7-31-2015 – St. Petersburg, Russia

Today we were again in St. Petersburg. I will start describing today from when we met our guide outside the cruise terminal. We first drove to a souvenir shop where the travel company headquarters was located (it appeared that the sublet space from the souvenir shop). The lady who was accepting payments for the tour said that all of the kids could get 15 Euro credit for anything in the store. (I think that that was so that the parents would stay and spend money.) I got a cool knife with a CCCP (USSR in Russian) symbol on it. It doesn’t seem very high quality, but it is cool.

---

We then drove to the Hermitage museum, the famous art museum in St. Petersburg. The museum is huge. It has over 3 million items. The guide said if you spent 20 seconds looking at each exhibit, 8 hours a day, 5 days per week, year round it would take 7 years. That’s wrong. It would take 8. Here’s the math:

3,000,000 items * (20s/item) * (1min/60s) * (1hr/60min) * (1wk/40hr) * (1yr/52wk) = 8.01 yr

We obviously didn’t see all of the exhibits, but she took us to the main masterpieces and some of the more interesting exhibits. I won’t try and describe everything we saw to you, but I’ll give you some of the highlights for me.

We went to a room decorated only in mosaics, much like the Church of the Spilt Blood. On some of the tables decorated with these mosaics, we couldn’t tell that they were mosaics until she told us.

We saw paintings by various artists. The most famous/prestigious ones were by Michelangelo and Rembrandt. We had just about enough time to look at it and say “that’s really good” and then leave. We also went to a hall where there are hundreds of portraits of various generals in the Russian army during the Czar period. She said that the worse paintings were put on the top, and the better quality ones were on the bottom.

We then went to a cool painting that is “3D”. As you move across the painting, the perspective of the main building changes. Looking at it from one side, the building takes up half of the painting. From the other side, it only takes up about a third.

---

After the Hermitage (and I haven’t described a fraction of what we saw there) we went to the main shopping district, Nevsky Prospect. It was really boring. The shops were the same as at home. It was funny though, we went into a department store that was really big. Mom, Tom (Mr. Coco), and Bob (another man who was with us on this tour) all went to go find the bathroom. They got lost. We realized that they were the only three in the group who couldn’t find their way around anywhere so it was funny that they were the ones that got lost.

---

After seeing Nevsky Prospect, we went to lunch. They served crepes with a variety of fillings. I got meat and vegetables in my crepe. It was pretty good.

---

After lunch, we drove to a submarine museum. We were able to tour a Soviet submarine used during WWII. It was about 70 metres long and the crew consisted of 54 people. It had 6 forward torpedo tubes and 6 extra torpedoes in the front and 2 rear torpedoes. Our guide was a former Soviet submarine commander who served in the large nuclear submarines. He didn’t speak a word of English, so our guide had to translate what he was saying. The submarine that we went in could only stay underwater for 72 hours because it didn’t have enough battery capacity. I think that air was also an issue, but it was rather unclear coming through translation. The modern Russian nuclear subs can stay under for 40+ days. The US subs can stay underwater for ~30 days.

---

We sailed away from St. Petersburg at about 18:00. Going out wasn’t that interesting until we passed a former Soviet military base (we began to pass it during dinner, so about 19:00). We saw all sorts of old abandoned military equipment and structures on the various islands. I went out to the balcony after dinner to watch everything pass by, but it was too windy and I went inside after taking some pictures.

---

After dinner, I ran into the family that I played soccer with the other day. I got into a long conversation with their mom about St. Petersburg which then morphed into a conversation about politics. I will say that she and I have very much the same views on all the issues we discussed this evening. If you don’t know where I stand on political issues, ask me when I get home, I don’t want to discuss it online. Discussing politics online isn’t constructive because, in the end, politics is about people and discussions about it are best had in person.

---

Tomorrow we are in Tallin, Estonia, a former USSR state. It will be interesting to see their opinion of the Russians.

7-30-2015 – St Petersburg, Russia

Today is our second day in St. Petersburg. After the normal morning activities, we went out to our guide and she took us to a hydrofoil which we rode out to Peterhov (that’s probably very incorrect spelling), the island where the official summer residence of the Czar is located. The boat ride was fine. I don’t remember much but the back of my eyelids though. The first thing we saw on the island was the canal leading up to the palace. We got some very good pictures of the palace from a distance. I will try to post some of them here.

We toured around the palace grounds looking at the gardens and fountains. The fountains were very elaborate. In the time of the Czars (which ended after the Communist takeover in 1917) the fountains were powered by water from lakes higher up in elevation that flowed down to Peterhov. There were some trick fountains in the park that only went off when people went on them. They are operated remotely and the person can choose when they turn on. One of the trick fountains is in front of a bench so in the time of the Czars, when someone sat down the fountain operator would turn on the water and get the person wet. There was another trick fountain that came down like an umbrella around a pavilion type thing. I went into both of them. I will try and post pictures of them.

After seeing the palace, we went to eat lunch at a restaurant that specialized in brynza. The best thing to compare it to is a fried quesadilla.

I got a Sprite at this restaurant, and I got a picture of the bottle. It has Russian writing on it. I also got a picture of a Subway restaurant sign on the sidewalk and a Coca-Cola canopy. I thought it was very interesting seeing common, everyday products in Russian.

