The Grand entrance staircase of the Hermitage

We docked at about 07:30 and I was up, bright eyed and bushy tailed on deck to watch.

If we wanted to travel independently in St Petersburg we would have had to obtain a visa, which is a complicated and frustratingly long-winded process.
However, if travelling on an organised excursion a visa is not not needed. Because of this, we had booked an organised excursion to The Hermitage and its Gold Room. This wasn't until the afternoon, and in the evening we had tickets for the ballet.

Our trip was due to leave at 13:30, and we were mustered just after 13:00. We had to get off the ship and then go into a terminal, where we went through immigration. On this first visit we were thoroughly inspected by unsmiling immigration officials, were issued with immigration cards and had our passports stamped.
We then continued into the terminal and outside to waiting buses. Our guide was called Lydia. She had a microphone and gave us an ear phone and receiver, so we would be able to hear her once we were in the museum.

The area around the docks is very run down. There were wide, empty, bare areas of land and then block after block of identical, ugly run down flats. The sky was overcast and it was all rather grey and depressing.

After about 5 miles we got began to enter the city and everything changed! The buildings began to be large, ornate and built to impress! St Petersburg is a relatively new city, only about 300 years old, being founded on 27 May 1703 and basically built on a bog! It has a river running through it (The Neva) and has lots of canals - it's known as The Venice of the North. In its 300 year history it has had about 300 floods, many of them catastrophic!

We arrived at The Hermitage. This is a group of five Baroque buildings, one of which is the Winter Palace, built for Catherine The Great, who started the collection of antiquities and objects of interest as a private court museum in 1764. Gradually her collection became too big and additional buildings were constructed to accommodate it. The rooms were magnificently decorated, with lots of gold leaf decoration, chandeliers, huge vases and pillars in semi-precious stone. Lydia took us through several rooms of interest and then down to The Gold Room, where our group was split in two. We taken in by a Gold Room guide. It was fascinating. There was gold from the 7th century BC up to the 19th century AD, executed in the most beautiful and elaborate way. Most of it was jewellery, but there were also cups, knives and swords. The gold came from Eurasia and the Orient. Some of the pieces were so intricate and fine. They had pieces displayed under magnifying glasses and the detail of the designs was breathtaking. They had very rare earrings and many Chinese hairpins that were beautiful. It was worth the trip just to visit this room for 45 minutes.

We waited for the rest of our group to rejoin us after their visit, and then carried on our tour of The Hermitage. We saw a fabulous golden peacock clock, that actually opens and displays its tail. This is only operated on very special occasions, but there was a video showing it working. We also saw two paintings by Leonardo da Vinci!

The Hermitage has over 1,000 rooms and it has been estimated that if someone looked at every object in collection for just 1 second, it would take 9 years to see everything!!!!!! We saw just a tiny, tiny fraction of it, but it was fascinating.

We left The Hermitage and returned to on our bus to the ship. When we got back to the port we had to pass back through immigration. Our landing cards were taken in and our passports stamped again - so we had effectively gone into Russia and then back out again!

We got back at about 18:00 and were due out again at 19:00. As we had to ready at least 30 minutes before this, in realty we had about half an hour to get ready. Fiona just got changed, but I managed to shower as well.

We left the ship to go to the ballet at about 18:45. When we went through immigration this time it was a much quicker process. Although our passports were checked unsmilingly and carefully. Since we had been through before we didn't have to have a landing card or our passports stamped.

This time our guide was Irene. She handed out our theatre tickets on the bus, and also a ticket that qualified us for a free glass of Russian "champagne" during the first interval. We arrived at the Grand Palace Theatre and queued for just a short time before entering the building. We had to climb a staircase, and then there were several nicely decorated rooms on the way into the auditorium. This was actually quite small, with wooden chairs laid on in the centre, and seats down the sides on small platforms facing into the the auditorium. There was a small balcony of seats above. We were right at the back on the outside edge of the central area. We were worried we would struggle to see, but needn't have done so.

The production was Swan Lake and it was superb! The prima ballerina was terrific, as were Siegfried, the jester and the magician, and the corps de ballet was well trained and disciplined. We enjoyed it very much.
I bought a program to see who the principals were, and found there were 4 possibilities for both Odette/Odille and Siegfried. i asked one of the staff who was dancing and she marked their names. We discovered they had the same surname (with the female variation) so could have been brother and sister!

We returned to the ship and found that a buffet had been provided in the Lotus Grill, which was very welcome, as we had missed our dinner.

We stayed alongside St Petersburg overnight.