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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

St. Petersburg: There is no smiling in Russia

Dan Webster

Above: The Peterhof Park and Gardens, which some refer to as "Russia's Versailles."

2015 cruise review continued: (To catch up, check out the posts below)

I’ve already made the point that you can’t experience more than cursorily any city larger than Ritzville in the relatively short time provided by a cruise ship line. So how, then, do you make sense of a metropolis (pop. 5 million) such as St. Petersburg, Russia?

Well, you make do with what time you have. And if you don’t have unlimited funds, one of the tricks is to find a good guided-tour company. The tours offered by Celebrity can be good – we toured a penguin habitat in New Zealand and had a great time – but they can also be prohibitively expensive. So we opted to find our own.

And SPB Tours was our choice. It wasn’t cheap (almost $700 for two of us), but it did come with two Russian visas (a $300 savings in itself), and it provided: a two-day package, van service that picked us up and returned us to the cruise ship terminal each day, the expertise of an English-speaking tour guide (ours was an assertive little blond named Olga B.), access at no additional cost (and only marginal waiting) to a number of the major tourist sites, lunch at no additional cost for both days, two different river cruises and plenty of time to take photos, ask questions, buy some souvenirs (chocolate bars with pictures of Vladimir Putin on the cover) or just sit and rest our aching feet (so many streets in the city, so few unoccupied benches).

Over the two days in St. Petersburg, our itinerary was: click here.

Are you exhausted yet? By the time we piled back aboard late in the afternoon of the second day, we certainly were. But here were the high points:

The subway: Seriously. The Metro escalator Olga B. took us on descended into the bowels of St. Petersburg. And as we passed 500, maybe a 1,000, people coming up – not a single one, by the way, who was smiling – we wondered: Why the hell is she taking us down here? Well, in addition to giving us a look at ordinary Russian life, some of the ornate mosaics were fairly impressive. We left, well, impressed.

Peter and Paul’s Fortress and Cathedral: Hey, look, that’s where Catherine the Great is buried!

Peterhof Park and Gardens: We took a hydrofoil ride here and, after trying not to freak out because I couldn’t see where the vessel’s emergency exit was, we disembarked to see what some call the “Russian Versailles.” Dating back to Peter the Great and the early 1700s, the palace and its gardens give ample evidence of the czar’s desire to emulate the greatness he saw in Europe’s capital cities.

The Amber Room: A room in Catherine Palace. Made of amber. The fact that it’s a re-creation (the original disappeared during World War II) makes it no less … ummmm, garishly impressive?

The Hermitage: People spend weeks touring this maze of rooms, each one more splendiferous than the next and filled with more paintings than any museum in the world. We had 90 minutes. Still, if ever we wondered why people eventually revolted against the Russian nobility, well …

The Church of Our Savior on the Spilled Blood: Great name, right? Oh, great design, too.

Yusupov Palace: Where Rasputin was murdered. The whole story is told, complete with wax dummies.

Also: The Russian pierogies that we had for lunch were scrumptious.

Then it was time to head back to the ship. As Olga B. said (imagine her speaking in a thick Russian accent, ending most every sentence with a throaty chuckle): “There is no time to see everything. You will just have to come back – hyeh-hyeh-hyeh.”

That invitation is tucked away with my passport.

Next up: Vasa, Vasa, where is the Vasa?