I will post some more photos soon.  We had no Internet since we left Svirstroy. Here we were thinking the slow, unreliable service would pick up once we got to St Petersburg, but there was no service at all. Sitting on the floor of the dingy St P airport now with fast, free Internet. 

Since we hd been to St P before we scheduled 2 days of private tours. The first Andi, Doug, Brad and I went to a bit of a Russian Orthodox service at the extravagant St Nicholas cathedral, walked by Dostoevsky's last apartment (now a museum), went to the cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky monastery (burial place of Tchaikovsky, Dostoevsky and many more luminaries, most of whom we hadn't heard of), visited a farmers market and a typical grocery store, had some more borsch for lunch, went to the high tech storage facility for the excess stuff the Hermitage isn't displaying and had a guided very interesting tour of the Museum of Political history to deepen our knowledge of Soviet times.

The next day Ngaire and Ken joined the 4 of us and we headed out of town for a tour of Pavlovsk and Alexander palace, lunch in small restaurant in a guard tower of Alexander Palace and a by appointment only visit to the amber workrooms at Catherine's palace where they did ll the restoration of the panel in the Amber Room and now make exquisite items for state gifts. 

On our final day we took the shuttle downtown and wandered round, bought some dolls the market near the Spilled Blood cathedral nd then went back for our final bad lunch.

Will post a summation a bit later, after we get to Berlin.