The enjoyment of being an independent tourist is you do not know how events will unfold. This trip fully met my expectations. This really is just a diary for me to remember what I did, otherwise I find one forgets. Thank you for friends and family who may have accessed this. Any feedback is welcomed. I have found that doing a Blog enables one to combine a diary and photos close to the time of the trip. After one gets home there is no need to do much more except a summary like this. The highlights were visiting the Hermitage and Winter Palace (all the same building), seeing the amazing reconstruction of all the historic buildings that has occurred since 1941 and continues to this day, having three days with excellent English speaking guides, making the history of Peter the Great, Catherine the Great and Nicholas and Alexander come alive, a walking tour on the first day that morphed into a tour of the extraordinary Metro stations built in 1955 in the Soviet era, a visit to Pushkin (Tsarkoe Selo, the Catherine Palace and gardens), visiting the fountains at Peterof, seeing the Italian Opera Pagliacci at the Mariinskiy Theatre, eating at small Turkish, Georgian and Italian restaurants, visiting an up market shopping center, hearing music and a ceremony at the Kasan Cathedral, seeing St Petersburg and the Neva river and canals on a boat excursion, riding in taxis (need to know how to not be fleeced), buses, trolly buses and the Metro, very comfortable hotel with English speaking staff, getting by without knowing or understanding Russian, able to get WiFi when needed, unaware of any Russian Politics, able to get one English channel on TV - Bloomberg news and being able to observe the Russian citizens (mostly a dour lot).
Some perhaps negatives - two days with rain and one with strong winds, worrisome security on buses when they are crowded. Taxi drivers and many of those people in stores rarely speak English. It would also be nice to have a compatible travelling companion to enjoy the adventure!
Anyhow - I am signing off this Blog with this summary. Thank you to those who have followed it.
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