Tomato Soup and Peanut Butter

Edit: apparently posting blogs via my email over the ship's internet had some kinks, so my posts have been turning out a little weird; about half of this one was actually missing. Hopefully I've fixed it and it's better now! Since I really have no way of knowing what my blog looks like while at sea make sure to comment and inform me if the posts stop making sense again!

Location: St. Petersburg, Russia

I came really close to naming this post "My Boat Crashed!" but I thought that might freak some people out, so I refrained. As it turns out, the boat did crash. It wasn't the M.V. Explorer though; it was a medium-sized river boat which was touring myself and about twenty other SAS students through the canals of St. Petersburg. At least it was until about 10:30pm, when the motor died mid-turn and it ran head first into the stone walls of the canal.

But I am getting a bit ahead of myself.

My first day in St. Petersburg officially started when I went out on deck this morning with breakfast and caught my first view of the city as the ship drifted down the Neva River toward our port at south-eastern Vasilyevsky Island. The part of the city we were going through at that point was mostly industrial, with cranes, shipping containers, and the occasional refuse dump. But the lighting outside was nice, and everyone was super excited to disembark. I will save all the boring stuff about the ship getting cleared and me almost missing my first field program for another time. Pretty soon, I and my fellow St. Petersburg Walking Tour field program folks were packed into a bus, given radios and earpieces, and ferried off to our first destination: the Hermitage Museum, located in the former winter palace of the Tsars.

...Which was, of course, really neat. Every single wall, floor, ceiling, window, and doorway was so opulently constructed that much of my time was just spent admiring the building, aside from its contents. The museum contains rooms and rooms of famous paintings, among them works by Da Vinci and Rembrandt. I found the paintings to be somewhat lackluster in comparison with their setting, but to be fair it's a bit hard to compete with this:

  

We also either saw or visited several churches, including the Church of the Savior on Blood, which were gorgeous. After the walking tour was finished, I found a small cafe and hung out there for about an hour, waiting for the day's second field program to begin.

  

...Which brings us to the infamous canal tour boat. As the last ones on, myself and three other students did not manage to grab the outside seating on the boat, and were ushered below into what turned out to be a very pleasant room with panoramic windows and a cozy sofa. We therefor had a front row seat to witness the unceremonious meeting of our ship and the canal wall:

 

(Left = small picture of our boat.  Right = the wall.)

Everything went fine of course; the boat didn't start taking on water or anything (it really didn't hit super hard), and we just had to wait about 30 minutes before we were transferred into another boat and sent back on our tour. Apparently this sort of thing doesn't happen very often though, because our trip liaison says we made the news. Yeah, only one day in the first port and we're already making a country's news!

In other news (haha) somehow in all of this I managed to miss both dinner and evening snack on the ship. So tonight I will be dining on the fine cuisine which I have stockpiled in my cabin during the voyage; instant tomato soup (from the B&B in Southampton) and peanut butter (rejected by Jazlin and salvaged by me back in England.) Well, that's all I've got for you and it is once again quite late. Let's see if posting this many pictures makes the internet mad...