Finally. St. Petersburg, Russia.

A visit to Russia is not something one does on the spur of the moment. They won't let you in without a visa. Getting a visa can be complicated, so after starting the process online, on the advice of someone born in St. Petersburg and who visits there regularly, we paid a visa agency to get our visas. We didn't really think about cost. Turns out they charge Americans what we charge them. The visas were $200 each plus another $100 fee for the agency. The only way to avoid this is to come in on a cruise or ferry and stay less than 72 hours. We were flying in and staying for 4 1/2 days. It was pricey but ultimately worth it to see an iconic city that sits on the border of Europe but most definitely is not Europe.

Our hotel for this last stop on the trip was located just off Nevsky Prospekt, the main street lined with shops, stores, restaurants and historical sites. Just walking up and down this street and people watching gives a pretty good slice of St. Petersburg life. It is two miles long and goes from the bullseye of the city, the Admiralty building with its golden spire, to Uprising Square. We walked this street for a couple of hours on the day we arrived and marveled at the churches, stores, museums and, of course, people - lots and lots of people. During our stay, we learned that Peter the Great who established St. Petersburg was enamored of the Dutch and designed the city with canals that cut across the two rivers of the city - the Neva and the Fontanka. They are pretty and also serve as a way to control flooding.

Before arriving we talked with a number of people who had been to St. Petersburg and read the recommendations in Rick Steves' guidebook and we decided to do something we have never done. We arranged for a private guide for two days of our stay. We had a car and driver, a guide who was very knowledgeable and accompanied us all day and entrance to all sites without having to stand in line. The first day Timofey Kruglikov took us about 45 minutes outside the center of the city to the small town of Pushkin to see Catherine's Palace and Peterof in Tsarskoye Selo which means Czars' Village. On the way, Timofey gave us a Russian 101 course with emphasis on the Romanovs starting with Peter I (the Great) and ending with Nicholas II (the one we mostly know about because his whole family was assassinated in the Revolution in 1918).  The centerpiece of Tsarkoye Selo is the large, salmon and white Catherine's Palace - the Catherine who was married to Peter the Great and became Empress. Over the years it was added on to by Elizabeth (her daughter) and Catherine II (the Great). It was badly damaged in WWII but because it was turned into a museum after the Bolshevik Revolution, there was documentation that allowed restoration.

The whole area has palaces and golden figured fountains, acres of formal gardens and ponds, fancy pavilions and grottoes. Unfortunately, the day we toured it was POURING rain. It didn't bother us when we were inside touring through the apartments, halls and Amber Room. It did matter as we explored the formal gardens full of gold statues surrounding large fountains, trying to jump over huge deep puddles and taking shelter in various gazebos and pavilions.

 Delft heater surrounded by art

 Gardens and fountains

More of the fountains and pavilions

After Catherine's Palace we shared a lunch at a local restaurant with our guide and then drove to Peterof. This time it was all about the grounds. It sits along the Gulf of Finland because Peter was all about sailing and his Navy. In one of the pavilions we came in and sat alone listening to a quartet sing. It was an unexpected private concert. 

On the Gulf was Peter's "simple house" where he liked to come to get away from palace life. After touring in the intermittent downpours all day long, we boarded the hydrofoil for a return to St. Petersburg.

The next day our guide Elena and the driver Sergei picked us up at the hotel for a day-long tour of the heart of St. Petersburg including the Kazan Cathedral (shaped like St. Peter's in Rome only bigger) and popular for a "miracle icon" of Our Lady of Kazan. Unlike some of the other churches we visited, this one is still an actual Russan Orthodox church and filled with worshipers. During the Soviet era it was used as a Museum to Atheism. Then we rode over to the Church on Spilled Blood. This is truly an amazing structure which is not a church but a memorial built on the spot where Alexander II was assassinated,

The next stop was St. Isaac's Cathedral, another huge, grand structure with a gold dome that looks like the Capital Building in Washington DC. It is massive inside and considered the leading Russian Orthodox church in the world.

Finally we crossed one of the rivers to see the Peter and Paul Fortress with the chapel that is the burial site of the Romanovs. It is on an island in the Neva River. Its centerpiece is the Sts. Peter and Paul Cathedral with the white marble monuments over the graves of the czars and czarinas from Peter the Great to a special chapel with the remains of Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra and their 4 daughters and one son. 

After a brief lunch in the cafe of the Hermitage (the new wing), we began our overview tour of one of the largest museums in the world. The art highlights the collection of European art collected by Catherine the Great. This is really a two for one tour. The first is the art including masterworks by Leonardo, Rembrandt, Matisse, Titian, Michelangelo, Renoir, Picasso, and on and on. The second reason to visit is to walk through and admire the historical rooms themselves as the museum is housed in a palace built by Peter the Great's daughter Elizabeth. The older art is housed in the palace. The newer art is housed across the plaza in a newly renovated General Staff building. The original palace is jammed full of people and tours, many from Asia. The newer building with the newer art is far less crowded and, therefore, more pleasant. Our guide threaded us through the throngs and gave us an Art History I overview of the collection in the palace and then we did the newer building on our own as she left us at the end of the day. 

 Leonardo's Benois Madonna

Peacock Clock

Raphael's Loggia

Matisse's The Dance

The last day in St. Petersburg we were on our own and finally, the weather was beautiful! We had seen enough of the city with the guides that we had a familiarity with the layout and an idea of what we wanted to see. First, was the Faberge Museum in the beautifully restored Shuvalov Palace where we donned foot coverings to protect the floors and saw much more than a collection of iconic Faberge eggs. It wasn't very crowded and was of manageable size in a lovely setting. The main attraction was the room featuring 14 Faberge eggs. They are a marvel of jewels, gold, and teeny, tiny mechanisms that reveal feature inside feature.

