6/24/12 day 60: St. Petersburg, Russia

Overcast today in Russia's second largest city. We docked in a new port a couple minutes outside of town. The last two times we were here, we docked basically downtown, just across the Neva River from the Winter Palace. Yeah, no big deal, I'm basically an expert on St Petersburg now. This city has had three different names in the last 100 years. Do you know the other two names? 10 points to the winner.

Escorted the "Jewish St. Petersburg" tour today. We hit a lot of the big tourist sights seen on other tours (saint isaac's cathedral, winter palace, old stick exchange, Neva River front, Flying Dutchman, etc) as well as some sights specific to Jewish history in the city. The synagogue was the big finish. Spent an hour getting a history lesson on Jewish culture in Russia and then the rabbi came in and sang a couple traditional songs. It was very interesting. Still amazed how many Yiddish words resemble German.

After my first set in the club, I went upstairs to the third less fancy restaurant for dinner. I had no appetite at 530 when the mess was open. So usually when that happens and I have a longer break between my 630 and 9 pm sets I roll up to the restaurants and join some guests for a proper meal, a glass of vino di casa, and some conversation. I ran into an Australian couple I had dinner with a couple nights ago. Lovely folks. I don't have the heart to tell them my name isn't Barry. Tonight was Spanish themed, so I took the seafood paella as a main dish. The appetizer took the gold medal tho: roasted tomato, and grilled eggplant baked with goat cheese. I would have eaten 75 of those things and then taken its picture and made it my FB pic. So delicious. This is my life.

Ps. Dig the panorama pic from my new application! Pretty cool, no?