Cruise Day 6 St Petersburg part 2

Not such an early start this time but some annoying mucking about as we waited for a family to get off the ship. After muttering curses at their absence, when they turned up we discovered they'd been stiffed by the ship service to provide the pre-arranged care for one of their children. After a short drop-in to the tour company office to pay, we went straight to our major feature for St Petersburg - the Hermitage Museum. This complex defies any short descriptions (i.e. so seek that elsewhere). It is astonishing in two main respects: 1) the array of art within, 2) the incredible spaces from the palaces and galleries that have been then been combined to comprise it. Touring through it - and I'm grateful to have had a guide who knew where we were going - it was humbling to be glancing through rooms that would have been a major exhibition in any normal art gallery - e.g. a room full of Caravaggio, a room full of Matisse, a room full of Picasso, etc. Ditto, a room with the museum's only two Da Vinci paintings, or their sole Michelangelo statue. As I had hoped, a great feature was seeing artists I'd not heard of but whose works were clearly exceptional. I will have to research at home to rediscover what I'd seen. Even if I'd had my notebook with me, on such a lightning run I wouldn't have had time to note titles and names. We split from our group and went back in lieu of lunch to re-view the Egyptian room - such 3D items as bas-relief and tomb objects would be poorly served by online photos and catalogues. After the kaleidoscope of treasures of the Hermitage we caught up with our tour group as they finished their lunch and headed to the so-called church of the spilled blood, built on the site of assassination of a Tsar. Again, little can prepare one for the scale and artistic density of this former church. While it's already quite an eyeful on the outside, the inside alone is quite remarkable for its mosaics from floor to extremely high ceiling. Then on to another incredible Russian church, at fourth largest in the world, St Isaac's is of such scale as to deceive the eye. There were mosaics so high up as to appear small, yet the replicas which had been placed at ground floor were nearly two stories high. Looking across at one then up at its original it was tempting to think the guide was fibbing. Both of these churches had been damaged in the war and the time and effort to restore them is impressive. Some have only recently been re-opened. For a change from the historic, we were taken into the modern underground railway station, which was very deep underground and very clean and with good mosaics. Finally, we dropped into a typical soviet-style "farmers" market, which let us see what kinds of fresh goods were available in the city.