To Russia on Serenity – June 6 - 8

After a VERY slow and stately sail (at 7 knots) from Tallinn, we arrived in St Petersburg, Russia very early Monday morning. When we were here in 1996 we were docked in the industrial harbour and a favourite balcony game was playing “guess which ship will sink first” and “look at the pretty colours floating on the water”! Since then the Russian government has built a beautiful new port facility that can accommodate as many as six large cruise ships at a time. There were five ships docked when we arrived, which when combined with the three ships docked “in town” near the Hermitage, made for a busy day.


As we had been here before we decided early on to “do things differently” this time. One of those different things was the 18 hour day trip to Moscow on Tuesday, so we started off slowly on Monday with an afternoon tour to Peterhof, the Summer Palace of Peter the Great. The advantage to this is we got to sleep in and then have breakfast served in our cabin by Neil, our Butler. Such a relaxing way to start the day.

Promptly at 1:45 we set off on the bus expecting an hour’s drive to Peterhof. And five minutes later, after a brisk 200 yard drive, we got off the bus and boarded a hydrofoil for the 20 minute ride to Peterhof! Our guide told us along the way that to drive would take “one hour there, but two hours back. If we were lucky!”, so this was definitely “the better way”! As the name would imply, Peterhof was the summer palace built in 1710 by Peter the Great, who succeeded (we think) Ivan the Terrible as Tsar of Russia in 1703. We think. The line of succession and the timeline gets very confused and gives us a headache. We can’t remember now if Peter the Great was succeeded by Peter the Merely Okay, or was it Catherine the First, or Catherine the Second, whose real name was Martha and who was the Polish Cleaning Lady. As we said, it gets very confusing. Anyway, as you can see from the pictures, it is a very beautiful place, especially considering it was virtually destroyed during WW 2!!!

Monica outside Peterhof Palace, complete with RadioGuide receiver and 'ears on'

Dinner with Jane that evening was really nice, good food and conversation. She has the same sense of humour as we do so there was quite a bit of laughing going on…

We would say that Tuesday morning dawned “sunny and bright”, but since the bus left the ship at 5:30AM, after five hours sleep the night before, neither of us (or anyone else on the bus actually) is really sure whether the sun was shining or not!!! It was so early even the native St Petersburgers (?) were not out of bed yet, so it was a quick ride to the train station where we boarded the high speed train for Moscow. Even at an average speed of 200 KMH, four hours is a l-o-n-g time on a train in seats that don’t recline even a bit! It was, however, an interesting experience and the scenery along the way varied from flat to flatter, with occasional flat areas and lakes thrown in for a change of pace. The odd time we would run past a little “village” of what looked like weekend cottages with gardens. One of our tour guides explained that these are dachas, very small houses where the city-dwellers could go for the weekend and holidays.

Russian countryside and a larger home

Unlike many cities, the Moscow train station is not “downtown” so we really didn’t realize we had arrived until the train stopped. Then the fun started. There were six groups from the ship, numbering about 200 people, give or take a bit, all being shepherded through the very busy Moscow Station by our Moscow guides. Whoever coined the phrase “controlling tourists is like herding cats” must have had cruiseship passengers in mind! Fortunately we had one of the Shorex people as our ship escort and a head guide who we think took lessons at the “Joseph Stalin School of Tourist Guiding” so amazingly we all made it to the buses without losing anyone! After being introduced to Mikhail, our individual bus guide, we set off. For a coffee break! We had been sitting on a train half asleep for four hours! We’re not sure if the break was for the guides or us!

The first stop on our tour was a walk through Red Square, the very HEART of the Evil Empire (in the immortal words of Ronald Reagan)! We really weren’t sure what to expect, but this wasn’t it. The first thing our guide did was set us straight on the name. The original Muscovites called this the “beautiful square” and the Old Russian word for “beautiful” is “krasny”, which for reasons unknown, in “New Russian” came to mean “red”. So the name Red Square had NOTHING to do with Communism. Such a disappointment. Another myth shattered! In reality, Red Square is an enormously wide boulevard, with The Kremlin on one side and the GUM Department Store on the other and St Basil’s Cathedral one on end. About in the middle along the Kremlin Wall is Lenin’s Tomb. From what we could see of it, this is an impressive red (what else?) marble structure, but unfortunately we couldn’t see much as it was covered in (wait for it) SCAFFOLDING! So what else is new for us?? But not just any scaffolding, but scaffolding for a stage for a rock concert. By Shakira of all people! As Larry said “for a Cold War kid with memories of Walter Cronkite reporting on May Day Parades, of rockets and tanks on Red Square while the grey, grim Politburo watched from atop Lenin’s Tomb” a Shakira concert seemed somehow sacrilegious!!!! As an aside, we were travelling with another couple from our table and Brian served in the US Air Force in Germany before 1992. Larry asked what his thoughts were after seeing Red Square. His comment was “if I had known it looked like this I would have been a lot less worried.”

