Day 116 – 5/10 – St. Petersburg, Russia

We have been sailing eastward, so we’ve had two nights in a row where we have set the clocks forward by one hour. This is unusual because most of the cruise has been toward the west, so we will net out for the entire cruise with 18 more days of gaining an hour versus losing an hour. Regardless this makes us a little more tired.

Add to this that St Petersburg involves some delicate navigation to get into it. The ship picked up a local pilot at 3:30am to spend 3-1/2 hours of help to get into port by 7:00am. To get to St. Pete, you leave the Baltic Sea, sail through the Finland Sea, then up the Neva River. The Finland Sea is shallow and has lots of islands, so the route in involves lots of gentle maneuvering. While we have developed some excellent sea legs over the past 4 months, the frequent, gentle adjustments of the ship early this morning had a different “feel” that did cause us to wake up. The ship might only quiver a little side-to-side at each fine tuning of direction, but it was something that we noticed as we slept.

We are far enough north that the sun start up around 6:00 am and has still not yet set tonight by 10:15pm.

St. Petersburg is built on 42 islands. In a way, it is similar to Venice. Because it is only 300 years old or so, the city is laid out with big rectangular city blocks, wide roads and very wide buildings.

St. Pete has 100 museums and art galleries. It is the undisputed cultural center of Russia.

We did a Princess excursion. If you do the ship’s excursion, you do not need a Russian visa. If you wanted to go on your own, you had to spend a couple hundred dollars in advance to get a personal visa from the Russian embassy.

The exchange rate today is 35 rubles to the dollar. I thought that I remembered it being 1 ruble to 2 dollars, and asked the guide. She said that the rate had been 1 to 1 in 1980, so I may remember earlier than that, but regardless, a 35-fold change in 20 years is dramatic. I asked her why she thought that happened. She thought that it was just a “game” by the financial institutions. Wow! Clearly the market had decided something about what the value of the Russian productivity was when they attempted to open up their economy.

I remember that several decades ago a Russian said of their old system that it involved an agreement between the workers and the government: “we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”

The guide’s view was that whatever change Russia is making is obviously necessary, but it affects different age groups differently. The elderly, who cannot now work, have not had to save for retirement because all services were provided by the government. If they do not get help from their extended family, they have lost all savings they may have had from the 35-fold relative inflation compared to US, and they now have to pay for services that had all been provided free. Young people have a chance to adjust.

We did a tour of the city and had a couple of stops. The three big stops were: a) the Peter and Paul Synagogue, b) the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood, and c) the Hermitage. I’ll add text with the photos from each.

When we got back to the ship, they had a show from the Troyka Ballet of St. Petersburg on the ship. This was nice, but I just cannot get good photos from the show floor using my camera. (They turn out slightly blurred, and red in color due to the lighting.)