Thursday, July 9, 2015
Clay was up first again. I don’t know if he’d been to the
gym or not. He says he is getting a sore throat, so maybe not. We thought we
were in no rush this morning. We arrived in St. Petersburg Ocean Terminal about
8am. We were not the first ship in and by the time we were docked, all 6 berths
were occupied. I don’t think we ever went past the place on the Neva River
where we saw 3 ships docked before. We went to Terrace for breakfast and it was
so crowded we were forced to sit outside. We wouldn’t normally mind that but we
have only had inattentive to non-existent service out there and sometimes with
a big side helping of sass. So, generally we try to avoid sitting out on the
back deck. Today, it was just slow service. We ate lightly so as not to tax the
service system and got out of there. We left the room about 8am and entered a
world we had not previously encountered. We were out of the room as Dottie, the
cruise director, was making the announcement that the ship was cleared and she
was calling the O tour groups. Evidently the last time we were here we had left
the cabin prior to any of that because that day we just walked all the way down
the front stairs and out the gangway on deck 4 and arrived at passport control
without any lines and 15 minutes later were ashore and waiting. Today we walked
down and got stopped on deck 5 as deck 4 was only for O’s tour groups. We were
sent aft to join a line at least 200 people long from the deck 5 gangway back
past Jacques. We stood there as they released 20 people about every 10 minutes.
It took us over an hour and 10 minutes to get ashore today. I am not sure whose
idea it was to limit the departure of independent guests. It may have been a
way for Oceania to minimize the passport control wait for their own tour
participants. I have no idea if they were doing this on our previous cruise because
we didn’t witness it before. It was a new day in Russia today! The other complicating factor was that we were sharing a passport control area with a much larger MSC ship that was disembarking tours at the same time even though they had been docked there when we arrived.
Today was our weird private tour day in St. Petersburg.
Months ago when planning this, we knew 2 things. We didn’t want to repeat the
standard Alla Tours here and it would be more crowded here now that it was earlier
in the season. So, Clay picked St. Nicholas Naval Cathedral in Kronstat. It was
an hour drive each way and he mostly picked it for that. So we could see
something different of and around St. Petersburg. It worked. We saw some repeat
stuff, but mostly we saw countryside and suburbs. We drove outbound from the north
and returned from the south. We saw even more variety. From the north was the earlies
road and it went over a dam. From the south was the newer road and it is part
of a St. Petersburg ring road. The cathedral was built in 1906, I think, and
was hardly ever used as a church since religion was outlawed shortly after it
was completed. It had very recently been renovated and re-consecrated. It was a
spectacular Byzantine-style Orthodox church. It was worth the drive. I picked
the Kunstkamera. It is the oldest museum in Russia and was started from the private
collection of biological and medical specimens of Peter the Great. It was fascinating
and disgusting and disturbingly crowded. But, the most amazing thing of all was
that Alla had arranged a private museum guide for our visit. So both our weird
things turned out to be good things. For lunch, we went to a Tepemok. They are
a chain of blini fast food cafes. We liked it. It was a very different
experience too. They had toys for kids’ meals. Our guide, Anya, explained that they
were Russian Winnie-the-Pooh characters from a TV cartoon show. They had Pooh,
Rabbit, Eeyore and Owl. Once she explained it, I could see it, but I wouldn’t
have figured it out on my own. We stopped to see the smallest statue in St.
Petersburg. It is a little bird on the water side of a bridge. Pedestrians try
to drop coins on the pedestal for good luck. I guess like a wishing well or
something. We had seen if from the boat tour last time but Clay couldn’t get a
photo. It is called Chizhik-Pyzhik
and though fairly new is fairly famous for tourists and locals alike. After
lunch, we took about an hour long stroll through the Summer Garden instead of
on Nevsky Prospekt because we didn’t really have any souvenir shopping to do.
At 3pm was our guided tour of Kunstkamera and by 5pm we were back at Marina. We
said good bye to Anya as we will not see her again. We don’t know who we’ll
have for Moscow tomorrow or how many in our group. On the third day and our 2nd
day of private touring in St. Petersburg, we will have our same driver again,
Slava. We paid Anya $50 for our 3rd day added visit to the
Impressionists building of the Hermitage. We showed her our paid invoice from
June. She seemed surprised as she was telling us we needed to pay her today. We
were surprised she was expecting anything more than the $50 but she must have
phoned in and verified it because later all she asked us for only the $50. We
sadly did not get a receipt for it! She confirmed with Slava and with us and we
thought with someone on the phone that we would need to be outside passport
control tomorrow morning at 6am to go to Moscow. As I was typing this up, the
cabin phone rang and it was a fellow passenger named Zach. He said he would be
going to Moscow with us tomorrow and had been asked to please notify us that we
had to be outside by 5:30am or miss the departure to Moscow. Clay thought in
June it was even earlier. Well, stay tuned.
We’ll have
an early dinner in Terrace and an early bedtime and a long, long, hard day
tomorrow on our whirlwind tour of Moscow. I will probably not get a post
published tomorrow, so look for it in 2 days.
The Queen Elizabeth that was here when we arrived, left before dinner time. While we were having dinner Celebrity Silhouette must have slinked off silently because we didn't see them or hear them leave while up in Terrace.
