Saturday 6th October 2012 - Day 3 - St Petersburg to Moscow

More frankfurters with fish and onions and tomato sauce for breakfast then we checked out putting our bags in storage and headed over to the Winter Palace, Hermitage building to meet the others and Sofia. We started walking and didn’t stop walking for 2 and half hours. This museum is massive! In fact the princess that this palace was built for collected works of art not shoes and handbags and as her collection grew so did the building as daddy was instructed to keep extending it to the little hermitage and the greater hermitage all linked by internal walkways.
Each room was huge, at least a few of our houses would fit inside each one. There were so many pieces of art, that if you spent 30 seconds looking at each one for 8 hours a day it would take 8 years to see them all! It took us 4 hours. There were pieces by Rembrandt, Vincent Van Gogh, Picasso, Michael Angelo, Leonardo De Vinci, Rubens etc. Neither of us are museum people as such but we both really found it quite interesting. It definitely helped with Sofia explaining a lot of the more popular paintings. After Sofia left us we took a short sit down drink break which was long overdue. We then attempted to retrace our steps to find one particular painting of Madonna holding a baby looking at a flower that I wanted to photograph but was too scared earlier as a lady moaned at me for using my flash even though I had turned it off!

Leaving the museum we went to the exterior of one of the Hermitage extensions and photographed a load of Atlas’s which were marble men statues holding up a balcony. They had cheeky bums and big feet, they were very cool. We then went to a new coffee shop with a comfy sofa. We attempted to stretch our brains some more as we now felt very intellectual having spent all morning learning. We managed six arrow word puzzles and only had to look at the answers a six times!

We then walked to a fountain in a park that Jon had wanted to see since we arrived. After which we walked over to St Isaac’s Cathedral and hiked the 200 steps up a spiral staircase to the top of the colonnade as we had been recommended to do so to see the views over the city. Again it was well worth the effort as the view was spectacular. Although our knees knew that we had just hiked up and down 200 stairs.

En route to another coffee shop or should I say coffee club, we considered a boat trip but decided our money would be better spent on more coffee a.k.a. Heineken draught and Pepsi Light. However we did get drawn into a chocolate museum as we are museum goers these days. It was nothing to write home about and there were no free bees or museum pieces We spent the rest of the evening killing time spending our 5,000 Ruble notes that the ATM churned out before meeting back at the hotel at 22.30 for our transfer to the train station. As tonight we are boarding a train for a 9 hour journey to Moscow! Dasvidaniya St Petersburg!