Winter Palace, Hermitage (again the same place)

I bet you that Putin wouldn’t like me calling St. Petersburg by a moniker, but there was some Florida guy wearing his St. Petersburg shirt in the museum today.  Who thinks that far ahead in a cruise and gets out that shirt?  Speaking of clothes.  I did not pack correctly for this 

cruise.  It might be like summer in Michigan, but the highest temperature that we have seen in this cruise was yesterday in St. Pete when it got up to 17 degrees Celsius.  That’s only about 62 degrees to us Americans.  It is freaking cold

 here and I have only one long sleeve shirt and one pair of heavy pants.  So, these are the clothes that you will see me in in the remaining pictures in the blog because it’s not supposed to get any warmer.  So, we got back on our tour bus and got 

 some sightseeing in St. Pete’s.  These parts were more like what I was expecting of this town and we got some great pictures before going to the Winter Palace to hit the Hermitage Museum.  This palace was beautiful, but what was in it was more beautiful.  We were 

allowed by our tour guide to break away from the herds of people clustered everywhere in tour groups.  She was afraid that we would get lost, but we had a map and a plan, but the Hermitage has a way of getting you lost.  We did get to see the big sights that had several

 hundred people with ipads walking toward the masterpiece and never actually looking at it with their eyes before moving on to the next.  It was sad really, but we were able to hit the impressionists, the Rubens and many other masterpieces without anyone in the room.  So,

 this will be a blog of art that is done by what everyone was looking at in a line of hundreds vs. the art that was in a room alone with John and I in it.  I’ll let you decide which ones were worthy of being looked at, but you have to not pay attention to the names or the lines to figure out which ones you like the best.  The amount of art here couldn’t be believed and you would need 3 says to see it all, but we only had 3 hours, so we practically ran through some rooms and lingered in our favorites.