Slight change in plans in St Petersburg

So, here we are in St Petersburg on Sunday and our host comes down with a ruptured eardrum and that means that she can not fly on Tuesday as planned. So I volunteer to stay with her until the end of the cruise in Stockholm (we were all getting off early in St Pete’s). Now she and I are staying until Friday and visiting Tallin, Estonia and Stockholm Sweden. I am pretty excited as I have always wanted to go to Sweden. It will be a nice change to actually stay on a ship with some time off and maybe lie on a deck chair at the pool for a bit! Hopefully we will have nice weather!

So without our host, the shoot has become a bit more difficult. But we run ahead and figure it out. St Petersburg is a beautiful city, large and sometimes not very clean, but with striking HUGE buildings covered in ornate sconces and such. There is so much gold plating on the buildings here that even on a cloudy day the sky sparkles a sunny glow.

We visit the Church of the Spilled Blood. It is what you would think of as a Russian building, similar to the ones you see in pictures of Moscow. It is amazing in it’s detail and color. Non-symmetrical spires stretch upward fro the main building, each covered in magnificently colored ceramics. It is truly like something out of a movie set, or maybe Epcot, Russia! You can’t even understand and I hope the picture does it justice.

The Russian people are an angry people. Really angry, unfriendly and mean people. All of them. It is a little shocking really. And they aren’t the most attractive folks. The fashion (and I use that term loosely) is atrocious. I spend much of the day staring in disbelief at what women and girls are wearing on a Sunday morning. All of the pants are unfathomably tight and the skirts remarkably short. There is a lot of gold lame, which I simply can’t explain!

We have a lovely day, though not too great weather wise, in St Petes and return to the ship. On this night we finally go out (almost all of us) to the “club” on the ship. We drink too much and dance too little and it is overall a great fun night that was much needed to relieve some of the stress. We have met some fun people on board and we all have a great night. We head out the next day with a renewed energy, but still without a host.