spbstan

A canal/river cruise would probably be including in a day program but it is nice in the evening. Depending on when you come, some of the best ballet, opera and classical concerts are available almost every night until August when there is a break to travel. The "Stars of the White Nights" festival is an international must for ballet and opera lovers, all of June each year. You could visit the new Faberge Museum that will be open until 21:00 and then go exploring the city on foot or canal boat which can be joined right across the street from the Faberge Museum. There is a lot to do depending on your interests.

If jazz is your thing, there are jazz diner cruises on the river, or really good jazz clubs.

The terms of the visa waiver for cruise passengers requires supervision of the representative of the sponsoring tour operator at all times so a guide is not going to allow a group to wander off out of her control.

One tour operator who was the contractor for Norwegian Cruise Lines offered a few hours, a map and dropped people off at Arts Square. They did get into trouble when a couple asked directions from a police officer who asked where their guide was. So I am not sure it that option is available after the immigration officials found out.

Thank you for the beautiful photographs spbstan. I especially enjoyed the one of the Alexander Palace reflected in the pond. When we visited there in 2011 we didn't walk the grounds very much. Most of our visit was inside. We haven't reviewed it in the thread because it still needed some renovation work and of course most people will opt for Catherine's Palace. The work that had been completed looked good like the New Study.

 

I really enjoy the town of Pushkin and have been looking for a home there, one of the nicest small towns in Europe. Really worth hanging out in with large lush parks, colorful flowers everywhere, every building and sidewalk in excellent condition, no graffiti or dirty streets and two interesting historic palaces in town. Alexander Palace is one that is livable, human scale and designed for people, albeit rather rich people, unlike the gigantic 1000++ room monsters in in other districts. It is also a quick trip by train, bus or foot to Pavlovsk park, which is a great way to get away from the city in 1500 acres of forest, meadows, rivers and lakes, plus a palace. An electric suburban train runs from the city center of St Petersburg to a train station directly across the street from the park. It is too bad more cruisers do not have time for some of these sights. All seem to be content with a short list of crowded destinations where all cruisers go, leaving most possible destinations essentially unused.

There are some new walking tours in the city center that allow visitors to get to know the areas and people more directly, plus save a lot of money so maybe there will be more interest in doing less conventional things.

Unfortunately, like almost all news items in the US are highly biased in their presentation. M10 is not in great shape but is absolutely better than claimed in the hit piece. I have driven it many times and it is not as decrepit as the story wants you to believe.

Villages are dying however, young people have all left and gone for good jobs and university in the 15 cities with over 1 million residents. As the last pensioner dies, the villages go to ruin and are not reclaimed, about 3,000 villages a year cease to have any residents so it is really hard to justify expensive infrastructure enhancements for a town of 3 people 100 miles from the nearest paved road. The country was built along railroad lines, not roads due to the vast expanses, 11 time zones across so it is not unexpected that the areas of development and population follow the rails. During the Soviet era, there were jobs for people in villages, even if just make-work jobs so everyone could have income but when capitalism replaced that economic system, there were no work activities from which to earn a living. So there was a mass migration to cities along rail lines.

The country is the least population density of any in the world so it is hard to justify supporting tiny villages with no business or agriculture, and no way to get the products to market if there were is low on the list of priorities. I wander the country and see many villages where life has changed little but there is one thing in common with all of them, there are no young working age people. The kids and grand kids have high educations and living in cities. Even with the decaying village life and hard winters, the country still has the most educated population of all countries with 58% with a university degree.

Eventually the forests will be resettled but when it is possible to provide services off the grid. As wealth is accumulated, many people build nice cottages, large multistory modern homes in the nearer forests but it will be decades before people are interested in doing that far from any road or rail line.

My girlfriend misses village life and she has a large tract of land with small house in a village in Ukraine but despite her dreams of living there again, every visit back, in the village she grew up in, and seeing only 2 people in their 80s left, with no electricity, 5 km walk to the nearest rail line, her interest in living in the remote rural areas lessens. Even when she was a child there were only 5 homes there. The people staying in the villages have one advantage over poor people around the world, they own their property free and clear, pay no taxes and are free to do as they please with their homes. Many, most, are just abandoned for city life and good jobs.

The article is inaccurate on many claims and biased in others so reading it, results in more inaccurate impressions of the country.

Debit and credit cards will be better, since you get the current rate, plus whatever your bank tacks on, which is a better rate than you get from the ship or your bank at home.

