Helsinki and St Petersburg

July 29 – Helsinki
We visited the two main sites to see – the Rock Church, and the National Museum. They were fascinating, and we really enjoyed them, but there's plenty more to talk about in St Petersburg.
July 30 – St Petersburg, Russia
We were greeted by a weather change (Oregon in March), and a brass band. Nice touch.
We took an afternoon tour, since we cannot go ashore any other way. If we wanted to be on our own we would have needed a visa which takes several weeks and several hundred dollars. Our tour was a cathedral tour. Next to the Alexander Nevisky Monastery, we visited the gravesites of two famous composers – Stravinski and Tchaikovsky. We also received a private concert by the male choir who sang some hymns and Russian folk tunes. Pretty amazing music a capella from the octet. We bought their CD.
July 31 – St Petersburg, Russia
Back to beautiful sunny weather. We booked two tours today. We probably won't do that again; we were really tired when we got back to the ship. The morning tour was to the Hermitage, the second largest museum in the world, next to the Louvre. It is in the old Winter Palace of the Czars. Having been to the Louvre twice, I believe they have a lot more paintings – they have 15,000 (too many to display at once). The museum actually does not have room to show the three million artifacts that they have. There are five different tours of the museum; we went on just one. The place is big. Our afternoon tour was the famous Church on the Spilled Blood, kind of a gross name for a church, but it was built on the site where Czar Alexander II was murdered. The inside was unique in that the wall paintings are all mosaic tile, very much like St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice, Italy.
After this church we were given a canal cruise which wound its way along the small canals out to the Neva River. One enterprising young man (Dmitri – a 14 year old), followed our cruise and was always smiling and waving to us from each canal bridge we went under (there were seven or eight). Sometimes he jogged, sometimes he ran, but he was there at every bridge. I'm sure he collected a sizable donation from the passengers.