I’m old enough now to take particular joy in revisiting places I experienced as a teenage vagabond. I’ll never forget hiking to the summit of Delos as a 19-year-old and learning how important — and literally central — to the Greek islands this now-uninhabited little island (a half-hour from Mykonos) once was.
I’ve returned now with our local Mykonos guide Antonis Pothitos, after having caught an early-morning tender from my cruise ship. And I’ve affirmed my notion that — even with 3,000 tourists on my ship, and even with four such ships in port this morning in Mykonos — if you get an early start and reach for the back lanes or rocky summits, you can be all alone with the wonders of the Mediterranean (and be back on your ship by sunset for a cocktail and a little dancing poolside in your loafers).
I’ve long wanted to make a one-hour public television special about cruising. And we’re doing just that now. My TV crew and I are on a Mediterranean cruise, filming a special that will air across the country in February 2019. It won’t be pro or con cruising — just a candid and honest look at this travel option, one of the fastest growing kinds of travel.
For the next couple of weeks, I’ll be posting daily as we cruise to destinations ranging from Barcelona in the west to Rhodes in the east. In this clip, I’m just in from a hot day of filming on shore. I took an amazing shower (any shower would have been amazing, the way I was feeling), changed into my casual cruise wear, and am enjoying a quiet, private sunset on my balcony with no land in sight — but curiously surrounded by lots of ships.
Stay tuned for lots of Mediterranean fun and learning.
Built in the mid-1700s for Peter the Great’s daughter, Elizabeth, the Hermitage was later filled with the art collection of Catherine the Great. The Hermitage’s vast collections of European masterpieces make it one of the world’s top art museums, ranking with the Louvre and the Prado. How does the Hermitage stack up among the world’s top collections of paintings for you? Photos by Trish Feaster, see her blog at The Travelphile.com.
Housed in the Romanovs’ Winter Palace, the Hermitage is actually two top-notch sightseeing experiences in one: an art gallery of European works and an imperial residence. You can enjoy the Leonardos, Rembrandts, and Matisses while imagining the ostentatious lifestyles of the czars who collected them. Between the canvases, you glide through some of the most opulent ballrooms and throne rooms ever built.With the help of our local guide, I learned that you can avoid a ticket line by simply buying your Hermitage tickets at the machines in the courtyard. In Russia, I found that machines like this generally have an English mode and work well.All over Europe, people are waiting needlessly in long lines. In St. Petersburg, the sight where you’ll mostly likely have a long wait is the Hermitage. With up to 10,000 cruise travelers a day flooding into the city and the Hermitage the top sight on their lists, it can be a zoo. But with our machine-bought ticket, we walked right by the ticket line and directly into the palace.Throughout Europe, former palaces — or at least palatial buildings — are filled with a country’s best paintings. But nowhere is the rich mix of a royal art collection and a royal palace so powerful. This is the throne room of the czars.If you’re looking for Europe’s great masters, you’ll find them in the Hermitage. Some visitors come away thinking, “But where’s the Russian art?” They’re in the wrong museum. The Russian art is in (logically) the Russian Museum. It’s every bit as exciting as the Hermitage — and it’s filled with art by painters whose names most Americans don’t know.The last time I visited the Hermitage, I knew it had an awe-inspiring collection. But it was dingy and poorly displayed. After my recent visit, I’d give the Hermitage “the most improved museum in Europe” award. It is dazzling — both the art and the palace in which the art hangs.Looking out the window of the Hermitage, the Winter Palace Square evokes scenes and memories of the Bolshevik Revolution. I can imagine members of Russia’s provisional government looking worriedly out this window as angry crowds of workers, inspired by the ideology and promises of Lenin, filled this square.
I was so impressed by the sightseeing in St. Petersburg that my filming plans were bumped up a notch. Before my visit I had thought “to express my frustration with Russia’s insistence on making visitors get an expensive and pesky visa, I won’t promote their tourism with a TV show.” After this week, I can’t help but dream of coming back with the crew. The city was gray and depressing last time I visited (in the 1990s). It sparkles (and feels much safer) today.
The main drag of the city is Nevsky Prospekt. This provides a spine for your sightseeing leading from the Winter Palace (Hermitage Museum) through the center of town.
Attractive and entertaining as Nevsky Prospekt may be, it’s important to get away from the center and all the touristy stuff. For our guidebook we’ve added a neighborhood walk through the heart of Vasilyevsky Island, a residential zone stretching from the city center all the way to the massive new Marine Facade cruise port. Something that continually amazes me is that in the early 1700s, Peter the Great, inspired by Amsterdam, laid out his great city in a swamp. Many of the original grid-planned neighborhoods survive. This neighborhood was built with a series of canals — Amsterdam-style. Later, the canals were filled in. The center of this street, once a canal, then a trolley line, is today simply a well-groomed park.
A new high-speed train, running several times a day, connects Moscow and St. Petersburg in just four hours. Muscovite tourists come to St. Petersburg and tell their guides, “Show us the charm of St. Petersburg.” St. Petersburg has charms, like this, that are rare in Russia.
St. Petersburg is a city of venerable, low-slung bridges. But each night at about 2:00 a.m., traffic is interrupted as the bridges open up and ships — which were stacked up and waiting patiently all day — motor through to begin their journeys through the Russian heartland. With the help of Soviet-era canals, shipping from Russia’s western port (St. Petersburg on the Baltic Sea) can get to the Volga and other great rivers and voyage to the Black Sea, the Arctic, and beyond.
By the way, one of my guides explained to me that 80 percent of Russians just want stability. Putin is so popular because, while he may not be an icon of democracy, he symbolizes stability. Anyone who wants something else is deviating from the norm — thus a “deviant.”
