St. Petersburg Day Two

Wednesday, August 15

It seems we just hit the pillow and it was time to get up, rush through breakfast, gasp at the length of the Russian immigration line, and make it to the bus exactly at 7 am. It's always good when you are the "second" last ones on the bus!

One poor lady lost her passport at Catherine Palace last night, and was not allowed to pass through immigration to get back onto the ship. She had to sleep in a hotel last night. We have no idea what will happen to her now, hopefully her embassy can help her.

We started our day with several picture stops. A lighthouse column with prows of ships on it that depict victories of war. Then the war ship Aurora, built in 1900. The cannon fired a blank shot just before the bolsheviks invaded the Winter Palace. Then the Palace Square right next to the gorgious Winter Palace. This square was the scene of the Bloody Sunday massacre in 1905, when a peaceful protest march was turned into a slaughter by nervous soldiers.

Then finally the Hermitage Museum, which used to be the winter residence of the czars. We were among the first groups to arrive, an hour and a half before it was open to the public. Nice! We wondered why we didn't have to wear protective booties here to preserve the beautiful original floors, but sheer numbers of visitors makes it impractical.

Our Gestapo tour guide lady zipped us right in so that we left the other groups behind and we were the only people in the museum. This is another not-to-be-missed site in St. Petersburg. Wow! The rooms themselves were actually more fabulous than the exhibits; the Hermitage rivals the Louvre in Paris in that respect. Having been to both, we'd say the Hermitage is more magnificent. It could be because during the Bolshevik Revolution, all the homes of the nobility were ransacked and all their works of art (paintings, statues, tapestries) were confiscated and brought to be displayed in the Hermitage. The Bolsheviks called it "nationalizing". These homes and belongings will never be returned to their original owners. Most of the noble families took their jewels and fled to Europe. Also, all the exhibits were saved during the war by being brought to the basement of the museum.

The Hermitage is so large (1065 rooms) and contains so many displays (more than 3 million items), it is calculated that if a person were to spend 10 seconds viewing each item, 24 hours a day, it would take 3 years to see everything. If you were to spend one minute per item, it would take 12 years. Our guide was required to spend a measly 2 months in the Hermitage learning the exhibits before she could get her tour guide licence. She knew how to zip through which rooms (Wait, we want to look around!) to take us to the paintings by Raphael, Rembrandt, and the Madonna and Child by Leonardi de Vinci. She showed us Rembrandt's last work and told us how some guy 25 years ago had a water bottle filled with acid and threw the acid onto the painting, as well as slashing it with a knife. The man was "hospitalized" (in Siberia!). This is the reason we can't bring water bottles into the museum anymore.

Our group had an appointed time to see the Gold Room. Silly us, we expected this to be a solid gold room or something? Well, it was just a few plain rooms, but they were full of glass display cases of jewels dating back over a thousand years. Not just regular jewels, either. For example, one coat made for a horse had 32,000 diamonds on it. We have no idea how much all these jewels were worth, but there were lots of video cameras, and the room was being guarded by a Russian woman with a gun.

Our next stop was the Peter and Paul Cathedral, where all the Russian emporers and empresses are buried. They are buried under the floor, but there are monuments marking the graves. We saw where Peter the Great is buried, etc. Zip zip, Gestapo tour guide lady cut in front of all the lines and had our group out of there in no time.

Lunch was at a very beautiful Russian restaurant. Last night at dinner we sat with a young honeymoon couple and she speaks Russian, so we found them again today and she did a great job explaining gluten-free to the waiters. The whole table was full of glasses: vodka, champagne, wine, water, coffee. More Russian folk singing, Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!

Our last tourist destination was the Yusopov Palace, which was a home owned by Felix Yusopov, of a noble family. We toured through the rooms (as big as apartments) and it is a mansion by our standards. We were treated to a very nice accapella quartet.

The Yusopovs were friends of the Czar Nicholas II family, and wished to protect the royal family from their unsavoury connection to the unorthodox medicine man Rasputin. Rasputin was a favourite of the queen because he was the only person who had ever had any success treating their young son, who suffered from hemophilia. Rasputin was invited to dinner on false pretenses by Felix Yusopov, only 27 years old at the time. Rasputin was fed poisonous cakes and then poisonous wine, to no effect. Yusopov waited two and a half hours and nothing happened, so he took out his revolver and shot Rasputin in the back. Rasputin fell onto the white bearskin rug. When Yusopov checked on Rasputin a short time later, he wasn't there! He had crawled outside, where Yusopov tracked him down and shot him again until he was dead. The events are recorded in a book written by Yusopov. But Yusopov's comrade who was also there that night wrote a book, and the details are different. So nobody knows exactly what happened, much like a lot of Russian history. We were taken into the cellar where all of this happened.

Of course our last stop of the day was to do some tourist shopping. Of course we had to buy a Russian doll for our mantlepiece.

Back through Russian immigration one last time, dinner, then we sat in the sun on our balcony as we sailed by the Russian naval base of Kronstadt. Goodbye, Russia!

Since being on the boat, we have changed time zones twice, losing an hour each time. Now we get to change time zones back, gaining our hours back each time. Yippee!
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