St. Petersburg

Mum and I have spent the last four days in St. Petersburg for the beginning portion of our seniors cruise. It is a beautiful city, and it's a shame that we are here on an organised tour and cannot just go walk through town.
It's quite different going from doing whatever one wants while travelling, to being only allowed to do what is planned and having to stay with the groups - mind you Russia is kinda intimidating, and I'm glad there are people looking out for us, and who speak Russian with us always. I'm sure we'd be fine after a couple days... though it would taking a little more time to get use to the Cyrillic, than trying to piece together only a foreign language.

Anyways, we've seen the Hermitage, gone to a ballet performance, visited Catherine the first's summer palace, travelled through St. Petersburgs city centre, ooooed and awed at the Peterhof Palace and cruised through the canals of the city.
The Hermitage was amazing, it rivals the Louvre and the Prado for art collections, though the added brillance of the Winter Palace makes it that much more visually appealing. The ballet was of Sleeping Beauty - not the disney version, but they did play "I know you..." and I had it stuck in my head all night. The ballet tutus reminded me of parasols, amazingly beautiful! I'm glad I knew the disney version, had I not, I would have had no idea what was going on... obviously no words in ballets.
Catherine's Palace and the Peterhof Palace were both so indescribable  Catherine's was much more ornate and "gold" but Peterhofs had the most amazing grounds and fountains.
It's hard to imagine that people lived like that. To have acres of land full of fountains and paths to walk, giant ball rooms and all this amazing furniture. Peterhof Palace was only a summer palace, somewhat modeled after Versailles. The other pretty impressive thing was that they were all utterly destroyed during the Second World War. Roofs and walls missing, rooms gutted, just the shell of a building. Immediately following the war the Soviets began restoring the palaces, to promote their history, and brought all the building back to their former glory, with many original pieces of furniture. Quite impressive!

We did two city tours, one by bus and one through the canals of St. Petersburg. Apparently there are over 500 bridges here and is loosely compare to Amsterdam for its waterways. I believe it.

The tour was ok. I couldnt really make out what the guide was saying over the speakers, but the scenery was nice. The buildings here are so grandious and have lovely colours.

We are setting sail tonight for the cruising portion of the trip, starting on the Neva River in the Volga-Baltic system. Should be interesting scenery when we wake up tomorrow - it's dark now so we are missing a lot. I guess thats what happens when we pick the cheap tickets: not only do we get cooler weather (not a matter for us) but we get early darkness to less our view times.