Here it is in more detail.

We showed up the first morning, tried to check in to the hotel but couldn't. Since we only had 2 days here, we didn't want to spend half the first one waiting in a hotel lobby, so we went basically straight from the overnight train to the Hermitage museum. No change of clothes, no deodorant -- just transfer from the train to the hotel lobby, then straight to the museum. Here's an aside -- I like this sort of thing. You can't check in, because it's before noon. You are welcome to stand in the lobby if you want. You can leave you bags at the "luggage room" but you are charged for doing so. A dollar a bag. What it comes down to is this: "I'm sorry, your room isn't clean yet. That'll be three dollars. Thank you." Except if they were to say that, you wouldn't understand them, because it'd be in Russian.

So we sucked it up, checked the bags, and went off -- smelly and unwashed -- to one of Europe's greatest museums. I had one big goal: the world's oldest carpet. I've read about it; it was found in a Pazyryk tomb in Altai, the region on the Siberian/Mongolian border where they found all the cool ancient frozen tombs. It's a thousand years older than any comparable rug. As a carpet collector, I need to see this thing. Not to mention, I've been building it up over the last 2 weeks as the one thing in the Hermitage I want to see more than any other. Well, it's out being cleaned. Or maybe it's on tour. I suppose there's a chance that it's in there but in an unmarked room that's hard to find. Anyway, I didn't see it. Oh, I saw the other 600,000 works of art on display. It's the world's biggest collection of old portraits of rich people you've never heard of. Trust me, between this and the Louvre, I never need to see a pre-nineteenth century work of European art again. 

The Hermitage is basically 5 different buildings, connected together by an awkward series of catwalks. You could make a math puzzle out of it: try to get from one room to another without crossing over your previous path, and without missing a room. Here's what they ought to do: build a big museum to hold their art, and let people who want to see the palace just wander through the rooms. What happens is this: tourists wander the palace, and now and then bump into someone they know from the train and say "I am totally lost. I'm looking at the map they gave me, but I can't figure out which room I'm in. Was there any good art in the room you just came from?" It's totally ridiculous. I'm not a "group tour" guy, but the people with the group tours had their own entrance, and they were able to navigate through it and find the important works of art. If anyone who reads this is planning a trip to St. Petersburg, let me say this: hire a tour guide and let them guide you around this thing. Or else skip it. Honestly, you won't miss much. Hundreds of thousands of oil paintings of dead Dutch rulers. They did have one room of impressionists -- works of art that were stolen by the Nazis during WW2, then stolen back by the Russians when the Nazis retreated, then never returned to the families they belonged to. A room of Picassos, a handful of Monets and Renoirs. Nothing you can't see better examples of anywhere else. 

Do I sound bitter? Sorry. We spent over 2 hours in line to get in, because we weren't in a tour group. That was a bit of a theme with our Russian vacation. Russia is a country that used to be ruled by iron-fisted dictators, and now it's ruled by blue-haired tourists. There are two kinds of people that count here: neo-mafiosos who used to be party bosses, and elderly tourists who follow their umbrella-toting tour guide. If you are an independent person who just for some reason wants to visit any of this countries top tourist attractions, you had better find yourself a group of old Japanese people, or you don't stand a chance. 

June 30th

In about a half hour we board our flight to the States. It's actually a really good feeling to know that our "tourist" leg of this vacation is over. So ready to just lay around and bum off friends, visit family, and be in America for a little while. We're in Beijing, dreading the next 30 hours or so. We fly to Tokyo, then catch a flight from there to Portland, then on to Los Angeles. Somehow we land in California about an hour before we left Japan, but it's going to feel like much longer. At least we slept last night. The overnight flight from St. Petersburg to Beijing (with it's idiotic 6-hour layover in Moscow) was awful. I'll never fly Aeroflot again, but then -- since I doubt I'll be visiting Russia again either -- I don't think that'll prove to be a problem.

Where was I.. . . St. Petersburg seemed at first to be so wonderful. Much more European than Moscow. Signs were (often) in English. People smiled when they took your money, and gave you directions instead of just the grunting crossed-arms "nyet!" we had grown almost fond of.

But. . . we had 2 days in St. Petersburg and just 2 things to do/see. Strolling the old European avenues was lovely, and we did have a nice meal in a cute little slightly-below-ground-level cafe. There was a great church that looked like St. Basils, but even more ornate.  Took a hundred photos of it.  Here's one I stole from Google Image Search, so you know what it looks like.

