Our first day in St Petersburg was a whirlwind of activities. We planned the ultimate excursion which they advertise as being two eight hour days and an evening at the Marlinski Ballet. The tours ended up being more like 10 hours so we were really rushed on day one.

In preparation for our Russia day we picked up some rubles from the front desk. For $100 I got 6000 rubles. It is the first time I have held a 5000 bill. It was odd currency to work with.

Our tour started early in the morning and our first stop was Catherine’s Palace. It was about a hour drive. There were no highways we twisted and turned through narrow little city streets until we were out of town on what seemed more like a FM road than a highway. This did allow us to get glimpse of some of the attractions in town.

Catherine’s Palace was beautiful. It was used as a summer home to get out of St Petersburg. It was patterned after Versailles. The rooms were full of ornate chandeliers and marble floors. We even had to cover our shoes with little paper booties to protect the floors. There was some art but mostly we were seeing the rooms and furniture.

The amber room although beautiful was not exactly what I expected. It was panels where that had fit pieces of Amber together like a puzzle. Think more rock fireplace then mosaics. There were also frames made out of amber for art made out of amber so pretty much everything was amber. However there was not quite enough to cover all the walls so one was blank and the part up to the ceiling was painted to look like amber. The amber panels were originally made for the Prussian king but Peter the Great showed asked that they be given to him and they kindly obliged. I guess they wanted to keep Peter the Great happy. Of course these are replicas since the Germans took them back in WWII never to be seen again.

After the palace we headed back to the road for the hour drive to Peterhof Gardens. Here we had our delicious boxed lunch of convenience store sandwich in the garden. Beautiful surroundings horrible lunch.

The gardens were full of fountains and was again patterned after Versailles. We wondered and took a lot of photos before heading to the pier to catch the hydrofoil back to the city. It was a crazy bout that looked like a cricket gliding across the water. It did cut 30 minutes off the trip so well worth it.

We still had two churches to see in the afternoon so we were rushing through town on our bus. The church of the Spilled Blood is the most Russian building we saw. It is a Russia Orthodox Church with the onion domes. The domes were patterned to look like burning candles.

The interior is all mosaic and mostly done in gold. It is very ornate. It definitely lived up to my expectations.

From there St issaks. It has a big gold dome which 8 people died making. We were quite rushed in the church but able to snap a few pictures.

Before the church we had a convince stop. Basically the cruise sponsored souvenir shop that allowed free bathrooms and vodka tasting. I did my part shopping in all the tour stops. I am sure things were probably cheaper other place but the convince stop was just that convenient and our tour guides did their best to keep us out of other stores.

Overall a great day in Russia and it isn’t over but the ballet will have to be its own post.