Speaking of deviance: One night recently, a group of deviant artists arranged (in a matter of minutes) to paint a giant erect penis on the street section of a bridge that would rise to let the cargo ships through at 2:00 a.m. The bridge happened to face what’s called “the big house” — the former KGB headquarters, now the headquarters of the Russian version of our CIA. As planned, when the bridge was raised, a towering penis flipped off that symbol of Russian non-democracy. (You can see this on YouTube.)
Three hundred years ago, Czar Peter I became Peter the Great because of his huge personality — a great traveler, city planner, warrior, scientist, and the Westernizer of Russia. In his travels he brought back lots of scientific wonders that illustrated his curious mind. The Kunstkamera, the oldest museum in town and one of St. Petersburg’s most interesting sights, includes Peter the Great’s personal freak show — typical of the period — of all kinds of human and animal deformities preserved in jars for three centuries.
St. Petersburg suffered like no other big city in World War II — with a 900-day siege that started in 1941 and lasted through three brutally cold winters. Starvation and desperation wracked the city but, with a courageous volunteer army, it stood strong against a determined Nazi army. I was impressed by this memorial to those who defended the city during what Russians call “The Great Patriotic War.” I wrote it up in our guidebook this way:
Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad — It’s hard to imagine the horror, suffering, and importance of the Siege of Leningrad, also known as “The Battle of 900 Days.” Hitler intended to literally wipe the city off the map…and the people of Leningrad knew it. The city survived, and May 9, 1945, was Victory Day. To mark the 30th anniversary of that victory, on May 9, 1975, this stirring monument was inaugurated. 700,000 Nazi troops got to the edge of the city, and this — with its 48-meter-tall granite obelisk with the dates 1941-1945 — marks the spot where the 300,000-strong ragtag army of mostly volunteer Soviets held the line. In the sculpture at its base (called The Victors), a worker stands by a soldier, symbolizing the unity of the people and the army in the struggle against the enemy. With the music of Shostakovich or Rachmaninoff playing, visitors ponder the million people who died defending the city. Walking by 900 lamplights (symbolizing the 900 days of suffering the battle brought), you enter an underground exhibit with a powerful 10-minute movie showing life and death during the siege.
By the way, while the city dumped the term Leningrad for other uses, when referring to the city during the siege, “Leningrad” is still used out of respect to the people whose valor and suffering saved the city. Each May 9, you see hammers, sickles, and the word Leningrad all over St. Petersburg.
While I try to teach with a gentle touch, some travelers just don’t realize that my tips will make their travels not only more fun and meaningful, but less expensive. In these isolated cases, I need to be more forceful.
Trish and I went through the formalities on our ship so we could leave it in St. Petersburg, before the cruise ended in Copenhagen. We then caught a taxi at the terminal (fixed price, paid in advance at a booth in the terminal, at probably double the metered rate — but at $30 for a 30-minute ride, I was satisfied), and went to my friend’s apartment. Here are various images, experiences, and tips I’d like to share from our time in St. Petersburg.
Enjoying four different private guides in four days, I experienced St. Petersburg as a city filled with discovery and meaning. With our first guide we walked…everywhere. St. Petersburg is exhausting on foot. This guide, Natalya, made sightseeing easy and instructive with a car and an iPad.While distances can be great in St. Petersburg, I refashioned our guidebook chapter to feature sights based on subway stops. The subway in this city is a sight in itself. It is cheap, easy, and a fire hose of a people-mover.St. Petersburg’s subway system, like Moscow’s, is vast and treats commuters like VIPs with grand and stylish-in-Soviet-times halls like this. The system gives St. Petersburg a magnificent infrastructure that will move its workforce until the end of time.As the subway system was a triumph of the former Soviet Union, halls are decorated with Socialist Realism art like this bronze relief. Today, while the hammer and sickle are out of style, these souvenirs of the USSR era are kept as part of the culture’s heritage. This particular scene shows Lenin stirring up his masses with his right-hand (hench)man, Joseph Stalin, standing dutifully behind him. After Stalin died in 1953, he was purged from Soviet society, so this is a rare image of him that you can still see in public today.Russia is a dangerous place for your valuables. Throughout Europe, fast-fingered thieves can nip your valuables without you even knowing it. In Russia, the thieves are not so subtle — when they hit, you’ll know it. Being ripped-off here is somewhere between a pickpocketing and a mugging. Tourists can be targeted. While I don’t always wear my money belt these days (shhh, that’s a secret), I wore it in Russia.While probably not advisable for most travelers, locals take full advantage of St. Petersburg’s “unofficial” taxi system. Getting a ride is like fishing. You look for an old beater car (usually a Soviet-era Lada) driven by a man (usually a Central Asian), and hold out your hand. He’ll stop and you negotiate a price. Locals will pay 100 rubles ($3.50) and tourists will be lucky to get a ride for 200 rubles ($7). Hop in and pray you get to the place you agreed to be taken. We did this routinely with our local guides and I got pretty good at spotting beat-up Ladas driven by Uzbeks, saving us piles of walking. While hopping into a Lada on one occasion, I told my guide, “This is a good system.” He corrected me, saying, “No, this is a good lack of a system.”As my host was an ex-pat, we hung out with his circle of friends — a fascinating, hard-core ex-pat group — most of whom had been in St. Petersburg for 15 to 20 years and had seen lots of changes. It was fascinating to learn from them why they chose to live here, how things had changed, and how to work the system like locals. One ex-pat ran the Irish bar in town and owned a boat, which provided perhaps the group’s favorite diversion. To just motor around the Neva River and enjoy the city’s low and horizontal, Neoclassical skyline was a delight.
