Have you heard? There's a rumour in St. Petersburg.

June 24th – Today is less of a bus tour, rather we have three major stops of varying length. First is Catherine’s Palace, where two Catherines—Peter the Great’s second wife and later Catherine the Great—called home. The palace was built as a summer retreat for Peter’s wife, and as if that wasn’t enough, there is a smaller complex on the grounds that was her hermitage (but not The Hermitage, which we’ll get to shortly). So if you’re keeping track: the royals had a proper palace (the Winter Palace); Peter had a summer retreat (Peterhof), and a retreat within that retreat (Mon plaisir); and his wife had her own sanctuary (Catherine’s Palace), and a sanctuary within a sanctuary. In no way excessive, this is. Catherine’s Palace is beautiful, of course, but all this extravagance finally starts to gall me. It’s just one grand room after another, each room a new demonstration of grotesque ostentation. Mirrors are expensive? Let’s build a room with 72 mirrors that are twenty feet high. Aluminum is new and incredibly rare? Send us a boat load. Amber is costly and notoriously hard to work with? Hey, come check out our Amber Room. The Palace was badly damaged and looted in the war, but the Russians have done an amazing reconstruction job that’s ongoing to the present day, but I still walk away with an awful taste in my mouth.

Next comes the shortest stop of the day, at the Church on the Spilled Blood. The exterior is a lot like St. Basil’s in Moscow’s Red Square (which is a little out of our way). Spilled Blood is built on the spot where Alexander the Second was killed by a terrorist bomb. We expect something very Byzantine and nasty inside, but it’s actually quite beautiful. It’s busy for sure—every inch of wall is covered in mosaics featuring Russian saints or scenes from the life of Jesus—but it comes together well. Spilled Blood was another site badly damaged by the war, but it was left in disrepair until more recently. Polina’s great line during our time here: “In Russia, we have a great tradition of destroying things and then heroically building them back up again.”

Last stop of the day is at the Hermitage, which is actually a collection of several buildings—including the Winter Palace—that have collectively been converted into one of the world’s largest museums. Three million paintings and frescoes, two million statues. We’re told that if you spend just two seconds stopping to look at each piece of art, it would take you eleven years to see everything. We’ve got about three hours. Polina leads us inside while some strange band in the courtyard plays “Livin’ the Vida Loca” in Russia [Sadly, this is the 4th language in which I have heard this song performed, the first three being Spanish, English and Japanese. Ricky Martin – who knew that he was so good at bridging cultural gaps? – Sarah]. It’s a quick tour, clearly, but somehow it doesn’t feel rushed. We see paintings by Raphael, da Vinci, many of the impressionists, Picasso, and Rembrandt. Sadly, because the Hermitage is similar in style and structure to other palaces we’ve seen in St. Petersburg, my memory of it sort of bleeds in with the rest of the day.

[One side note – the palace is preserved as it was when the Bolsheviks took it over during the October Revolution of 1917. The tsar and family had been out at Catherine’s Palace for months, but the throne room, etc. are exactly as the Romanovs left them. The night the Bolsehviks got in, the provisional government were meeting in one of the smaller rooms, which caused the revoluntionaries no end of problems. They were lost for nearly 4 hours in the palace, and decided to relieve themselves in priceless artifacts along the way. The Bolsheviks: much like the Europeans in North America, they began destroying things as soon as they arrived. Though, to be fair, they had no idea the value of the treasures they were strolling by – the Russian aristocracy horded wealth like Imelda Marcos did shoes. When the men finally happened upon and kidnapped the provisional government, they stopped the room’s clock so that it commemorated this turning point. The clock still reads 2:10 a.m. Contemporary Russian curators have left this room as is, as a reflection of their Soviet history. – Sarah.]

Dropped off after the tour, we take it easy in our cabins for two hours and then head down to dinner, an even fancier one than we’re used to. It’s Sarah’s parents’ anniversary, and we’ve made plans to go to Oceanliners—a small, ultra-classy restaurant on the ship that is available by reservation only. Sarah tells me it has the same menu and level of service of Michel Roux’s five-star restaurant in Britain. (You also pay a little extra for it.) We chose the Menu Exceptionale, which pairs a glass of wine with each course. The food is amazing, the presentation better still. Even personally, we maintain a level of class appropriate for the venue—until the cheese course at the end. Sarah’s dad—not a cheese guy at the best of times—eats a big dollop of goat’s cheese and when I ask what it’s like he blurts out, “Brutal!”