May 26: St Petersburg, Russia Day 1

We were in St Petersburg for 2 day, the first cruise we'd stayed overnight in a port. We booked full day tours for both days, for a couple of reasons: firstly, many people say there is so much to see in St Petersburg, and a tour is a good way to see it. Secondly, if you go on a booked tour your visa is organised for you, whereas if you go and do your own thing you need to organise and pay for your own visa. I should mention here that all of the following is based on memory and we have tried to absorb so much information that some of it may be missing or incorrect. I hope most of it is right - I don't have Internet access while writing so I can't check myself on Wikipedia!                                / Our first tour was entitled Pushkin and the Hermitage. Pushkin is the informal name of the Summer Palace of Catherine the 1st, located in the Pushkin suburb. The suburb is named after Alexander Pushkin, a great Russian writer and poet. We learnt about the Romanovs, the most recent Russian royals (on all our tours). Catherine the 1st was Peter's second and beloved wife (unlike the first wife who he had sent to a nunnery), and ruled for 2 years after his death (1725, http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_I_of_Russia). Peter gifted her the Pushkin palace as a 'modest' home with just 16 rooms. Catherine liked the classical style (white relief and cameo designs in the walls, please excuse my lack of correct historical architectural jargon), and on the outside she had her favourite colours, baby blue and white (http://www.saint-petersburg.com/images/pushkin/catherine-palace.jpg). Peter liked a lot of wood. So there is one room in wood, a study of Peter's. The rest WAS is classical style. Peter and Catherine had two girls (actually Catherine had 11 babies, but only these two girls made it to adulthood); the eldest, Anna married to a German prince and the younger, Elizabeth became queen later on. Elizabeth was enamoured with Baroque style and gold on everything. It is said she never wore a dress twice and after she died there were 25,000 dresses found in her closet. So when Elizabeth became queen she was unsatisfied with the classically styled 16 room palace and had it extended and overtly gilded in gold leaf, both inside and outside. Throughout our Russian tours we found this was a theme of Elizabeth 1's reign - she 'Baroqued' everything and was very glamorous, perhaps in today's language, a 'diva'. A lot of the palace was of course ruined during wars and from fires, and has been restored. A few original items exist now - a cherub here, a vase there, and some pieces of Catherine's personal collection, for example Chinese porcelain or china dinner sets. A lot of it was packaged as wars came nearer and shipped to Siberia for safe keeping. (As a side note, we were also told Russia took some of Estonia's precious collections for 'safe keeping in Siberia' ... And they were never returned.) I wish I could add photos now so you can see the classical vs Baroque styles, amongst other things. I will probably not be able to add them until we get home.                                    / We stopped for lunch at a restaurant in between Pushkin and the city. We had borscht (quite yum), a chicken and rice dish and ice cream.               / Our next destination was a souvenir shop but we met quite bad traffic. Russian traffic is an experience - I took a video (there were lots and lots of Ladas, I kind of thought they'd all be dead by now. Amusingly, we did see a lot of Ladas trying to jump start other Ladas). It so happened that this weekend was the city's 309th birthday (27th May) so there were a few roads closed, celebrations, extra police, partying, decorations. It was rather an honour to be in the city on this particular weekend!              / After the souvenir stop we headed to Catherine's Winter Palace, right in the city on the banks of the river. Part of Catherine's winter palace is now The Hermitage, the world's largest art collection. We learnt the story behind the Hermitage: Catherine found her palace 'uncomfortable' for more intimate and casual entertaining, so she had a pavilion built off to one side. In one such entertaining party she decided to put her personal art collection on show for her guests. The pavilion was nicknamed the Hermitage, and today's art museum was born. As I have said, it houses the largest art collection in the world, with the second largest collection of Rembrandt. In the early 1900s the collection was under the responsibility of just one man (can't remember his name), who was a little corrupt and decided to sell some of the artwork to make money. He held private sales and auctions, and this is how a lot of Rembrandts and other artworks ended up in America (who now have the largest Rembrandt collection at the Washington art gallery). As I said in an earlier post, while appreciating the whole collection may take 7 years, we had 1 and three quarter hours. We saw things very quickly, but in the list below you can see how prestigious and impressive the collection is. This is a list of artists whose artworks we took pictures of. We saw many others, and didn't see thousands more: Cezanne / Van Gogh / Monet / Vernet / Gerard / Matisse / Picasso / Manzu / Da Vinci (there are only 12 paintings, the Hermitage has two and we saw them both) / Caravaggio (The Lute Player) / Michelangelo (sculpture 'A Crouching Youth') / Rembrandt (The Descent from the Cross).  /                           / After tea back on the ship, we left it again to go on our evening tour, Russian Folklore Extravaganza. I thought the word Extravanganza was a bit cheesy, but that is definitely what it was. So colourful, energetic, beautiful, exciting, fascinating and entertaining. It was put on by the Russian Military Ensemble of St Petersburg. There was a brilliant contrast of a choir of conservatively uniformed male soldiers with beautiful voices (both collective and individual performances), and very brightly dressed, exuberant and celebratory folk dancers. It was absolutely brilliant and thoroughly entertaining.           / On the way home we saw the rostral (spelling?) columns lit with flames on the top. They used to be lighthouses, and only get lit for the birthday of the city. How lucky we were to see the city on its birthday!       /The traffic on the way home meant we didn't get to bed until 11.42pm, and it was still light. I heard someone say that on the summer solstice St Petersburg only has 4 minutes of darkness (not sure how true that is). I would compare the type of light at 11.42pm to around 6.30pm in the New Zealand winter. Bizarre!