Red Square - the red building is the Russian Historical Library and the long one on the right is the GUM (formerly government workers only) Department Store

Lenin's Tomb

The famous St. Basil's Cathedral

From Red Square, our next stop was THE KREMLIN!!! And another lesson in Russian. The word “kremlin” actually means “palace” in Old Russian. As our guide put it, there are kremlins all over Russia! Entering through the main gate the first building you see is the former headquarters of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. This is a squat, grey concrete and glass building that fairly screams “COMMUNIST ERA” and in fact looks terribly out of place. Our guide, who has been a guide going back to the days of Communism, even commented that building it in the grounds of the Kremlin was probably not a very good idea. Over the next three hours we toured all around and through the various buildings. Surprisingly all but a couple are open to the public, and even more surprising, are the SEVEN churches inside the grounds! While they were used as museums during the Communist era, they were not destroyed (as so many were) and are once again active congregations. Our final stop in the Kremlin was the Armoury Museum, the only building in the Kremlin complex that still has a Red Star on top.

The only building where we could take photos inside was the Kremlin Palace, which was the Moscow home of the Tsars and rulers going back into the 15th Century.

Clocktower on the Kremlin wall

The building housing the offices of the President and Prime Minister

One of the older churches within the Kremlin

Inside the Kremlin Palace

After leaving the Kremlin we were taken to The Writer’s Club, one of Moscow’s best restaurants, for dinner. Let’s just say that after that meal we are really glad they didn’t take us to Moscow’s WORST restaurant, and leave it at that. We then returned to the train for the four hour trip back to St Petersburg, getting back to our cabin shortly after sunset at 12:30 AM!

A long day, hard on the feet (didn’t have a pedometer so we’re not quite sure how far we walked) and the backside (in the train) but worth it to see what the Russian city that had the worst reputation for the longest time is truly like. And really, it is just like any other big city, but with more old buildings. Yes, we did see at least one McDonald’s, a Subway and any number of western clothing and shoe stores…So it isn’t as different any more as you might think. Actually we both commented that it looked just like any other large city we have ever visited. Except for the Cyrillic alphabet names on all the buildings, of course! Still haven’t figured out if the character that looks like this, 3, is an R or an S or maybe something else entirely. We just know it is NOT a number!

Our last day in St. Petersburg was spent at two locations of the Hermitage. We were very fortunate that Crystal is able to arrange some tours that are not usually open for cruise ship tours – this one was to the Repository, the location of much of the climate controlled storage of items not on display. It is also where much of the lab and restoration work on these pieces is done. There is quite a plan for expanding the Repository to include administration for the 3 million items they have, and they are funding it in part by holding tours, mainly for school children and a few other groups.

Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take photos inside of the Repository since it is under high security and some of the items are not even catalogued yet. Most of what is on display in the Repository is of Russian origin, while the Hermitage showcases western European artwork. We saw 15th and 16th century icons from Russian Orthodox churches, statues, paintings and sculptures from the 18th century to present day, and even a sultan’s tent that had been presented to Catherine the Great. The tent is quite interesting, as it had been given to the Tsarina but since she had no space to put it up, it was folded and put into storage – where it stayed for about 300 years. The Repository has it on display over top of a glass roof and walls so you can actually stand inside of it. A truly interesting exhibit.

After the morning tour, it was off to lunch in a restaurant by the river, close to the Admiralty Building. The menu was very similar to what we had had for dinner in Moscow, but a little more substantial. It seems that the Russian cuisine served to tourists is a little short on inventiveness… Who knew there was such a thing as Chicken Stroganoff??

After lunch, we arrived at the Hermitage Museum just in time for our 2:30 timeslot. With quite a number of ships in port, you can imagine how busy it was at the tour group entrance. We had thought that 2 hours wouldn’t be enough to see all the exhibits on the list, but, as we discovered, it was basically the same tour we had done on our previous visit with a couple of minor changes: Some of the priceless artworks are now a little better protected (i.e. all the Rembrandts are now behind special glass) and the little old ladies who provided “security” in all the rooms were a little younger and better dressed. And wearing shoes instead of bedroom slippers!

We haven’t mentioned the plainclothes security force yet, although we noticed it in every room of every museum we were in. One of our tour guides told us that, since in Russia the old age pension is a flat sum per person, not based on time worked or income level, many people have to work an extra job to augment it so they can live above the poverty line. And since there are very many more women in Russia than men (about 13 to 1), there are a lot of widowed ladies who need the money, hence they are working in the museums, making sure that the tourists don’t break the rules – or the exhibits.

At the end of the tour, we headed back to the ship and our first dinner at Silk Road. After the show we spent a little while in the Sunset Lounge where the sun finally went down after 11:00 (we even got photos) then headed for bed. After all, our morning of kayaking was coming up in Helsinki!