We were up and out at 10:30 AM today, as we wanted to get to the Hermitage before it got too full of tourists. We thought we would have to try the fanciest Burger King ever (sorry, Pete) but our hotel did have a continental breakfast. Luckily, it was raining so the line for the Hermitage wasn’t too bad of a problem. Inside, on the way in, we noticed one of the museum volunteers happened to be from Yorba Linda / Placentia - what a small world. The actual Hermitage collection itself, was beautiful, but just way too much for one day, encompassing painters for Leonardo da Vinci to Gaugain to art from ancient Samaria. We just wandered from room to room for a few hours until we couldn’t take it anymore.
From the Hermitage, we took a fast ferry to Peter the Great’s summer palace. It was raining on and off, but we got some beautiful pictures of the main residence as well as the grounds, with tons of gold and fountains everywhere.
Eventually, we walked to the bus station. The bus moneytaker (yes, there is a person on the bus just to take your money), in typical Russian style, told us we “would know it when we saw it” in reference to the location of the train station. At this point we had very few rubles between us, and couldn’t scrape up for a beer, only ice cream. Some dogs were taking breaks from the rain by sleeping out right next to the station, and so I got an awesome picture. The train ride back itself was pretty boring, but I finally did see a guy using an actual Kindle (tons of Russian people have off-brand e-readers). I also saw a guy taking video of his sleeping girlfriend, which seemed a little strange…
Back in the city, Max dropped us off at the hotel while he went to visit his (yet another) aunt. We just stayed in, and did our postcard / journal duties. We did discover that part of the reason Russians speak bad English is that everything is dubbed - even Bill Nye’s new science show! I called Callie because I really missed her and ended up using all of my Russian phone credit in about 15 seconds, cutting off my Internet access till I renewed it the next day.
Eventually we headed out to dinner at a cute little bar place that claimed to take credit cards. It actually ended up costing around 2200 rubles and their credit card machine was broken. Sunny negotiated us free drinks while I got the unenviable job of wandering through town to find an ATM. It took 4 tries: one ATM in a “24 hour” spot was closed, one would only give me amounts divisible by 0 (math?), one was in the “out” section of the subway station which got me yelled at by police, and one was in the Dostoyevsky hotel which actually worked. We headed back to the hotel to sleep as we had a really early start.