Greetings from the internet cafe, where the service is surprisingly good for this time of the evening. We're about an hour away from pulling out of St. Petersburg, and we just finished a great Master Chef dinner in Animator's Palate, after a very full day in port. It feels good to be back on the ship, but I feel like we only scratched the service of St. Petersburg, so it's hard to be leaving as well.
We had breakfast at Topsiders this morning and walked off the ship easily at around 9:30. Customs was a lot easier today, and we met our guide and went straight to St. Isaac's Cathedral, which was unbelievably impressive. It's almost as big as St. Peter's in Vatican City and St. Paul's in London, and it's got A LOT of gold. We went from there to The Cathedral of the Spilled Blood (turns out there really was someone's blood spilled there -- Alexander II, one of the truly great Tsars), and that church looked and felt much more Russian than St. Isaac's. The crowds were not too bad at either church, but then we went to The Hermitage, and that was packed. That museum gets 30,000 visitors a day, every day. There were a ridiculous number of tours there. It's a strange museum. On the one hand, it has one of the most incredible art collections of any museum in the world. On the other hand, the art seems thrown up on the walls without a lot of thought, it's relatively dark, there were rooms where the windows were wide open, which can't be good for the pictures, and because the museum is housed in what used to be the Tsar's main palace, the rooms themselves are often of more interest than the art on the walls. We were there from about 11:45-1:15, and saw only the art that our guide said was an absolute must see.
After The Hermitage, we went to a cafe not far away for lunch. We each had a different kind of "pancake" (not American style -- blinis or crepes) and they were very good. We treated our guide. Once again, the cafe did not take credit cards, and the guide paid in rubles and added it to what we owed her at the end. After lunch, we drove to Catherine the Great's Summer Palace in Pushkin. This was my favorite stop of the 2-day tour and also where the princess ball had taken place the night before. The summer palace is really beautiful without being too big. The amount of gold in the rooms is ridiculous and the amber room is a thing apart. I found out that it costs $40,000 to rent the ballroom for an event (and that doesn't include transportation, entertainment or food), so for anyone wondering why Disney charged so much per person to go to the ball, now you know why. The grounds around the palace are lovely in a fairly straightforward way, and it was a really nice way to spend several hours on a pretty summer afternoon.
On the way back to St. Petersburg, it started to absolutely pour. Not only was this the first rain of the trip, but it was a violent summer storm, and it kind of came out of nowhere. Our guide told us that there has been a tremendous amount of rain in St. Petersburg this summer so that the ground is pretty saturated, and we actually saw a surprisingly amount of flooding in the streets when we got back to town. We made a quick stop at the big synaogue that was built with the Tsar's permission (very beautiful in an unostentatious way) and then battled ferocious traffic back to the ship.
On photos -- our guide mentioned that our ticket vouchers included the ability to take pictures. There were a few rooms in the summer palace and a few rooms in The Hermitage where no pictures were permitted, and there were more rooms where you could take pictures without flash. We took an awful lot of pictures, so in general, I think that will be ok.
I think the dollar is strong in Russia right now. Our guide paid for 2 lunches (for 5 people), a souvenir t-shirt (my aunt asked for one with Russian writing on it), one set of snacks at Peterhof and the 500 ruble tip at dinner last night, and altogether we owed her $94 for that. I think that's pretty good. We could only charge the dinner, so keep that in mind when you're thinking about what you're going to be doing in St. Petersburg.
We were left with confusing impressions of the city. The revolution and WW II had disasterous impact on a lot of the grand buildings of Tsarist times, although a fair amount of restoration has been and continues to be done. We sensed a lot of conflict about the shift away from communism. Putin appears to be popular but there are concerns about how long he will be in power. The city cares an inordinate amount about its past and I think is confused about its future. Although Masha was careful to point out that St. Petersburg is not like the rest of Russia and is more European in its orientation, to us it felt very much like what we expected Russia to feel like and not very European. I will be interested in others' impressions as they travel.
More on money, since someone asked. I think I made this point before, but we have been surprised by how little money we have needed in port. We have no Estonian money because apparently you can't get it outside the country. Disney is running a shuttle bus from the port to the center of town tomorrow, and we are hoping to be on the first shuttle bus at 10 am (clocks go back an hour tonight, so that should be doable). We are planning to stroll around town and may or may not go into any museums. We're hoping that the lunch restaurants take credit cards. So we'll see. We expect to spend more money in Stockholm, but we also expect to be able to charge more.
In any event, it was a very interesting, very full 2 days in St. Petersburg. And now it feels great to be back on the ship!
and try to explain them to her and that if she ever made it to WDW or DL she could use them. This was in Russia somehow I really don't think she will make it to the resorts. Sue
I spoke with 
Hope this helps... 
and I fly out Sunday afternoon for LHR... Woo Hoo 
It's almost here 