If you are exchanging a lot, you will save some by going to an exchange bank(not the exchange offices at terminals or airports, they are the worst rates in the world). This is mainly true for St Petersburg.

Pay in rubles in Russia, it is illegal to use any other currency to pay a bill. You can be sure of getting a bad conversion rate if you are given the option of paying in dollars or other currency since it IS illegal. You might be able to negotiate a lower price because you both know they are not reporting the income if getting cash other than rubles(and probably even if paying rubles), unless they are a foreign company and have dollar or euro accounts if you pay before arrival.

If you want to pay street vendors with foreign currency it is almost assured you are not getting good deal on price and will get no change. It is better to visit regular stores which cater to locals for good prices than those selling exclusively to tourists. If the is no price marked, you will, with certainty, end up paying more than it is worth from a street vendor.

I am not sure how to post images here but I will attempt it.

Here is one that I took late summer with my smaller D7000 and 24mm, handheld:

I will let you guess where this is since it is right next to where you visited yet few foreign visitors have ever seen it.

As a hint, here is another shot of the same palace on another day as the sun was setting late at night, to the right:

Here is a winter shot of St Isaac Cathedral on a rare snow day(very little snow in the last 2 years)

This one was in the rain on a dull day with a storm coming on off the Gulf of Finland, taken at Peterhof

Here is a place you visited, one of my favorite hangouts in the summer, Pavlovsk Park not many foreign visitors go there. :

I take more people shots than landscapes. Here is a crop of 200mm shot of a bride getting impatient with her photographer since it was in a park, 12 degrees and windy on a dark overcast drab day. When I got closer I realized I knew her from a dance party we both attended before she met her husband.

I seldom plan on photo trips around the city, just happen to have a camera with me many times, particularly late at night. Most of these were shot with light zooms on D90 or D7000, but the night and newer landscapes are with the D800 which has 14.4 stops of DR and does well at high ISO, so I usually do not use ND filters for these casual fast shutter hand held shots. The colors would be richer if I used a tripod and slow shutter speeds at low ISO but tripods are not handy when just exploring because I can't take it into a museum. If I show some visitors around for photo taking sessions, I don't use a tripod then either since I am usually helping them with angles or settings.

Hope to see you in 2015 during the big party!

Copenhagen and London are both great cities that we love to visit and stay. Our three favorite cities to visit are : San Miguel (Cozumel) , St. Petersburg and London.

I wanted to thank you for such an interesting thread and the effort used to annotate all the photos. Unlike most travel reports, the information you supplied was very accurate, so it is apparent you really did get to know the city in those stays. I fully agree that staying longer changes everything and the best part is learning by interacting with locals who are not paid to entertain visitors.

The new 3 year visa for Americans will probably make the land visits more attractive for more casual stays. I got one the first week they were made available in September of 2012. The price for the consular service has been lowered so it is the same as a 30 day Tourist Visa

As you might have discovered, the 2 page application asks a lot of difficult-to-answer questions like all the countries visited or ex-spouses history or contact info for colleges and employers. The good thing is that none of that is taken seriously by the consulate since it is an open secret that the only reason that form has those questions and is 2.5 times longer than applications for other nationalities, is because after 9/11, the US started requiring a much more intrusive application for Russians. The key is to put something, or the most relevant answers, as long as SOMETHING is in each box, even if it is just N/A for not applicable.

There are 4 classes of Visas which have the same 3 year validity, and only one requires an invitation(the Tourist Visa) all the others only need a letter from an inviting business for Business Visa, a personal letter of invitation for a Private Visa, which is a citizen inviting a friend or relative to stay with them, and a new catch-all-visa that applies to most visits that are not strictly tourism or business, called the Humanitarian Visa.

It was a very pleasant hour spent reading the entire thread, but every other post I wanted to interject or clarify something since all those locations, activities and sights are within walking distance of my apartment in the city center. Next time you are here, send me a message and I'll go share a pint with you at one of the hundreds of English pubs in the center....

If you are serious about photography, let me know, I go out frequently shooting and have a serious collection of Nikon glass and bodies. My landscape camera is a D800, and know the best vantage points and times for many scenes. The early morning in the summer is spectacular with the golden hour being several hours around 5-7:30 a.m. for example, for traffic-less, stunning light from Basil Island looking across the Neva to the Palace Embankment, and Synod/Senat (now the Russian Supreme Court)