Today I was a slug. It was 9:30 am when Mama threw open the drapes to let in the morning sun. Luckily we hadn't signed up for the morning trip to the Peterhof, so she headed up for some yogurt and pastries and I snoozed a little longer.
Finally ready to join her in the Library, I lost her. She must have walked down the starboard hall and I the port side because she wasn't to be seen in the Brary when I got there. I trooped on to the computer space with I the brilliant idea to connect my iPad to a computer to enable my uploading of multiple shots at a time to the blog. Guess Apple doesn't want to play nicely with everything not Apple since it couldn't read it as an attached device. Oh well.
While I was sitting there, an elderly gentleman asked me how I got the computer to work. He had tried earlier without success. I offered to help him, but as he problem was he had recently changed his hotmail password and as he had it "favorited" on his home computer with the password already loaded, we were sunk. Hotmail would send him a link to reset the password but his options were via text, phone or another email. Having none of those three options, he decided his email could wait. He was the third person I met on this cruise who recently changed the email password with subsequent difficulties. Note to self - never change my password.
Mama found me at the computers so we grabbed lunch, then headed up the dock for the obligatory 30 minute bus ride for our afternoon adventure.
Beginning across from Basil Island, home of the Peter and Paul Fortress and Cathedral, we boarded a bargish boat for our canal tour, traversing the Neva, the Fountain and the Little Neva Rivers.
Along the way we passed a wedding party on a tricked out bargey boat and also a bride and groom photo shoot in one of the gardens. We saw all of the same places we had seen by bus but from the opposite vantage point.
No time for shopping. (What is this place? Some kind of communist country with no shopping?) As soon as the canal tour finished, it was back on the bus to battle the traffic to the boat.
And at 7:00 pm promptly the Viking Helgi finally set sail, metaphorically speaking, and left port.
The captain, via a tour guide interpreter, and the hotel director welcomed us with a champagne toast and all the department heads were introduced.
After dinner we retired to our room for a brief snooze before sunset. At 10:45 pm. In the immortal words of Yakov Smirnov, "What a country." (If you were born in the 80s or later, Google him.)
As we were passing the Schlusselburg Fortress, a rainbow broke out in the sky. This fortress was the true stronghold of Russia as no foreign invader has breached its location and taken over Russia since Peter I - the Great One - took this part of the country back from Sweden. (That's according to Doug our Cruise Director but that sounds funny since I thought the closest country north is Finland but that's a damn geography question, as Charlie used to say each time he landed on a blue space in Trivial Pursuit, so don't ask me to prove it.)
Anyhoo - Lenin's brother was one of the political prisoners kept at said fortress and was executed there. Looks pretty desolate and far away from 'civilization.' At some point I'll post a short video I took while we passed it and entered Lake Ladoga.
It's 11:30 pm and I finally drew the curtains on a pinkish sky. I wouldn't call it night yet. Given the amount of daylight this time of year, I couldn't even begin to imagine what it's like in the winter.
Will try to get some more pix to upload without crashing and then to sleep. Tomorrow is an artists' village and Mama is going to paint a matrushka doll. I'm heading to the banya for a massage (please tell me it's not with the birch barks) and a schvitz and a refreshing chaser of a cold-water dunk. I had to sign a disclaimer to register for this one. Laugh if you like but I kid you not.
Добрый вечер!