St. Petersburg, Russia

Having spent our entire time in Russia within its two largest cities, we were excited this morning to spend our last day on a trip to the surrounding countryside. Our destination was Catherine Palace, designed by Rastrelli, the home that gradually became the favorite country estate of the royal family. In fact, in 1837, Russia’s first railway line was built between St. Petersburg and the palace in order to shuttle the imperial family back and forth.

Only appropriately, we opted to take the far less luxurious subway, followed by a 20-minute ride in a marshrutky, essentially a small mini-van that follows a set route.

We arrived just before noon and, unsurprisingly, joined the massive line outside. Strangely enough, entering after an hour’s wait, we found the palace lobby nearly empty. While we appreciate the Face Control that limits the number of tourists inside at any given time, could the Russians at least spare us and allow us to wait inside?

Our English-speaking tour guide explained that most of the exterior and 20-odd rooms of the palace were razed during World War II. Since then, they have been amazingly restored in the classical style in which they were originally built. We started in the huge, frescoed Great Hall, with its mirrors and fantastic gilded woodcarvings.

Next was the State Staircase, followed by the immense Picture Gallery. The Green Dining Room showcased a different classical style, with its many intricate wall carvings and inlaid floor.

The highlight of the palace was the amazing Amber Room, completely covered with exquisitely engraved amber panels. The room, which was destroyed in the war, was rebuilt with support of the German government. It took 25 years to restore the room to its pre-war brilliance.

We returned to the hotel and packed up. For our last meal, we decided to do what the Russians do now: get sushi. It has become all the rage here and we found a trendy spot down the street from our hotel on Nevsky Prospekt. Sitting down after midnight, we ordered about 15 rolls, and waited. And waited, and waited. An hour later, there was still nothing. We got up and walked out, only to be chased down the street by the waiter who then overcharged us for our drinks.

It was, we decided, a fitting end to the trip.

Derek and Burt fly back to the States tomorrow. I’ve got an 8-hour overnight train to Moscow, followed by an 11-hour flight to D.C. and connection to Raleigh. It should take just about 27 hours of travel to get me back to Carolina.

But after three weeks on the road, you can be sure that I’m looking forward to it.

St. Petersburg, Russia

No trip to St. Petersburg is complete without a visit to the Hermitage, one of the world’s greatest art museums. Empress Catherine II started the collection back in 1764 when she purchased a few pieces from a private collection. Since then, it has ballooned, and today comprises over 3 million pieces of art, covering the entire spectrum, from Ancient Egypt to the 20th century.

It is also one of the most popular attractions in Russia so — given our experiences here so far — we were unsurprised to see a massive line that we grudgingly joined. We waited with the masses for close to an hour, slowly freezing our faces off. While Derek held our spot, we walked around to warm up and saw a Tour Office.

We stepped inside to get out of the cold and talked with a guide, who told us that we could join a 2 p.m. English-speaking tour. And if we bought tickets to it, we could also buy entrance tickets now that would allow us to skip the queue. The price? About $8. We signed up immediately, cursed Lonely Planet for not instructing us to do this sooner, found a frozen Derek and made our way inside.

One of the strangest practices in Russia is the mandatory coat check. Every museum and restaurant has one. Some are free, some are paid. All are absolutely required. What doesn’t make sense, however, is that these coat checks, especially at busy spots like the Hermitage, fill up very quickly. The mandatory nature of the check is not then dropped though — which creates massive lines, like this, while everyone waits for spots to open.

We joined the lines for 15-minutes before realizing that although the coat checks were full, the lockers for checked bags were not. We threw all of our jackets in my bag which the babushka checked for us. Why they simply were not checking jackets in those same spots is beyond us.

Alas, we had done it! Jumped the queue, bought tickets and checked our jackets, it was now time to explore this massive complex, which comprises of five buildings, including the Winter Palace. We started at the Jordan Staircase, a fantastic introduction to the palace’s opulence.

While making our way to the third floor, we peeked out the window and saw the massive line — this was probably half of it, with the other snaking far into the courtyard beyond.

Upstairs, we found the impressionist and post-impressionist rooms, with colorful Monet’s and Renoir’s, strangely devoid of anyone else. Our good fortunes continued. No one except a babushka was there to bother us when checking out the many Picasso’s from his Blue Period.

