The Hermitage

This morning, we toured The Hermitage with several thousand of our fellow tourists from German, China, etc.  The Hermitage is the art museum housed in several of Catherine the Great's Palaces.  She started purchasing collections of art in 1764, and the museum has continued collecting to this day, making it one of the best art collections in the world, made better by the beautiful building and rooms in which it is housed.

We were on a Semester at Sea trip rather than going on our own, so our tour guide collected 36 of us at 9:30 and we headed out on a bus.  The tour operators around here all seem to use little receivers for all the people on the tour with a little earpiece in one ear.  She had her own little transmitter, and we set our receivers to channel 38.  We only got interference at one point in the entire tour, and were able to hear her narration without hearing all the ambient noise around us.  At some points, there were four different tours in the same area, so you can imagine the shouting that would have been needed for them to be heard otherwise.

On our way (because The Hermitage didn't open until 10:30, we made a photo stop at St Isaac's Cathedral.  St Issac's Cathedral is now a museum.  In its days as a cathedral, it could hold 10,000 people standing, and our guide said it was the 3rd largest cathedral in the world..

In the square in front of the St Isaac's Cathedral is the statue of St Nicholas I, erected in 1859.  We love horse statues, of course.









Then we hopped on the bus and drove to The Hermitage.

This is our group (minus me of course) with the Winter Palace in the background.
Our guide, Elena, was flooding us with information.  I asked why a winter palace and a separate summer palace.  The simple answer was that one was heated and the other was not.
Then after a 15 min wait, we were able to enter and got crushed by the crowds as the various guides were jockeying for position and imploring us to NOT start world war III among the various tour groups with different cultures of moving about in groups.

One thing we were encouraged to pay attention to was the building itself and its ornamentation.  So, we moved about this incredible structure with continued "Oh Wow!" moments.

The main thing I can say about the collection at the Hermitage is that it is amazing.  I'm going to just show  a few photos of some of the artwork, and say that it ranks right up there with the other great art museums of the U.S. that I've visited.

I wish we had started at the end, because I like some of the more recent artists best, but the tour guide wanted to give us a chronological perspective.  Finishing up on Picasso and Gaugin was a treat.  Unfortunately, the Matisse collection was being moved.

It was a busy morning, and everyone was exhausted.  We were late getting back to the ship, but the wonderful dining crew pulled some food back out for us.  We went back to our cabin and recharged our camera batteries, and took a nap to recharge our own batteries.  Then this evening we headed out to what was essentially a repeat of yesterday's river cruise, but this one was a night cruise to see many of the buildings and monument under the lights. While we were waiting for it to get dark, we made a couple of stops for "photo ops".  The students love photos and love photographing themselves all over the place, so I've included a few photos of students.  Nicole posed excellently for me in one of them.

It was a cold night on those open boats, and I'll swear that the wind was blowing right out of Siberia