt several people and wrecked the carriage of Alexander II. He got out of the carriage and the second bomb went off, which was enough to kill him. His son, Alexander III, built a chapel in II’s memory that was later enlarged into another huge pile of stone but with brilliantly colored domes and spires. All the interior art is mosaic except for the gilded altar screen and the jewels set into it. Absolutely fantastic.
And that was the last stop. We filled out a critique on our way back to the ship, giving high praise to Kate and to Andrew. We felt Kate did a wonderful job of getting us through places with a minimum of fuss on a weekend where everyone was out, including five cruise ships, and USS Normandy plus warships of other countries making a port call.
We went to our cabin to collapse. Our feet were tired and my lower back was hurting. We were stiff for the rest of the day.
We rejoined at dinner and had a nice chat with the good food. I had antipasto, veal schnitzel, and a raspberry-chocolate tart, with plenty of cabernet sauvignon from France.
We took a short break, then met on the sun deck to observe the ship’s departure from St Petersburg. Just after getting underway we saw a Soviet “Kilo” class submarine tied up to something small that may have been a tender. We went out through a narrow canal through a very dense cargo-handling area. Many, many, large container cranes, lots of smaller cranes with buckets handling scrap, trains hauling container cars away to other places, and all the earmarks of a large seaport. StP has five million people.
D & I went to the bar in the casino where she had a port and I a gibson for a nightcap. Then we went to the cabin and crashed. We don’t arrive in Tallinn until noon so there’s no reason to set the clock.
Friends told us later that we passed a navy base an hour or so after we left the deck.
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