Had a terrible nights sleep and woke with a terrible allergy reation to somthing. As it was in a shared room decided it was only fair to leave so went for a walk and coffee at 5.30!!
This turned out to be a very busy day. St Isaacs cathedral was again incredibly ornate, build mainly of granite and marble with gold leaf everywhere, the overall mass of the thing is 300,000 tons!!
Lozza and I then took on the Hermitage. This houses one of the worlds largest art collections with over three million pieces, mostly gifts to Catherine the Great. This is housed in the Winter Palace of the Tsars and is one of the most magnificent and extravigent buildings imaginable. It is hard to see why there was not revolution years before it hapened. By the time we had done the tour of the palace we were pretty done in so only looked around the actual art museum for an hour or two, still saw some great works though.
We were booked into the Vodka museum for dinner that evening, the girls wanted to rest prior to this so Ivan and I went for a couple of sneaky pints and discuss music related matters.
The museum was very good, mixed a history of vodka tour with dinner and some shots to taste. All were suprised to find that vodka is actualy made from wheat and has nothing to do with potatoes.
Stayed quite a while here and tasted several varieties of the clear medicine, Pushkin vodka came out top of the ratings so we bought a bottle of that for about three quid.
We were due to tak a late night boat trip to see all of the cities bridges opening to let the tall ships through so had quite a bit of time to kill, having tried another bar and staying til closing time we happily stumbled upon a 24 hour English bar. Not only that but it was busy and had scantily clad dancing girls on the bar
and a selection of working girls to take care of your every need. Nice.
Boat trip was excellent, although memory is a little hazy on detail, toasted the trip with shots of puskin!!
Were stopped by the police in the taxi back home, lukily they didn't demand all our papers as I didn't have them on me.
Crawled back to bed at about 3.30 and slept like a baby.
