Day 13: Tuesday 25th August
A very early start – 7.50am – to get to the Hermitage Museum early and be two of the first in the queue. The journey the previous morning took 1 hour 20 minutes; today’s journey is shorter and we get there with one-and-a-half hours to wait for the museum’s opening at 10.30. (The alternative to queuing for an hour-and-a-half or more is to pre-book on the internet which on reflection would have been preferable as you go to the front of the queue with your voucher. This was happening, alongside some shameless queue-jumping too – a very common phenomenon in Russia!)
But we are among the first in. The Winter Palace, which houses the main part of the museum, is unbelievably vast – over 1,000 rooms – and sumptuously decorated and furnished. The State Rooms and ‘Palace Interiors’ are fabulous and well worth a lingering visit in their own right; add to this the huge number of paintings, artefacts, jewels, archaeological finds – from ancient Egypt to the twentieth century – and you would need a good three days to do justice to it all. It’s a pity they don’t offer two-and three-day tickets in addition to the one-day only ones (R350 each).
Through a misunderstanding we have bought tickets to Peter the Great’s Winter Palace too and go along there in hopes of finding out more about him. It is a let-down and not worth even the mere R60 it cost. The building has been restored so far as possible to its original state but there is no history of Peter or of his use of the building. And it is quite peculiar in that the concierge and various helpers seem almost to resent the presence of visitors! The one thing we did learn (from a brief visit to the Peter and Paul Fortress and the Lonely Planet book) is that Peter I was called Peter the Great not for his greatness but for his height – he stood 7 feet 4 inches tall. It didn’t take long to ‘do’ his Winter Palace, allowing us time to pick up the visa registration before a nice meal at the other end of Nevsky Prospekt – and so back to the van after another exhausting touristy day.
While walking along crowded Nevsky today a young woman cut in on me to peer at the image on someone’s compact digital as they took a photo. I laughed at the temerity of it and she immediately engaged me in conversation – explaining that she was a professional graphic artist and photographer and had a bee in her bonnet about the poor quality of most people’s photos. (Still, a bit cheeky, I thought, perhaps she was an agent for a Russian bride scam and I was seen as a potential punter?) She kept up our conversation in fluent English until we got to the metro where we bade farewell.
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