 At the top you see the miniature coronation carriage that was held by the beautiful egg to the right.

Other rooms displayed icons, goblets, snuff boxes, watches, porcelain and enamel.

 Icons

After a good lunch in a restaurant that specializes in dumplings called Pelmeniya, we decided to tour the Russian Museum in the Mikhailovsky Palace. Unlike the Hermitage, this museum is only for Russian art and felt like more of a window into how Russians saw their country. It was in chronological order and ended with 20th Century art up through the 1980's. The art in the last rooms no longer had to laud Russia. These last paintings are critical of the later Soviet years. We liked this museum better than the Hermitage.

Queue by Alexei Sundukov

We exited the museum through the back and walked through the Summer Gardens all the way to the Neva River. These gardens, filled with people strolling, sitting and listening to bands, is the oldest garden in the city laid out by Peter the Great himself. He commissioned Dutch and French garden engineers and Venetian artists to bring European culture to St. Petersburg. It was open to the public if you were "decently dressed." We finished our day with a river tour where we ordered food and viewed the riverfront of St. Petersburg out to where the cruise ships dock and back. 

It wasn't possible to see everything St. Peterburg has to offer in just 4 days but we got a taste. 

Terviseks! (That's "Cheers" in Estonian)

As so we have reached the end of our bike tour in the capital of Estonia, Tallinn. If we thought before coming to the Baltic States that they were a bit interchangeable, they aren't. Tallinn in particular and Estonia in general has a distinct personality. Since the end of Soviet rule, Old Town has been restored and Tallinn has lured in tourists with cafes, shops and restaurants in between historic buildings and churches. It is a popular stop for cruise ships. We were lucky that there were not many in port when we were there. As part of our tour, the company arranged for a tour guide for us in the old city. Unfortunately, it rained, hard, during our walking tour which may have had a dampening effect on our enthusiasm. We got a bit of history and the layout of the old city but we really enjoyed it more when we wandered around on our own with our guidebook in hand.

Fat Margaret cannon tower attached to the Great Coast Gate

We spent part of our first day on own own exploring the Old Town of Tallinn. There is both an Upper and Lower Town. The upper town was the government seat and the lower town was for the merchants from places like Denmark, Sweden and Germany who hired the Estonians to do the jobs they didn't want to do. This part of the city was basically abandoned during Soviet times when many, Russians came into Estonia to work in the now-defunct Russian factories. After independence, Estonia worked intensely on developing its own economy - much of which is technology-based. Apparently, Skype was invented here. The money from Skype revved the engines of the economy and it took off. This provided the state with enough capital to begin the massive restoration of its old city. 

We had already seen many of the streets and buildings in this part of the city on last night's tour so we headed inside to tour the City Museum (Linnamuuseum). The main site of the museum is housed in an old merchant's house and shows how the city developed from its first days. It ends with an exhibit on the top floor that talks about life under Soviet rule. There was a really interesting video of the actual declaration of independence and the ousting of the Russians. All those Russians who came to work in the factories continue to have strong ethnic ties to Russia and they make up about 25% of the population. There is some concern that Russia under Putin will attempt to do the same thing he did in the Ukraine - come in to "protect" the Russian-speaking population in Estonia. 

View from the Upper Old Town

After the museum, we had made reservations to eat at a recommended restaurant called Rataskaevu 16. It was an early dinner or late lunch and was two hours of delicious-ness. If you find yourself in Tallinn, make sure you make a reservation for this place. You won't be sorry.

We needed to walk off the leisurely lunch so we headed out of the Old City and made our way to the acres and acres of Kadriorg Park. It is huge and green, crisscrossed with walking paths, dotted with trees and formal ponds and gardens. It houses the Presidential Palace where the president of Estonia lives. The Kunstimuuseum or art museum is in the park also. It's a massive seven story modern building of limestone, glass and copper. We didn't have time to check it out except from the outside. This park also has the Tallinn Song Festival Amphitheater where what Estonians call the Singing Revolution took place. Estonia is small but in 1988 one third of the population of Estonia - 300,000 people- gathered at the amphitheater to sing patriotic Estonian songs. This had been forbidden under Soviet rule. But Soviet control was weakening so the Estonians started to push back. Singing has long been a national form of expression and this is the form they chose to protest. There are still people alive who remember coming to the amphitheater dressed in folk costumes and joining together with the masses to sing. In 1990, pro-independence candidates won elections in Estonia. In 1991, the USSR fell apart and Estonia was its own country. 

Presidential Palace in Kadriorg Park

One of many sculptures in one of the ponds scattered throughout Kadriorg Park

The next morning before leaving for St. Petersburg, Russia, we walked through another completely different neighborhood in Tallinn called Kalamaja. Here many of the streets were lined with old wooden houses  We walked past the Seaplane Harbor and the walled area surrounding the abandoned Soviet-era prison Patarei. It has not been restored and but can be explored if you book a tour. We were not interested in seeing yet another prison that was a place of torture and execution. We did walk to and explore Telliskivi Creative City. Here entrepreneurs have taken over ten abandoned factory buildings and begun to fill them with shops and cafes, art and fashion, beer and food trucks, graffiti and bike shops. It felt like we were back in the Bay Area as we ate at one of the cafes.

We headed off to the airport for our last stop on this trip - St. Petersburg, Russia.