Mandatory Picture of a Fabrage Egg

We started out visiting the Hermatage art museum, which is a converted palace. It’s hard to understand the large number of palaces in St. Petersburg. Peter the Great built Petrohof to be bigger and better than Versais. Catherine the great built a palace in St. Pete, but she also re-did several rooms in Petrohoff. The royal family lived in the palace that is now known as the Hermatage. And there are at least a half dozen other palaces scattered around the area. The thing is, Peter didn’t spend much time in any of these palaces. He was always out fighting wars or visiting Europe. In any event, the Hermatage is the place to go when visiting St. Pete. It has the longest lines.

Hermatage Second Building

We were standing in the rain waiting to get tickets, when I noticed a small number of people were leaving line, returning with tickets, and going inside. Danita went off in search of tickets, and found kiosks where one could buy tickets electronically. But she couldn’t get the credit card to work. The main screen had an English option, but when it came time to use the credit card, it was English only. She came back and I went off to try my luck. I hit the jackpot because we have two credit cards. One has the chip. That didn’t work because Europe has PINs on their chip cards and the US doesn’t. Knowing that, I was able to make our other credit card work, because it has only the mag stripe. Proud possessor of tickets, we went to the line to get into the museum. This line was at least indoors. It was a very long line, but we were in luck again. A museum official came by and explained we could take another way into the museum. There is no way to see all of the Hermatage at once. We had decided to see the French Impressionists, especially Monet, which Danita knew was on the 3rd floor. We went to the 3rd floor and found an exhibit of ancient money. Then we went down and took a different staircase to a different section of the 3rd floor and found rooms left as they were when the imperial family lived there. All this was very nice, but it wasn’t what we wanted to see. We found a museum official that spoke a little English and found out about the 2nd building (there are more than two). We went to the 2nd building and after two more false starts, found the 19th century French area. We went the wrong way and saw a dozen rooms of French Impressionistic art that weren’t by Monet. We went back the other way and finally found Monet. It took us only 3 hours. By then we were tired, but we were stubborn enough to see what we went in looking for.

Hermatage Second Building Interior

We left the Hermatage and found a delightful lunch, then went to the Collenade of St. Isaac’s Cathedral to get a bird’s eye view of St. Petersburg. It was time to find our river cruise ship. We got our suitcases and a cab, and were whisked off to the river boat harbor. As we were collecting our luggage, a port official came over and told our cab driver we were in the wrong place (as I surmised from the tone of voice, body language, and end result). There was a long and serious discussion, the end of result of which was that we had to go the second pier 300 meters down the road. I’m not sure why there had to be such a long and serious discussion, but that seems to be the way things are done in Russia.
When we came aboard, we found ourselves in a bright and roomy cabin with a wonderfully large deck. We’re looking forward to our adventures on the Volga river.