Baltic Cruise II

From St Petersburg we sailed back west, visiting Helsinki, Finland; Stockholm, Sweden; Rostock (Wismar tour) and Kiel, Germany.

Helsinki has much fancy modern architecture, contrasted by the offbeat tourist draw called the Church in the Rock.

Fascinating Ceiling

Stockholm features the Vasa Museum, containing a ship resurrected from the harbor 333 years after it foundered and sank on its maiden voyage in 1628.  Swedish engineering has vastly improved since.

Stockholm Harbor

From Rostock, Germany we took a short excursion to the medieval town of Wismar, where we learned a lot about the early history of brewing beer.  Beer was health food actually -- for all ages -- as the water was not safe to drink unless made into beer.

They love these pig sculptures

According to our guide the mayor in the olden days would issue a proclamation like, 'Dear Townspeople, on Wednesday please do not shit or piss in the canal, as we'll be brewing beer from that water on Thursday.  Thank you.'  Or some such.

So we went to a brewery, in business since 1452 and had a pint.

The tour included a walk around a church still not entirely reconstructed from WWII.

The tour guide lamented the fact that, in her opinion, Allied bombing of the church in the last days of the war was an "entirely unnecessary" act.  I did not offer my opinion that there had already been by that time six million unnecessary acts committed by Germans.

Next day we docked in Kiel, Germany.  Not much to report from there.

What?

 Then we were back to Copenhagen for more adventures.

Baltic Cruise

Finally!  We made our way to Copenhagen by fits and starts at the end of May, delayed in Denver and unable to make an overnight connection out of Newark due to weather; arrived a day late (having paid for an expensive hotel room that we never stepped foot in) so ... at last we boarded the Holland America ship MS Zuiderdam for a tour of the Baltic Sea.

   

After sailing east from Copenhagen for a day and two nights we arrived in Tallin, Estonia, where, by the oddest of happy coincidences, Shannon's brother Reid and sister-in-law Tina were docked aboard a different cruise line alongside our ship; them sailing west from St Petersburg.  We had a fun visit, drank some beer in Tallin, had lunch and lots of laughs.

Some like it dark, some like it light

The fourth and fifth days we spent in Russia, touring St Petersburg's Hermitage museum, the gardens of Peterhof, and a bunch of churches, one of which was actually unusual and mildly interesting.

Our Entrance at the Hermitage

View of the Hermitage from across the Neva River

Catherine the Great was not so much a collector of art as she was a collector of others' collections of art.

See?

Two days of viewing some of the three million pieces in the Hermitage left me mildly disappointed (and over-amazed), since the French Impressionist painters and Post-Impressionists were displayed in a different building, which we were not privileged to see.

Large Specimen

Lunch along the touristy Nevskiy Prospekt

The gardens at Peterhof

That is the Baltic Sea out there

Apparently Czar Peter The Great went to France and toured Versailles, which caused him to develop a severe case of Palace Envy.  Peterhof was the result.  Nice try, but nowhere near as impressive.