I finally made it to the Hermitage last week. This is my one regret of the trip so far…NOT making it to this museum MORE!! It’s FREE with an ISID! But it’s always something…
The weather was SOOO weird that day! It was cold and rainy-ish when we left for the museum. We took the metro because it was just TOO cold to walk. When we came out of the metro it was DEFINITELY raining as we got closer to the Hermitage it started hailing. We had to wait in line outside to get tickets and it stopped raining, started again, then the sun came out bright and shiny. We went into the museum and about an hour or two later it was snowing like crazy!!!! Maybe this is how weather works, but I’m from the California COAST where it doesn’t snow unless there is cosmic weirdness!
History…the Hermitage is a museum made up of 5 buildings and contain the finest art collections in the world. Catherine the Great founded it in 1764 and the museum has been public since 1852. The 5 buildings that make up the Hermitage are: the Winter Palace (home to Russian emperors and tsars), the Menshikov Palace, Museum of Porcelain, Storage Facility at Staraya Derevnya and the eastern wing of the General Staff Building.
Basically, it’s a HUGE place with a lot of cool stuff in it! And it’s likely that if I’d gone every single day for 3 months I might have been able to see everything…but not likely. I went for 5 hours and only got through a fraction of the Winter Palace. There is so, SO much but the architecture is amazing! I really can not wrap my head around the piles of money it cost to build palaces of this nature or the cost of upkeep! And some of the rooms are so gorgeous, why would you NEED others to go to? Why wouldn’t you just spend your entire life in the one room overlooking the river with peacock clock in it? Ok…maybe a 2nd room…if the peacock clock did indeed ring every 15 minutes that would likely cause me to have some mental instability. But anyway…
It was hard to pay attention to the works of art because I was tripping on the ridiculously high ceilings with stuff all over them and columns and columns and more columns and fabulous stair cases and chandeliers…oy…
JaimieF 