St Petersburg - Day 1

Our first day started out very slow, thanks to the Russian Immigration staff. According to Princess, all passengers are off the ship and en route to their shore excursions within 1 hour. Well, our ship took over 2 hours and since our excursion was scheduled to be one of the last to leave, we waited and waited, then waited some more. We finally left over 1 hour behind schedule - and we had a fairly short 1 1/2 hour turn around between shore excursions today. But all are with the same tour company so they slid the afternoon schedules a bit.

The Hermitage was very worth while. We spent 2 hours going through it, with chances to view the Old Masters and French Impressionist areas at our own pace. The buildings themselves were very impressive. It's hard to believe just a few people lived in that entire Winter Palace, now part of the Hermitage. The paintings themselves were very impressive, but were overshadowed by the buildings that contained them. Pictures cannot capture the beauty - nor can words.

As I mentioned earlier we got back very late from our morning excursion and our hour and one half interlude was down to 15 minutes so Mary and I did no re-board the ship and waited for the next excursion. This one was nice, but had a multitude of logistical issues. I won't go into them here, except to say that a 30 minute walk through St Petersburg was not on the itinerary. The canal ride was very nice, but we got shortchanged on time outside of the Church of Spilled Blood. Mary and I paid to go into the church and used most of our 20 minutes there so we only had 5 minutes to do some shopping with the street vendors. The church was amazing - the entire interior is covered with religious mosaics.