Welcome to our class on Northern European cruise ports. My name is Cameron Hewitt. I'm a writer and guidebook researcher here at Rick Steves, and one of the many projects I've worked on with Rick is writing a pair of guidebooks for people taking cruises. We have a Mediterranean cruise ports guidebook and we have a Northern European cruise ports guidebook which is what we'll talk about here today. Thank you all very much for coming. I thank all of you here in person as well as those of you who are watching at home online either live streaming or later on YouTube. We're really glad to have you tune in to learn a little bit about how best to spend your time if you're going on a cruise to northern Europe. Before I start, I want to point out we have a great resource available for us here, we've got this sheet that was available in the lobby, if you here in person. If you are watching online, you can find this to download on our website at ricksteves.com. One side of it shows the Mediterranean cruise ports, which is part of this series of talks I'm doing, by the way. I've got a one class on European travel skills, one on Mediterranean ports, and this class on Northern ports -- all of those available on YouTube. And then on the other side we've got what we'll talk about today -- the Northern European cruise ports. Basically what I've done is I've taken all of the information we learned from our cruising guide book, which I'll tell you about in a moment, and I've whittled it down to the one piece of paper that you really need to know for how to use each port that you might go to on your northern European cruise. You can follow along during the class and kind of get all the details here, I'll give you a quick version of each of these, and of course all of the full details are covered in our guide book as well. Let's go ahead and get started here. And I have to tell you, I really, I've taken cruises throughout Europe -- Mediterranean and Northern Europe -- and I really have enjoyed cruising in Northern Europe. It's actually a pretty good way to see that part of the of the world. For one thing, Northern Europe is a very expensive place to travel any way that you travel but particularly on your own. Hotels, restaurants, transportation, these things can be extremely expensive in countries like Norway or Denmark or Sweden. The nice thing about a cruise is those three things I just mentioned are almost entirely covered in your cruise ticket, so it's a great way to economize and save a little bit of money. It's also a collection of destinations that are really worth seeing any way you have to see them, but seeing them by cruise is particularly convenient in this area. It's very much a part of Europe that's focused on the sea, so a lot of the great cities and best natural beauty happen to be perfectly accessible by cruise ship, whether we're talking here about the Norwegian fjords, the great cities of Scandinavia like Copenhagen, even small towns as well, cute little islands that you can take a look at out of your veranda on your cruise ship and possibly even have a chance to go and explore. Cruising can also be a great way to reach exotic destinations that might otherwise be very challenging to reach but are very worthwhile. The best example of this is St. Petersburg. I'll be talking quite a bit about St. Petersburg later in the talk. It's a complicated issue and if you're going on your own to St. Petersburg, there's a lot of red tape that you have to deal with from a visa perspective, and cruising provides a way
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to kind of sidestep that. There's some compromises you make, but it may be the easiest way that you can see St. Petersburg without going to a lot of trouble, and again, it lets you reach great cities like Berlin, the capital of Germany. Berlin is a cruise port. If you know your German geography, that sounds crazy, Berlin is three hours from the sea. Well, believe it or not, this is a very popular stop on a lot of cruises. There's a port called Warnemünde that I'll talk about, and you can hop on an express train and be in Berlin in three hours, and have a few hours seeing one of the great cities of Europe before you head back to your ship. In general, cruising is just a great way to go to connect, to learn about the history and to see a lot of variety in Northern Europe. You've got everything from these kind of changing of the guard kind of royal situations to a chance to connect with an actual Russian person and learn a little bit about that culture. Let me help you get your bearings to what the options are here for a Northern European cruise. Basically, we're talking mostly about the Baltic Sea, which you see kind of on the right half of this sheet. The little cruise ship icons are the places I'll be talking about in this talk. A lot of cruises in this area begin and end in Copenhagen, which is where my talk starts. I'll kind of work my way then east from there. Stockholm, Helsinki, Tallinn and, of course, St. Petersburg, working our way back out of the Baltic Sea, including a stop there at Warnemuende which is down at the bottom part of this map going towards Berlin, we're going to head then up to Norway, which is another not really technically on the Baltic Sea but another area that's very popular for Northern European cruises. Of course it's a great way to see the fjords, to go to the great cities of Norway, so we'll do a loop around that. We don't have a lot of time for this talk, I may or may not have time to talk about it here, but keep in mind that some Northern European cruises also include these things that are in the lower left part of the map -- London, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels -- these are all places that are also accessible by cruise ship. We find that even though we've included those in our guidebook they're kind of a little bit more on the periphery of what most Northern Europe cruises are, which is why I'm really going to focus on these Baltic and Norwegian ports instead. I mentioned already that I'm the co-writer of Rick's guidebook on Northern European cruise ports, and when I say "the co-writer," what we did was I didn't actually write most of it. It was already existing from a sightseeing perspective. We