The Hermitage is one of the largest and oldest museums in the world. It’s located about two blocks from our hotel. How cool is that?

Catherine the Great founded The Hermitage in 1764 and it’s been open to the public since 1852. I guess it was only open to Cathy’s friends during the intervening 88 years.

“Hey, c’mon over on Saturday night and we’ll look at the Dutch Masters.”

“Not the Dutch Masters again. How about Picasso?”

“Sorry, he won’t be born for a few more decades.”

They say it owns the largest collection of paintings in the world and after looking for several hours at rooms full of those same Rembrandts, Picassos, and everything in between, I believe them.

The building that houses the Hermitage is known as the Winter Palace and was built by Catherine. I assume she built it because one simply can’t change seasons without changing palaces.

One of the things we were really looking forward to was trying foods we’d never heard of. Although Jamie was not very excited when she read about Iceland’s pickled herring and sheep’s head cuisine.

Here’s a selection of exotic foreign breakfast cereals offered at breakfast the other day.

I originally posted this YouTube video on one of our other websites, but it’s so appropriate that I’m running it here on JimandJamie.com. Take a few minutes and watch it, because it will give you a sense of what the streets are like in St Petersburg.

Let me be blunt: Russian drivers are terrible. No, not just terrible. They’re completely insane.

Our hotel is one a one-way street. We hadn’t been out the revolving door for more than a minute when we saw a huge, fully-loaded dump truck coming down the street in the proper direction. Apparently the driver just plain decided that he didn’t want to go that direction, because he made a very slow, very difficult three-point turn — blocking traffic — so that he could go down the one-way street IN THE WRONG DIRECTION.

A few minutes later we saw a motorcycle coming down the sidewalk straight at us, scattering pedestrians in every direction.

On top of that everyone drives down the main streets at freeway speed. U-turns in heavy traffic are common.

It’s every man for himself on the streets of St. Petersburg. Cross the street at your own risk.

UPDATE: We just arrived in Moscow. Traffic is unbelievable. Absolutely unbelievable. Our cab driver was listening to a mellow jazz station (I know that because the announcer said, “Mellow” in English between every song) and still honked his horn a thousand times during our ride. Lane divider lines mean nothing here.

Traffic was crawling at a remarkably slow pace. We actually saw one driver go backwards down the lane meant for traffic coming the opposite direction, swerve into a driveway, then shoot out and cut into our lane of traffic.

It’s crazy, man.

I once read that the days following the fall of Communism were very strange in Russia because no one knew how to be a capitalist.

Well, those days are long gone. This is now a hotbed of raw, unbridled capitalism. There are carnival barkers using bullhorns to sell their wares on almost every corner of Nevsky, St Petersburg’s main thoroughfare. Everyone’s trying to sell something to someone.

Funny thing is, they truly glorify the days of the czars, but don’t say as much about the decades of Communist rule. I wanted to buy a T-shirt or cap that said CCCP (the Russian initials of the old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) or a hammer & sickle, but I haven’t been able to find anything adorned with either.

But the top of this building serves as a silent reminder that Communism ran the whole shebang not that long ago.

Sometimes there don’t seem to be enough hands or your arms aren’t long enough or you can only see both faces if they block out the scenery in the background.

This was supposed to be a shot of us in front of a beautiful fountain in Peter the Great’s Summer Garden.

Oh, well.

This is Jamie looking very regal while standing in front of Catherine the Great’s throne in The Hermitage Museum. She wants one for our new house.

The primary reason we chose to stay at The Renaissance Hotel is because they advertise that they have a special door to The Hermitage so that guests don’t have to stand in line. Silly us. We assumed that meant the two buildings are adjacent to each other and that we could pass from one to the other with the turn of a knob.

No such luck.

What it really means is that the hotel has an arrangement with the museum. Find the ticket office (if you can), show your room key and you get to bypass the lines. Of course, you still have to stand in line at the ticket office, but that’s nothing. A trifle. Piffle.

The woman behind the glass in the ticket office spoke not a word of English. Well, she did speak just a few.

“Two hundred rubles.”

“I want two tickets,” I replied. “Is it two hundred rubles for one ticket or two tickets?”

“Two hundred rubles,” she said.

I handed her my Visa card.

“Cash only,” she spit contemptuously.

