Russia: St. Petersburg
Sep. 11th, 2008 11:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
deirdreThis one's taken a long time because I needed to sort through all the photos, and St. Petersburg was definitely our most photo-intensive port. Don't worry, I'm putting the photos all behind an lj-cut.
First of all: if you're on a ship, you can't get to St. Petersburg unless you're going through an approved tourist agency that can arrange a visa. Every time you get off the ship and go into the country, you're given a landing card, which you have to turn in when you go back. There's a small building with a small (but nice) gift shop, but that's all there is in the port.
I found out why later: very few people are allowed in the port; Russia makes a lot of money exporting scrap metal, and we weren't in the new cruise port (which will open next year), we were in the commercial port. So security was tight, even more so than in Egypt, I think. (Egypt also had the landing card issue, come to think of it.)
Thus, unlike in our other ports, there was no ability to get off the bus in town before it went back to the port. Some people did sign up for a relatively independent tour through an agency, but as this was my mother's and my first time in Russia, and Rick's since the fall of the Soviet era, we figured the guided tours were the way to go.
Our first stop was Peterhof, which has only been restored for a fairly short time. It was burned during WW2, and only a fraction of the treasures were saved, but it is quite glorious, especially the many acres of gardens and fountains. During this trip, I believe our guide could have been a medalist in Olympic walking. At first I held it a bit against him (not being the quickest walker), but later it was explained that Russian guides are just like that: jockeying for the best place for their customers.
Sore and weary, we arrived at the ship with about 45 minutes to spare before our next excursion to Catherine's Palace. Rick and I got a very quick lunch, while my mom went to the ship's theatre to wait.
Catherine's Palace is so large that it's difficult to take in. Most of it is unrestored. The palace is three hundred meters long (three football fields and then some). There's room after room of just more stunning things, and it's impossible to comprehend it all.
Because we'd booked so many shore excursions, NCL comped us tickets for the evening Folkloric show, which we wouldn't have gone to otherwise. When we got back from Catherine's Palace, we once again had less than an hour (sound familiar?) to get food before our next bus.
The performers were amazing, and it was a very high-energy show. Even so, I had difficulty staying awake, I was just that wiped. It was difficult to get any available-light photos to work out, but
We finally arrive back at the ship at 11:30, ready to sleep some before doing it all over again the next day.
For our second day, we had an early opening tour for The Hermitage, meaning it's less crowded than it normally is. If Peterhof and Catherine's Palace were over the top, The Hermitage simply squares the problem.
I didn't realize until I got there that The Hermitage has roughly 1/6 of all the surviving Leonardo paintings, so now I'm sad my photos of them didn't turn out. That said, I wasn't as impressed as I was by some of the other pieces.
The last place we stopped was the Church on Spilled Blood, which is more correctly named The Resurrection Church.. During WW2, an unexploded bomb landed in the largest of the domes, and it took them a long time to figure out how to get it out. By then, there'd been a lot of water damage and mold, so they put a lot of energy into restoring it, and it finally re-opened (as a museum, not a church) in 1997. It is said to be the largest mosaic museum in the world; the interior above waist level is pretty much solid with mosaics. I didn't pay the interior photo fee here, but my mother did.
All the rest of my St. Petersburg pictures can be seen here.
First of all: if you're on a ship, you can't get to St. Petersburg unless you're going through an approved tourist agency that can arrange a visa. Every time you get off the ship and go into the country, you're given a landing card, which you have to turn in when you go back. There's a small building with a small (but nice) gift shop, but that's all there is in the port.
I found out why later: very few people are allowed in the port; Russia makes a lot of money exporting scrap metal, and we weren't in the new cruise port (which will open next year), we were in the commercial port. So security was tight, even more so than in Egypt, I think. (Egypt also had the landing card issue, come to think of it.)
Thus, unlike in our other ports, there was no ability to get off the bus in town before it went back to the port. Some people did sign up for a relatively independent tour through an agency, but as this was my mother's and my first time in Russia, and Rick's since the fall of the Soviet era, we figured the guided tours were the way to go.
Our first stop was Peterhof, which has only been restored for a fairly short time. It was burned during WW2, and only a fraction of the treasures were saved, but it is quite glorious, especially the many acres of gardens and fountains. During this trip, I believe our guide could have been a medalist in Olympic walking. At first I held it a bit against him (not being the quickest walker), but later it was explained that Russian guides are just like that: jockeying for the best place for their customers.
Sore and weary, we arrived at the ship with about 45 minutes to spare before our next excursion to Catherine's Palace. Rick and I got a very quick lunch, while my mom went to the ship's theatre to wait.
Catherine's Palace is so large that it's difficult to take in. Most of it is unrestored. The palace is three hundred meters long (three football fields and then some). There's room after room of just more stunning things, and it's impossible to comprehend it all.
Because we'd booked so many shore excursions, NCL comped us tickets for the evening Folkloric show, which we wouldn't have gone to otherwise. When we got back from Catherine's Palace, we once again had less than an hour (sound familiar?) to get food before our next bus.
The performers were amazing, and it was a very high-energy show. Even so, I had difficulty staying awake, I was just that wiped. It was difficult to get any available-light photos to work out, but
We finally arrive back at the ship at 11:30, ready to sleep some before doing it all over again the next day.
For our second day, we had an early opening tour for The Hermitage, meaning it's less crowded than it normally is. If Peterhof and Catherine's Palace were over the top, The Hermitage simply squares the problem.
I didn't realize until I got there that The Hermitage has roughly 1/6 of all the surviving Leonardo paintings, so now I'm sad my photos of them didn't turn out. That said, I wasn't as impressed as I was by some of the other pieces.
The last place we stopped was the Church on Spilled Blood, which is more correctly named The Resurrection Church.. During WW2, an unexploded bomb landed in the largest of the domes, and it took them a long time to figure out how to get it out. By then, there'd been a lot of water damage and mold, so they put a lot of energy into restoring it, and it finally re-opened (as a museum, not a church) in 1997. It is said to be the largest mosaic museum in the world; the interior above waist level is pretty much solid with mosaics. I didn't pay the interior photo fee here, but my mother did.
All the rest of my St. Petersburg pictures can be seen here.