We checked out the 37 paintings by Matisse, including The Dance. Some of my favorite paintings were the super-realistic works by Francois Flameng, a French painter I’d never heard of before.

Our terribly unfriendly tour guide would later bring us to the museum’s real classics, including those by Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael. To her credit, she did a great job of explaining the 1812 War Gallery, with its many military portraits, as well as the Imperial Apartments and Pavillion Hall.

Exhausted from taking in the museum, we returned to the hotel and hopped on the Metro. Burt had found us tickets to a hockey game for the local team, SKA, and we thought that going would be part of a quintessential Russian experience. The $5 seats were decent and the crowd rambunctious, especially the gold-toothed man sitting to our left. We drank beers and ate corn on the cob.

Thankfully, SKA won. Although we were confident that if they didn’t, the 100 riot police — in full gear, sporting various forms of guns and weapons — patrolling the stadium would have kept the crowd under control.

Except maybe the gold tooth man.

St. Petersburg, Russia

St. Pete is called Russia’s “Window to the West” and it’s not difficult to see why. The city, with its boulevards, canals and Baroque buildings, feels like Europe. Street signs are in English and the woman behind the counter at the coffee shop this morning could actually explain what was in each pastry. We love it here.

With most of the country on a national holiday, and many sights holding erratic hours, we had an aggressive schedule. Our first stop, Kazan Cathedral, was literally across the street from our hotel. The neoclassical church is atypical of others in this city; surrounded by a colonnade, it looks more like a government building. Inside the dark interior, a service was in progress.

Modeled after St. Basil’s in Moscow, the strangely named Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood was our next stop. Built over 24 years in the late 19th century, the church fell into disrepair during the Commie years when it was incredulously used to store potatoes and theater sets. After a 27-year restoration, the church reopened in 1997. The interior, with 7,000 square meters of Italian mosaics, is unreal.

The third stop on our morning church tour was St. Isaac’s, one of the largest domed buildings in the world. More than 100 kilograms of gold leaf were used to cover 60-foot high dome alone. Construction, which was completed in 1858, required the use of special ships and a railway to transport 120-ton granite pillars from Finland.

Interior highlights included an 2,400-square foot painting on the ceiling by Karl Bryullov and intricately carved doors with various saints and other religious figures.

From the top of the bell tower, there were some great views of the surrounding city, including the Mariinsky Theater, Admiralty and Hermitage Museum. Meanwhile, less scenically, dozens of factory smokestacks sat off in the distance.

We walked over the Neva River to Vasilevsky Island, which Peter the Great originally intended to be the heart of his city. As such, it is one of the oldest neighborhoods in St. Petersburg, home to the Kunstkamera, the city’s and country’s first museum.

Founded in 1714 by Peter himself, the Museum of Anthropology & Ethnography is famous for its incredible ghoulish collection of deformed fetuses, odd body parts and mutant animals — all collected by Peter with the aim of educating the notoriously suspicious Russian people.

There were no photos allowed inside the exhibit and the babushkas were on serious patrol, but while they weren’t looking, we were able to snap one of this two headed calf. How bizarre.

Down the street was an equally strange restaurant, Russky Kitsch, a completely over the top example of Soviet kitsch. With mismatched Victorian furniture and walls plastered with photo collages, the restaurant’s centerpiece was a ceiling fresco of Fidel Castro and Leonid Brezhnev entwined in a passionate embrace.

The khalia soup – a spicy beef stew served with a piece of flat bread — was quick to warm us up. It was followed by the best beef stroganoff that we’ve had, creamy, thick and delicious with a side of mashed potatoes.

Properly fueled, we cabbed it to the last stop of the day, the Peter & Paul Fortress, which built in 1703, is the oldest major building in St. Pete. It was built as a defense against the Swedes but they were defeated before the fortress was finished. Since then, it’s served as a prison and is also home to the SS Peter & Paul Cathedral, where all of Russia’s pre-revolutionary rulers are buried, including Peter himself.

Exhausted from a big day, we returned to the Grand Hotel and hit the spa. Downstairs, while sitting in the sauna, a very serious looking Russian man joined me — wearing my Vineyard Vines bathing suit that I’d left outside. It can’t be, I thought. But sure enough, it was. Instead of even trying to communicate with him, I went out to talk to the attendant. She didn’t seem to understand – “He’s wearing your bathing suit?” she asked perplexed. “Um, yes,” I replied. “I don’t understand,” she said. Me neither.

