Welcome to the Hermitage, one of the world's greatest art museums, with over 3 million exhibitions housed in a wing of the Tsar's former Winter Palace. If you like, you could choose to line up for up to 3 hours for a ticket. Alternatively, you could follow your Russian tour guide as she brazenly pushes her way right to the front of the queue with 12 people in tow.
Needless to say, we chose the latter. And even though we were almost stampeded by the mob as the great doors swung open at 10.30, we managed to squeeze in and ruthlessly grab almost the first available tickets, so we were in the Hermitage by 11.am!
We walked around the grand palace interiors and were considerably impressed by the marble staircases and colour-coordinated rooms. We ummed and arred over the French impresionist paintings and tried to sound intelligent as we discussed artworks by Monet, Van Gough, Picasso, Matisse and notable others and how our homes would be decorated to incorporate selected works.
After mentally-redecorating our home, it was time to find the exit. This turned out to be no easy feat, however finally we managed to escape and we rewarded ourselves with icecream and a lunch of traditional Russian pies.
We headed off to our next museum of the day - but forget art, we were off to the Kunstkammer, or the 'Cabinet of Curious' as our guidebook so eloquently put it. One of the world's first ethnographic museums it was opened by Peter the First. The first thing we noticed was the queue around the block just to buy tickets. On any other day we would have dejectedly joined the end or probably given up completely, but we now had new confidence to line up like a Russian- so not to line up at all. we subtley made our way to the front of the queue and after small chit-chat with some Russian girls managed to buy dva tickets just 5 minutes later.
After exploring the 1st floor, where we wandered through wax models of indigenous people of the world, we hit jackpot on the second floor where we discovered the room of malformalties and monsters. For those of you who are as curious as we were, this consisted of a collection of embalmed children and fetuses with severe deformities. We spent almost an hour entranced by such displays as the "double-faced monster with brain hernia" and "child's skeleton with two heads and three arms". We were told off for taking photos but we really couldn't help ourselves. Absolutely fascinating!
We had just one more place to find in St Petersburg, if it was possible to find. The canal where Rasputin was shot and pushed into the ice. After getting prematurely excited that we had found the correct bridge and taking numerous photos we found out that the actual location was a further 150m downstream. That was ok for us (yay - always happy to take more photos) and all we needed to do now was experience dessert pancakes at Tepemok. Check.
We had just one more must-do St Petersburg experience, which was to see the rising of the brigdes at 1am. Like the Spit Bridge in Sydney, the bridges on the Neva River open every night to let the large ships through. Unlike the Spit Bridge however, this was a far more beautiful and momentous occasion. The bridges rose, the crowd cheered and the fire-twirlers and buskers played through the night. We walked back the short distance to our hotel completely exhausted and completely satisfied.
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