St. Petersburg - The Hermitage

Sunday, May 29, 2011

During the night, we finished crossing Lake Lagoda and entered the Neva River.  The location of the Salt Pier, where our ship is docked, is about 1/2 to 3/4 hour by bus from the city center in St. Petersburg.  At 10:30 we left on our excursion to the Hermitage.  We had an hour and a half guided tour (Valera) and another hour and a half on our own.  There are more than 1,000 rooms in the museum with more than 3 million exhibits, so we really didn’t get to see much--just the highlights.  It was very crowded--lots of people from river ships and big cruise ships from Baltic cruises.  Part of Hermitage was the Winter Palace of the Tsars.  The Hermitage consists of the Winter Palace and several adjoining buildings and contains western art, much of it collected by Catherine the Great.  Around 3:30 we got back to the ship and were able to go to another Viking ship docked here to use the internet.  The internet has never worked on the Pakhomov (but then it’s complimentary, so we got our moneys worth).  We only get to go online when we are near another Viking ship.  We had a nice dinner (early at 4:30, since we didn’t have time for lunch) and then got ready to go back to the city center.  We saw a performance of the Tchaikovsky ballet, Swan Lake, at the Conservatory Theater.  The music was beautiful and the dancers are incredibly graceful and lovely.  We ran into a lot of traffic driving back to the pier.  St. Petersburg is celebrating its 308th birthday (founded on May 27, 1703) and there may have been some special events.  We got back to the ship around 11:30.

Photos

Our first day in St. Petersburg was overcast with a high in the mid 60s.  It was raining lightly when we left the theater and boarded the bus to go back to the ship.

© JAY DEITCH 2020