After lunch we headed over the Catherine’s Palace. It was very grand. Much of it was destroyed during WWII and the Soviets didn’t take care of it either. The inside was decorated very elaborately. Much of the decor was gold plated which made the rooms very bright, almost too bright. It was very similar to many other European palaces, but it was very cool nonetheless. We also learned about the history of the royal family and saw various portraits and belongings of the Czars.

After our boat ride, we were planing on doing a canal tour, but the weather was very bad and the water was choppy so we decided to skip it. We went instead to the Church of the Spilt Blood which was built in the location of the murder of Alexander II, Czar of Russia. The entire church interior was covered in intricate mosaics and was very impressive. It was a Russian Orthodox church so they had many icon stands. Even the icons were made of mosaics.

---

After the Church of the Spilt Blood, we went back to the ship. I don’t want to describe the rest of the evening and I think you would be bored by it anyway so I will conclude this post. (I have to catch up, I still have to write about 7–31.)

7-29-2015 – St. Petersburg, Russia

The stereotypes are true. Russia was pretty much as I expected.

If you like Russia, Putin, Socialism, Communism or Obama (specifically his foreign policy or, really, lack thereof), you should probably not read my posts about Russia.

When we looked out into the city from the 11th deck where the Windjammer Cafe is the buildings (they were a kilometer or so away) just screamed communist block housing. They were tall, white, ugly buildings made out of cement. It appeared that they were still making apartments like that in the area because we saw one under construction.

We had to go through customs to get out of the port and I was worried that the passport control agent would be very strict. I think we got the nicest Russian border agent. She spoke very good English and was very friendly, friendlier than passport agents in the States. I’m thinking that she is the exception, not the rule, because when we came back through, the lady was much more legalistic.

We met our guide outside the cruise terminal. Her name was Maria. Then we headed to the van and met the driver, Mitri. We drove towards the city and she explained some of the sites as we went.

Note, I am going to try and write semi-chronologically about are time in St. Petersburg, but I am going try and group information together more than on my other posts.

These facts may not be entirely accurate. They have come through a guide and then through my brain so that is two points of failure.

St. Petersburg is built on ~40 islands and was founded by Peter the Great, Czar of Russia in the 1700s. It is the second largest city in Russia next to Moscow and has a population of about 5 million.

Our guide described it as “the most western Russian city”. I don’t have anything to compare it to, but it seemed fairly Russian to me. As we drove, we saw a squadron of police in wool-lined raincoats passing by. It’s an entirely different attitude to America where it seems that we try and hide our law enforcement because it might be “offensive”. We also passed a warship (I think it was a battleship) and two submarines docked in the bay. I don’t think any of them are serviceable, but it was so Russia.

It began as a fortress which we went to later on in the tour and grew out from there. Our guide pointed out the Czar’s winter palace that now holds the Hermitage Museum. It was very large, and we couldn’t even see it all. At one stop in a square with a statue of Nicolas I, we saw the palace for the Czar’s daughter, Maria. It is said that she only spent one night in it because she did not like that the statue of her father was facing way from her palace.

We went inside the fortress and to the church inside. It was the church where many of the Russian Czars were buried. Everyone from “Someone the Great” to “Someone the Terrible” were there. We asked her how the Czars and the Soviets were looked at by modern day Russians and she said that “it is history, we just think of it like history”. That was very telling, I don’t know if she speaks for the majority, but it was similar in Vietnam as well. In Vietnam, most people see the Vietnam War as just history.

As we exited the church, it was about 12:00 and there is a cannon that is fired at noon every day from the top of the wall. We got a good vantage point of the firing. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a good picture of it being fired, but later I got a picture from a better vantage point. I doctored that one up to make it look as sketchy as possible without totally obscuring the image too much. Here it is

We walked along the top of the fortress walls which overlook a bit of the bay. (It doesn’t seem like there is a bay because there are so many islands, but it is part of the Baltic Sea. By this time it was lunchtime. We went to a small cafe which specialized in “pies” (Cheburek in Russian). I didn’t take any pictures of my food because I’m not an Instagramophile, but I think my mom got some pictures so I will try and post them someday.

After lunch, we went to the Artillery museum. The first room we went into had a variety of missiles from the early 1800s to the Soviet era. They had a display with rockets like the ones used in the War of 1812 and where we get “rockets red glare, bombs bursting air” in our national anthem. They had upwards of ten missile launcher trucks which were kinda cool. They had a display about the rocket that took down the famous US spy plane during the Cold War.

In another room featured cannon without explosive shells. Interestingly, the United States Civil War was the last war in which these types of cannon were used. There wasn’t anything extremely special about the cannons, but one was interesting to me. It was a small cannon, the barrel was about 30 cm (1 ft) long and was 26 cm in diameter. It was a gift to some Czar prince and was used to shoot vegetables, much like a potato cannon except with real gunpowder and much more cannon-looking.

There was also a room with armour from various periods. It wasn’t as interesting as the rest of the museum so I won’t describe it in depth.

At this point, the group split up. I went with Sebastian and Tom (Mr. Coco) back to the boat. Mom, Hannah, Mrs. Coco and the twins went to a metreuska doll factory and decorated metreuska dolls. You can probably read Hannah’s post for more info on what they did, but I will post a picture of their creation here.

When we arrived back at the cruise terminal, we had to have our passports to go through customs. Unfortunately for Sebastian, his mom (who was painting dolls) had his passport so he had to stay outside of customs. I made it through fine because mom had given me my passport.

The rest of the day proceeded much like previous days so I will not describe it here.