Aside from that, our main goals were the Hermitage and the Catherine Palace. I'll start to get upset if I write too much about it, and no one wants to hear the pissed-off ramblings of a disgruntled tourist, so I'll be brief. The Hermitage. Totally done looking at Dutch masters and Russian czar portraits. The highlight is the building itself, inlaid parquet floors and lovely ceilings. But there's no way you can find anything, and you find after a while that you've been down this hall twice, but you never saw anything in the other wing that you thought you were headed towards. When you connect a bunch of old buildings into a museum, it just doesn't lend itself to easy navigation. Turns out, the whole thing is a conspiracy on the part of tour guides. Just like Egypt. If they made things easy to find or understand, it would put half the Russian tour guide industry out of business. You simply cannot get around that building unless you hire a guide to tell you what to look at and why it's important in the history of art. I'm one of those guys who would rather do things on my own, and at my own pace. The one thing I wanted to see -- the main object of the Hermitage day -- the reason I looked at the line to get in and said "what the heck -- $20 tickets, and a 2-hour wait? Let's do it!" Is that the world's oldest pile carpet is in that museum. The treasures of the Pazyryk culture of the Altai, found frozen solid in Russo/Mongolian tundra, have been thawed out and are on display. Wooden horse decorations, tools, even mummified people, all perfectly preserved. And among them, a carpet that is a thousand years older than any other existing carpet in the world. Now, it's hard as heck to find anything in that museum, and the Altai room is that hardest. When we entered it, I got the feeling that we were the first people down there in weeks. It almost seemed like not a display room at all -- there were packing boxes on the floor, and most of the lights were off. Contrasted with the throngs of people upstairs looking at portraits of Czarina Alexandroskya the Nineteenth, it was like we accidentally went through the staff entrance to the basement or something. But the guards were nice, I think because they don't get much interaction with people. Still, none of them knew about the old carpet, or if they did, they didn't understand our questions. I found the room where I thought it belonged, and it wasn't there. So I looked around the whole pre-history wing for a half hour or so, in case it was curated in some silly place. Eventually we decided it was either out for cleaning or on exhibit. So basically, the main thing I wanted to see in that museum wasn't there. On the way out, we looked in the gift shop at a book of the museum (visitor's tip: on your way in, BUY the guide to the museum, so you can find stuff in it.) The rug was in there, and it looked pretty cool. I'd say "next time, maybe I'll see it" but I am leaning towards the "let's not do this again" angle right now.

One full day in a museum looking for a rug that wasn't there. The next day, we did the "day trip to Pushkin" to see the Amber Room at Catherine the Great's palace. It's a whole room made out of amber. I read about it years ago, and it's been calling to me ever since. The Nazis plundered a lot of the amber-coated furniture, but since WW2, the German government has been helpful in getting some of the room's amber paneling back, and now it's open for viewing. 

Pushkin is 25 kilometers south of St. Petersburg. It's the second-biggest tourist draw in St. Petersburg. Here's the catch: you can't get there. Oh, you could do what everyone else does. You could hire a tour guide and get on a tour bus, and go through the museum following a lady who tells you all sorts of stuff about Catherine. Not us. We figured out the bus routes and the metro, took the subway to the bus station and caught a bus (actually a van -- they only hold 10 people, and they don't leave the station until they're full) which cost 10 rubles. That's like 8 cents. Half hour drive, and we were in Pushkin, then just a fifteen-minute walk to the Palace. We left early, to beat the crowds. That's advice we got from the guidebook. But like I said before, the one thing you can count on is this: your guidebook's wrong. We got there just before noon, and saw the sign: "English language pre-booked tours from 10 to noon, Russian pre-booked tours from noon to 2. Independent visitors are welcome to enter from 4 to 6. Advance tickets will not be sold. Tickets on sale inside entrance." OK, so IF we decide to stay, we have to wait 4 hours to buy tickets. But we came all this way. . . and we really want to see the amber room. . . so we decide to suck it up. Wait 4 hours. We ate some ice cream. We sat in the park. Our toes and feet were sore from walking all over Moscow, or we would have strolled the palace grounds for 4 hours. We saw a little exhibit of Catherine's favorite sex toys (no, really! Naughty figurines, scatological porcelain dolls, playing cards that show naked people if you hold them up to the light.) We ate more ice cream. In fact, the only thing to eat was ice cream. We could have left and walked back into town, but a fifteen minute walk was just not calling to us at that point. Well, the line started to grow, so we got in it. And waited. This was two hours early. We stood in line, in the surprisingly hot Russian sun, for two hours. When the door finally opened at 4, the fight for the ticket booth was unlike anything you've seen. Guards had to come out to keep semi control. We eventually made it in. Lots of people behind us didn't. If you don't get your tickets by the time they stop selling them (5:30) you don't go in. It was nearly 5:15 before we had tickets in hand. Waiting from 2 to 4 for the doors to open, then another hour and a half to get close enough to the ticket booth. 
Finally, at the ticket booth. Forty US dollars each. What!!?!?! You know, if the sign outside had said "Tickets for independent travelers go on sale at 5:15 and cost $40" I think we would have left and gone somewhere else that day. But at this point, we weren't going to leave simply because of money. We sucked up the 80 bucks and entered. Short end of it is: Amber room was fairly cool. Glad I saw it. 

If anyone had told me beforehand that it would take all day, and we'd be living on ice cream, standing in line in the sun, and it would cost eighty bucks, I would have thought about skipping it.  

If they had told me that it would be impossible to get a bus home once the museum closed and the ten thousand residents of St. Petersburg who had been with us in line were all trying to fight for one of the last remaining seats on an 8-seat microbus back to town; and that we'd be standing in line for a bus until nearly nine at night; and that while fighting to get on a bus, pickpockets were going to steal my camera, and that we'd eventually have to take a taxi back (a taxi that would start out saying "fifty dollars" and then on dropping us off try to pretend like he had actually asked for far more than that). . . . 

. . .  I think if we had known all of that, we would have skipped Pushkin, stayed in the city and eaten lunch at that cute below-ground cafe that we found on the first day.  Maybe gone to a movie.  Still, glad it happened on the very, very, last day of vacation, and not in the beginning!  And it all worked out.  Our insurance replaced the camera with an even better one.  And I only lost a few days worth of photos.  And we weren't hurt or stabbed -- just violated by thieves and tired of waiting in Russian lines.

Anyway, a month is a dang long time to be traveling.  We were quite ready to get on that plane.

Hope you enjoyed the story!