Day3 6/1 Thursday

Excursion to Hermitage. Hermitage is actually 3 palaces together: the Winter Palace of the Tzars, the Little Hermitage built by Catherine I and embellished by her daughter Elizabeth, and New Hermitage built as a museum. It’s a huge museum/structure visited by 20,000 people each day so it gets very crowded. The museum supposedly has over a million objects so it would take years to see all of them. It has a large collection of artifacts from antiquity and an extensive western painting collection from 17th , 18th, and 19th centuries. Unfortunately, there is almost no Russian art in the Hermitage, which was very disappointing. For Russian art you have to go to a separate museum…We also had to wait about 10 minutes to cross the street because there is international economic forum taking place in St. Petersburg right now and the street was closed for the motorcade of some VIPs, potentially Putin himself. The bus ride there through the city was very picturesque. The architecture of the Hermitage is most impressive -- the ornate gilded columns, chandeliers, and other details are exquisite. After dinner we returned to the Hermitage theater for a ballet performance of Swan Lake. Good, but not as impressive as the morning visit. When we were driving back around 11 pm, the traffic was worse than at 7pm. It must be their rush hour.

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