She came into the sauna and talked with the man, who looked at me, looked at her, and then curtly took off the bathing suit, handing it back to me without a word. “Spasiba,” I said.

He didn’t reply.

Back at the hotel bar, we weren’t able to make sense of the incident. Several shots of chilled vodka didn’t help. Next we knew, the night was late and we hadn’t moved. And our dinner had consisted of some olives and the small pieces of smoked salmon on brown bread that are traditionally served with vodka.

All drink, no food. Now, this was the true Russian way.

Moscow, Russia

After all of the schedule shuffling, we woke up early, packed and got ready to demolish our final day in Moscow. On deck was the tour of the Kremlin that we had booked on our own yesterday. Even better, the skies were blue and the sun was out. Not like that would have any impact on the thermometer. “It’s cold today,” the front desk receptionist called out. “Even for us.”

With the mercury barely above -10 degrees, we nearly froze on the walk over to the tour office. This was an absolutely bone-chilling cold, with an occasional breeze that literally took your breath away. It was the first time that the three of us — guys who braved truly brutal winters in Ithaca — could not stay outside for more than a couple of minutes. It’s safe to say that it’s the coldest weather that I’ve ever experienced. And it made me long for those sweaty days in Egypt.

We moved quickly with our guide onto the Kremlin, the enduring symbol of the Russian state since its founding in 1147. This is where it has all gone down: from Ivan the Terrible’s wrath and Napoleon’s burning of Moscow to Lenin’s communism, Gorbachev’s perestroika and Yelstin’s New Russia.

We past the tight security and the Kremlin’s official government buildings; fully-armed military police quickly yelled at tourists straying off the appointed path while fleets of Mercedez Benz and BMWs with tinted windows floored by the streets.

The government buildings are closed to tourists, so a visit to the Kremlin largely consists of Cathedral Square, where the Patriarch’s Palace, Assumption Cathedral, Archangel Cathedral and Annunciation Cathedral are all located. These impressive places of worship were built by various tsars as private worship areas. Individually, each is unique and different. Taken as a whole, the entire area is almost difficult to digest in its grandeur.

On the square’s eastern side, the Ivan the Great Bell Tower soars above all else. It is the Kremlin’s tallest structure; before the 20th century, it was forbidden to build any structure higher than this in Moscow.

Lastly, we saw the Tsar Cannon & Bell, which aptly describe the largest cannon ever cast in Russia and the largest bell in the world. The 40-ton cannon dates back to 1856, it was never fired; the monstrous 202-ton bell dates to 1737, it has never been rung.

Given the extensive Soviet history lesson, it was only appropriate for us to have lunch at the McDonald’s just outside of the Kremlin walls in Pushkin Square. This was the first to open in Russia and today is the busiest McDonald’s in the world.

We hustled back to the hotel and caught a taxi to one of Moscow’s five train stations for our 6-hour journey northwest to St. Petersburg. It was relatively uneventful and we were able to catch a cab through the crowded streets to our accommodation, the Grand Hotel Europe.

This is one the world’s great hotels — and has been in operation since 1875. Tchaikovsky spent his honeymoon here. It’s also played host to a laundry list of politicians and celebrities, from former French president Jacques Chirac to Elton John. The rates fall considerably in the off-season, which is how we found ourselves entering the lobby of this absolutely stunning place.

“Would you like the long tour?” the concierge asked as she led us to our room. “Sure,” we replied, passing the elegant lobby bar, an open mezzanine café, breakfast room with original stained glass and black-tie vodka and caviar bar. The interiors were a beautiful combination of marble and gilt, with sweeping staircases and elegant antique furniture.

Our room on the second floor overlooked the Russian Museum. It felt a bit tight after having had the living room in Moscow but was still very comfortable, with heated marble bathroom floors, super soft beds and a world newspaper menu — the first I’ve ever seen at a hotel.

Meanwhile, the service was practically tripping over itself. After our tour of the hotel, the concierge told us that she was available for whatever we needed. And, unlike Hotel Savoy, she truly wasn’t kidding.

Settling into the lobby bar a few minutes later, oligarchs to our left and cigar-smoking politicos to our right, we agreed.

Our luck had officially changed.