After having left Tallinn, Estonia the previous day, we awoke very early the next morning for our brief 2-day stint in St. Petersburg, Russia.
As Russian visas are notoriously difficult to obtain, there’s a nice little loophole for travelers arriving by cruise ship — they may stay in the country without an official visa for up to 72 hours, so long as they are accompanied at all times by a government certified tour guide.
The cruise companies want to make you think you have to buy your excursion through them to take advantage of this visa exception, but in truth there are a number of reputable private companies you can choose from. We decided to arrange a custom, private tour through TJ Travel.
After about a 2-hour stint waiting to get off the ship and go through immigration, we had our passports stamped and met our guide Alexander and driver Vasily. Alex was a rather dull fellow—he told us his idea of fun was staying at home in the winter and memorizing new facts for his tours— but he did a sufficient job getting us to all the places we asked to go to and telling us a little history along the way.
First up was a visit to the Hermitage museum prior to the official opening to the public, allowing us to skip some crowds. First, we toured the Winter Palace rooms, but then diverted from the usual cruise-tour itinerary by requesting to visit the General Stuff Building, where the Impressionist and Modern Art collection is held.
And it was absolutely breathtaking.
The sheer quantity of the collection was just outrageous. They didn’t have one or two Monets; they had 11. There were multiple Da Vincis, both paintings and sculptures. They had more than a dozen Picassos, rooms and rooms of Gaugins, and more than 100 works by Matisse.
It was pretty amazing. And you basically have to visit the collection in Russia because the Hermitage rarely makes loans, as many of the pieces were the stolen fruits of various Russian wars. Honestly, I could have spent the entire day there.
However, that was not to be, and we eventually headed to our other big highlight of the day, the “Summer Palace” of the Romanovs at Peterhof Palace. Here, we toured the grounds and the impressive fountain display, but also did a tour of the palace itself, which was just as ornately decorated as the Winter palace.
Of course, what you don’t see in between these monumental displays of wealth and grandeur are the dichotomy of everything else in Russia. Between all these bustling tourist sites were blocks upon blocks of Soviet-era concrete apartments, many of which appeared to be in need of substantial repairs. There were very few shops or small businesses, and almost no green space in the city center. Outside of the stunning palaces, it all seemed rather dreary.
Still, we pressed on. That evening, we arranged for a special outing to a less touristy part of town to a restaurant called Bekitzer that served Israeli food and hip cocktails. After dinner, we headed to a popular bar district (our guide told us the slang name for the street in Russian essentially translates to “drunk guy avenue”) for additional cocktails at Apotheke. Here, there was no cocktail menu; you simply tell the bartenders the type of liquors and flavors you enjoy, and they whip something up.
The next day it was time to head to the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood, a classic Russian Orthodox church complete with elaborate mosaics and onion domed steeples. Again, this was absolutely incredible. In fact, it’s hard to say what was more beautiful — the exterior (at the top of this post) or the painstakingly restored interior.
That afternoon, we saw a number of lesser Russian sites; we shopped for souvenirs and had doughnuts along the Nevsky Prospect, we descended deep, deep, deep into the St. Petersburg subway system which was impeccably clean and impressively decorated, and we viewed the Peter & Paul Fortress, where my favorite Russian author Dostoevsky was once imprisoned.
Finally, we ended our trip with a stop in the Soviet Video Game Museum, where they had collected many of the old propaganda video games from the early 1980s and restored them for the nostalgic at heart. They gave us actual Soviet coins to operate the machines where we got to try our hand at shooting down American airplanes and driving on crazy Russian highways.
We even saw our guide lighten up and smile remembering the arcade games of his youth. He enthusiastically explained the games he remembered playing to us, and even challenged us in competition on some of his favorites.
Finally, we returned to our ship in time to catch a gorgeous sunset as we pulled away from St. Petersburg and headed onwards. More to come!
