St. Petersburg, June 5 and 6

We are docked at the new passenger terminal area. Today there are four other large ships in port: one Royal Caribbean, one Norwegian Cruise Lines, one Thomas, and one that I haven't seen before called Saga. There is a separate terminal building for each pair of ships, and they are building another. That project includes pounding I-beams into the ground as in Copenhagen, but fortunately a good deal farther away from us...thump thump whomp thump thump whomp.

Getting off the ship for tours was a fine example of the Russian way of life. After waiting in line at Passport Control, you submit your passport, a landing card, and your tour ticket through a little slot in the officer's booth. He or she then looks through the entire passport, looks you up in an online database, carefully compares you to your photo, and then loudly and energetically stamps your passport and hands it back with the departure portion of the landing card, all while maintaining a total poker face. You'd think they all had their smile muscles severed as a job requirement.

After walking over a quarter of a mile to get through the building and around to the bus, my tour was quite good. It was one of those "Panoramic St. Petersburg (or whatever city)" things where you ride around while the guide talks, the bus stops every so often, and the group files off to take a photo or shop for souvenirs. Our guide was good, and the bus driver was amazing at navigating the snarl of streets in the central city.

The city has changed a lot in 37 years. The traffic has increased enormously, mostly in the number of cars zipping (or trying to zip) around. There is very little parking, especially in the central part of the city, so they park anywhere at all, sidewalks, grass, anywhere. We did not get stuck in too much traffic, but that was the luck of our timing just after the morning rush hour.

Another change was the amount of poster advertising along the streets. I even saw one that I recognized. It showed three men, the center one of whom was Will Smith. It was a poster for "Men in Black 3," but in the Russian alphabet the title was much longer than that.

As you may know, Peter the Great established the city beginning in 1703 mainly because he wanted a port on the Baltic and to establish a shipbuilding industry. (Peter had been trained as a shipbuilder while studying incognito in Amsterdam as a young man.) While most of the nobles didn't want to move to St. Petersburg from Moscow, they didn't have much choice, and the city served as the Imperial capital for over 200 years. Peter, and Catherine after him, favored the Italianate architecture, so all the original buildings are of that style and massive. One notable exception is the Church of the Saviour of Spilled Blood you see in the photo here. It is, of course, copied after St. Basil's in Moscow. The only services ever held in it were royal funerals for the Romanovs. In fact Nicholas II and his family were reburied here after their graves were found. However, they are buried in a sort of annex because the Russian Orthodox Church chooses not to accept three rounds of DNA evidence that these are actually Romanov remains.I spent a quiet afternoon on board. Jill finally came in after her nine hour tour of Catherine's Palace and The Hermitage. I had originally booked a tour of The Hermitage for tomorrow, but after advice from the shore excursion people, I decided to cancel that one. I'm not fond of art museum tours in large groups, and I was in there back in 1975. My main memory of it is the huge urns of malachite and lapis lazuli trimmed in gold leaf. I always thought they were carved from solid blocks of those minerals, but a woman I talked to who had been on a private tour told me that they are actually clever mosaics on brass where the patterns in the pieces are matched so closely that they just appear to be all one large piece. You learn something new every day.

June 6

It did not really get dark last night, or if it did, it was only for a couple of hours while I was asleep. This is what the Russians call the time of "white nights." when sunset is at 11:15 and sunrise at 4:45, if you figure a couple hours of light at twilight and before dawn, that doesn't leave much time for darkness.

Only the Royal Caribbean ship remains, although another NCL ship came in this morning. After a quiet morning, Jill headed back on another tour to The Hermitage to see the Gold Room, while I planned to just relax on board. I had a little lunch and chatted with several other passengers.

As we sailed away we got to see Peter's Summer Palace although it was a bit far away for a good photo. Then we did get good views of the Neva Bay Flood Dam which is 25 km long with only two gates to the sea. The whole area has been heavily fortified on every small islet for several centuries. The flood dam had been planned for decades, but was only completed fairly recently. When certain kinds of weather systems come in from the Atlantic, the gates are closed to keep St. Petersburg from flooding which it had done over 270 times in several hundred years. It's the biggest flood control system in the world.