What I mean to say is “Oh! No Tourists!”
The Museum is closed today, but for you a special tour
Good News everyone! If you are on a Baltic cruise and they offer the evening Hermitage tour, grab it as soon as you can. While the Hermitage contains more than three million works of art and artifacts of world culture, on any given day it may seem like there are over three million tourists there as well. Not on this day! It’s a Monday when the museum is normally closed. This evening in the entire museum complex I would guess maybe there were only 90 guests.
The Hermitage grand tour
1) The Winter Palace, one of five buildings that make up the Hermitage. 2) Our very knowledgeable tour guide for the evening (the guy with the blue folder) for the two and a half hour tour. He kept us going from one era to the next as best he could. Of course if you spent one minute in front of each work of art 24/7 it would take you over 7 years to complete the Hermitage journey. 3) The palace tiled floor. 4) One of many elegant staircases.
Hallways of the Hermitage
One of the largest and oldest museums in the world with the largest collections of paintings in the world, it was founded in 1764 by Cathrine the Great and has been open to the public since 1852. The hallways above are from the Winter Palace, the former residence of Russian emperors.
One of more than a zillion paintings
By my calculation we probably saw one in twenty-four thousands (1/24,000) of this museum and we had a better time than most people who wrote a review on Trip Adviser. While most people liked the museum, the major complaint was the long wait to get in and the unruly groups of tourists who pushed and shoved their way in front of paintings. And someone actually wrote that they spent 8 hours in the Hermitage and saw 60% of the artwork? No freaking way!
The Ticket for Monday night
All I can make out is that the ticket was provided by the “Baltic Travel Company” which seems like a rather general name but the company really does do special tours in St. Petersburg so, there you go. Also you can get Android Google Apps for the Hermitage.