Travel Blog Day 3

St Petersburg, Russia, Day 2

The second day of St Petersburg was very different than the first. While in the first day we only saw the residential district and Peterhof, the second day we saw the "cultural district", which is where all the beauty in the city is. Of course, 90% of the people don't get to live in this part of town, but it looks a lot nicer.

Compared to other european cities, it still has a very strange feel to it. There's very little parkland, and what is there doesn't seem to be aimed at leisure as much as "here's an area we could march soldiers around in if we wanted to". All of the buildings are meant to impose upon the viewer, and nothing feels new or modern anywhere. A couple new cars, but no new public transit, no shiny glass or chrome in storefronts, no sense of progress or modernity.

The Hermitage was a beautiful museum, but insanely overcrowded again. It really does feel like everyone who comes to see St Petersburg ends up in the same few places. Even when they drove us around sightseeing, we drove past the same Eternal Flame square like five times, I think they just haul tourists around in a tiny little area. I don't care much for viewing opulent room after opulent room, thrones and china, gold paint and chandaliers. The art was beautiful, I enjoyed the Rembrandt, Titian, and Rubens a lot. Rusty and I got a few images of the nameplates off artists we'd never heard of, in the hopes of picking up prints. Jan Mandijn reminded me of Dali, I'd love to pick up a print of his. I've decided that I really don't like impressionism. They had a massive French Impressionism exhibit, including a lot of Picassos, and I found 95% of it to be crap.

Too bad that the one town we stay in overnight is St Petersburg. You can't get off the ship here without a Russian Visa unless you're on a tour, so we're stuck on the ship at night. It would have been fun if Rusty and I could have gotten off the boat and checked out some of the night life. Or we could have ended up bleeding in an alley. Either way it'd be better than sitting on a boat with a bunch of geriatrics, trying to find anything to do other than drink in a piano bar and sing Piano Man for the 50th time.

We got some pictures of us hanging out on our deck at midnight, with the sky as bright as day. I've never been this far north in my life, I can't believe that the sun seriously doesn't set until 11pm, and even then, it stays bright for two more hours. It really messes with your body's rhythms, especially since I'm not used to going to bed while the sun is up. I can see why people say that you go a little crazy when you live somewhere that the sun never sets.