St. Petersburg was a Disappointment

I was really looking forward to our two days in St. Petersburg because I had heard about how dazzling it was so I felt let down when we disembarked the Emerald Princess and were met by a bunch of grouchy immigration officials who obviously didn't like the idea of getting up at the crack of dawn to meet a shipload of tourists.

Samson and the Lion at Peterhof Palace

After being hauled around on a bus for two days and herded through the Hermitage, St. Isaac's Cathedral, the Yusupov Palace, Peter and Paul Fortress, Church of the Spilled Blood and the Peterhof Palace, I was dragging my butt and felt much like a wet noodle.  It was hard to believe how crowded all of these places were and how quickly we shuffled through them.  It all seems like a blur.  And the traffic -- it was horrible.  It took us about as much time to travel between sites as it did to tour them.

Although the palaces and churches were magnificent, I still can't help thinking that St. Petersburg was a pretty depressing place overall.  Gray skies (I was told that St. Petersburg gets only about 30 days of sunshine per year), buildings that were once brightly painted but had obviously faded and the generally dour people made a lasting impression on me.  During our tour of the Hermitage, I was struck by the women who were sitting in chairs in each of the rooms.  I smiled but never once received a smile in return.  In fact, if I actually caught the eye of any of them, they immediately looked away.  

We did, however, have a very informative Russian guide who I could actually understand when she spoke English.  She was quite proficient at giving us a titillating account of the history of the Romanovs, the most interesting of which was how Rasputin met his maker in the basement of Yusupov Palace.

In retrospect, I should have been smarter about my visit to St. Petersburg.  Instead of trying to see everything in two days, I should have selected two or three sites to see and done it at a leisurely and more enjoyable pace.  In fact,  I could have spent the entire two days at the Hermitage!

More photos of St. Petersburg