After we arrived in St. Petersburg, my family and I were met by a cab that took us to our hotel (ya we got the VIP treatment). Unfortunately, our hotel wasn't exactly up to VIP standards: The rooms were minuscule; the walls were probably made of tissue paper; and the service was decidedly Russian (as one of the other teachers sums it up, it's like people in the Russian service industry are constantly unpleasantly surprised to discover that they have a job that entails doing something). But this inhospitable hotel that my mom nicknamed "Raskolnikov's hovel" had one big plus--it's location. We were just off Nevsky Prospekt right in the center of everything. After dinner at a Japanese-Uzbek-Russian fusion cafe (we got selections from the Uzbek menu), we went to bed. We were still tired enough from traveling that it didn't matter that we could hear every detail of whatever tacky Russian soap opera our neighbors were watching.

The next day we hit St. Petersburg hard. We started out with the Hermitage, which is where we still would be if our visas didn't have an expiration date. The Hermitage is a massive palace-turned-museum, and a person could spend months exploring its hundreds of rooms. The palace interiors are quite impressive in a very overdone-baroque way (not my style, but you gotta give those Italian masters credit). We mostly visited the collection of French Impressionism.

After we extricated ourselves from the Hermitage, we got lunch at a sidewalk cafe along Nevsky Prospekt, stopped into Dom Knigi (literally "House of Book"--a famous bookstore), and visited the Church of Our Savior on the Spilled Blood, an amazingly ornate church built on the site where Tsar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881. We finished off the day by going on a boat cruise on St. Petersburg's canals and getting dinner at a Russian-dacha-themed restaurant.