Update: Fri 23:55

Friday, 23 September

I didn't notice during breakfast but it was raining today. At least the first sightseeing job, The Hermitage, in the Winter Palace (amongst other places) would be indoors.

The Hermitage is a mix of palace and general museum. There are state rooms (suitably impressive for the visiting ambassador) and plenty of waiting rooms, drawing rooms, boudoirs etc. (with a wide range of furnishings) and then hundreds of rooms of collections of exhibits and artwork. The exhibits range from the usual state museum stuff of lots of gold- and silverware through Greco-Roman statuary, Egyptian mummies, excavated barrows and early-human flints etc.. Then there's the rooms and rooms of artwork over multiple floors.

Then there's the large swathes of the building that are closed off making navigating the building rather tricky. I didn't even start off with a map and only the realisation that everyone else seemed to have one made me seek one out. Even then, finding a set of stairs that would take you up or down to the next floor was the devil's own job. I went through the Peacock Clock room any number of times (catching it chime a couple of times).

The one thing that I did want to see was the Amber Room. Of course, the Amber Room isn't in the Hermitage or even, arguably, in St Petersburg, it's down the road in the Catherine Palace in Pushkin. D'oh!

I then wandered up and down Nevsky Prospekt, the main drag. I'd ridden up and down it a couple of time already but I wasn't watching the buildings. There's some nice ones, the Singer Building is especially interesting with something like a giant upturned glass vase on the roof with a globe on top. Now a mix of bank and coffee shop, as is the way.