Monday 29 August St Petersburg (day Two)

.After a very heavy sleep we woke feeling much better albeit stiff and sore from all the standing the day before. We were not looking forward to today because we had another eight hour tour. we were the last tour off the ship and found that we had two guides Irena and Nicoliy, they both spoke excellent English and didn't look the types to get flustered. We started the tour with a very relaxing river and canal cruise which showed a totally different aspect to St Petersburg and we both said that we were starting to like St Petersburg. We disembarked and had a short walk to Yusupov Palace that had been owned by Felix Yusupov - often said to be as wealthy as the Tsar himself. The furnishings, decor and art works had to been seen to believed - it even had a two hundred seat theatre complete with orchestra pit. There were female attendants in all the rooms and all appeared to have been trained by the KGB (not allowed to lean or touch anything . We had had a wonderful morning and didn't think it could get much better, but it did. We were taken for lunch to the St Petersburg hotel (Chaplain Restaurant) where we were served a beautiful meal of mushroom soup, beef stroganoff, and crepes and a nice glass of red. The only let down was that there was no milk for the coffee, but after all we are in Russia. After lunch we were taken to an other souvenir shop before going to the Cathedral on Spilled blood built on the spot where Alexander II was assassinated in 1881. From the outside the church looks like a Russian wedding cake and on the inside it is decorated with thousand of square metres of mosaics that go from floor to ceiling and even in the cupolas. This was truly beautiful. There was a market next to the church which was one of the few places you could bargain so we bought a few more things to go in our already full cases. We were back on board by 5:00pm, David went for a drink while Di had a rest. For dinner we had hamburgers in the sports bar while the ship sailed out for St Petersburg, then went to the early show in the Starlight Lounge which was a pair of ordinary acrobats- we both said we have seen much better on Australia's Got Talent. We were off to bed when we ran into Judith and John (our friends from Somerset). Poor John had been laid up with a bad back all day and they has missed their second day in St Petersburg, he was bad enough to need medical treatment. We were still in bed at 9:30pm and because of a time change we gained an hour overnight.