Luckily I had enough rubles. I handed her two hundred rubles and my room key.

“Passport,” she sighed, as if I were some sort of slow child.

Crap. The concierge hadn’t mentioned that we would need our passports to buy tickets. She simply said we needed our room key.

“Our passports are back at the hotel,” I sputtered.

She gave an even bigger sigh. She looked over at the other woman in the booth and shook her head slowly as if she couldn’t believe that God had foisted me upon her.

“Eight hundred rubles,” she said.

I have no idea how we went from two hundred rubles to eight hundred rubles, but I forked over the cash, grabbed my tickets and headed outside to find Jamie.

Sure enough, doors opened and we were allowed to bypass the long lines of people who’d been waiting far longer than we had. We went through security, feeling just a little bit better than all those little people waiting in the line that snaked out the door and through the immense courtyard.

Then we went through the turnstile and the female security guard, who also spoke not a word of English, made it clear that she was unhappy and that Jamie had committed a violation of some kind. Turns out Russia’s former Communists now know how to do business. The problem was that we hadn’t paid an extra fee required to bring a camera into the museum.

So we went back to the ticket line where we slapped down another pile of rubles for the little sticker that says, “I paid a small fortune to bring my camera into this museum” or, I’m sure, something very similar.

When we worked our way back through the crowd to the same security guard. She remembered us, almost smiled, then motioned for us to come through the turnstile again by using the same tickets and holding their barcodes up to the reader. For some unknown reason, the tickets would no longer trigger the turnstile. Perhaps the computer was programmed to allow just one admission per ticket and wouldn’t work because we were now attempting to use the for the second time. Who knows?

This security guard was actually quite nice. She motioned for Jamie to press up against the turnstile and motioned for me to get in right behind her. Then she wrapped her arms around us, used her bar coded ID card to trigger the turnstile and literally pulled us into the museum.

We all smiled nicely, said thank you and went into The Hermitage.

Russians use Cyrillic, an alphabet that’s completely different than the one we use. Some of their letters that look identical to ours have completely different pronunciations. And then they have a whole bunch of letters that don’t even look like letters. Here’s what it looks like:

А Б В Г Д Е Ё Ж З И Й К Л М Н О П Р С Т У Ф Х Ц Ч Ш Щ Ъ Ы Ь Э Ю Я Yo

How different is it?

This is a poster promoting a new TV show by English chef Jamie Oliver. The large word in the center is Russian for “Jamie”.

It’s worrisome, wouldn’t you agree, when you’ve paid big bucks to stay in one of the nicest hotels in the city, but you find a sign in your bathroom that basically says, “Drink the water if you want. But we wouldn’t.”

We’re using the same strategy a lot of people use in Mexico — nothing but bottled water. So far, so good.

The Marriott hotel in Moscow helped me book tickets on a train from Helsinki to Saint Petersburg. That’s all I knew about the train.

Jamie and I decided to do a little homework to prepare for the trip so we visited Helsinki’s main station the day before our departure and asked the nice woman in the information booth a few questions.

“You can’t miss the train,” she said. “It’s the one that doesn’t look like any of the others. And it’s a Russian train so make sure you keep your passports with you.”

“Will they check them here in Helsinki or in St Petersburg or aboard the train,” I asked.

She laughed. “They’ll check them four different times aboard the train.”

And they did. First an unsmiling conductor checked them. Then an unsmiling customs inspector checked them. Then an unsmiling immigration inspector checked them. And finally, some other undetermined, unsmiling official checked them again. Apparently just to make sure the other unsmiling officials hadn’t screwed up.

All that aside, the train was great. It looked brand new inside and out, but even better, it was a “speed train” that quickly revved up to a top speed of 130 miles an hour. I know the exact speed because there was an LED readout that constantly updated the current speed.

The countryside was beautiful, a “stewardess” served us a delicious breakfast, and we were in St Petersburg before we knew it.

It’s the third week of August and back in California we haven’t yet hit the peak of summer. I was talking to an Englishman who’s married to a Finn in a restaurant today. “We’re celebrating the last weekend of summer,” he said.

I thought that was kind of odd, but when we walked outside we noticed that leaves are already turning yellow and falling off the trees. Another Finn told us that mid-winter days only have about two hours of sunshine and a couple more hours of dusk.

We’re very spoiled in California.