already had really great chapters that we've had for years on places like Berlin and Copenhagen and Stockholm, but what I did is I went and actually took several cruises and landed in these ports and actually had to deal with the confusion of figuring out "how do I get from the port into the city?" And then we've tailored that existing guidebook material as "part two," to help figure out the best things you can do if you just have that few hours in port. We've kind of whittled it down to what we think is the best information. These are really big books. They're big, brick-like monsters, and the reason they're so big is we decided not to skimp on details. We figure whether you're coming by cruise ship or whether you're spending a week in Oslo, you're just as interested in the great sights of Oslo. So we kept all of our full-length information here. The trade-off, though, is because we gave-- we're so generous with this information, we expect you to take a knife to this thing -- use an X-acto knife to strip out just the sections that you need, so when you get off the ship in Copenhagen, all you need is that section on Copenhagen. Don't be hauling around two or three pounds on other destinations. I know it hurts to cut up a book but this is really worthwhile if you want to pack light and really make the most of your time while you're in port. Let me talk a little bit about the specifics of cruising in Northern Europe. As I mentioned, I have another talk that covers the Mediterranean, but there's some different factors at play here, some things that are unique about the Northern European cruises. As I already mentioned, a lot of the destinations that are the most worthwhile in Northern Europe happened to be perfectly matched to cruise destinations and because you have a lot of big important cities that are also ports it's often very easy to arrive and find your way into town. This is Copenhagen, for example, and in Copenhagen the big ships dock in some cases within easy walking distance of the town center even though it's a big sprawling city. In general, this is a pretty easy place to arrive by cruise -- there's not a lot of tendering, there's not a lot of really distant ports where you have to take a half-hour train ride to get into the place you really came to see. For the most part, you're either right in the town center when you walk off the ship or an easy quick public transit ride away. Any time you get off that ship, and this is the point that I'm really trying to make with this talk, you do have that choice. You can either go on one of these shoreline excursions and line up for these buses on the left side of this picture, or you can go with these folks here on the right side and walk into the main town of the place you're going to and enjoy the place on your own. I'm not necessarily anti-excursion, I'm not saying "never book a cruise line excursion," but in general they're not necessarily the best value. They're marked up quite a bit and very often if you really knew what you're getting into you'd know that you can do it yourself for a lot less money and a lot more independence. The book that I've written and the slideshow I'm about to give is to help you understand in each port whether that's the right decision for you. I think if you're a fairly adventurous traveler and you're comfortable taking public buses and trams, there are almost no ports in this part of Europe that I would consider paying for an excursion. I think you can really do it on your own, if that's what you'd like to do, and part of the reason that's the case is more than any cruise area that I've ever been to, these are extremely user-friendly ports to arrive at, and a lot of these big cities, sure you come in at a big ugly industrial port but they've gone to the trouble of painting a blue line that you can follow all the way from your ship to the gate. They've made it as easy as "connect the dots," so it's a really great place for cruisers from that perspective. Now keep in mind, when you're cruising in Northern Europe, even if you're there in the middle of the summer, it can be quite chilly. I find that the folks who go on cruises for Northern Europe aren't there as much for the hedonism, they're not there to lie out at the pool, you can try to lie out at the pool but you might have to wear a sweater. Even in the summer it can be unseasonably cool. I do find people going to Northern Europe are really interested in the destinations, and that's why I think this book is especially important. It's really to help you make the most of the time that you have in each of those places. Let's get started. As I mentioned, I'm going to start in the Baltic Sea here on the right side and then I'm going to hook up to the Norwegian ports there at the top. If there was one port that's kind of the main port where a lot of cruises begin and end in Northern Europe, it would be Copenhagen, the Danish capital, an absolutely delightful city. And if your cruise does begin or end in Copenhagen it's a bonus because you can come a couple days before your cruise or leave a couple days after and really take time to enjoy the place. But assuming you have less time than that, let me just give you the basics from a cruise perspective. It's a pretty big city but but the sites are fairly compact and concentrated here in the old city that you see in the middle of this picture. Up at the north end of this map, that's where all of the cruise ports are. You'll find that this is the case in a lot of Northern European cities, there's not one cruise port, there's often multiple cruise ports, and this gets a little complicated for me to explain. That's why I really rely heavily on that handout that I mentioned, or the guidebook, but I'll just try to give you a quick take on which port your-- what the options are from each port. By the way, when you are arriving on your cruise ship, if you're especially using a guidebook and want to know where are we coming into, it's always worth asking "which port are we coming to?" Sometimes it'll be listed in the itinerary that you're given or even when you book the cruise it'll tell you which port, sometimes you have to kind of go out of your way and ask for it, it might be printed on your daily program that you're given in your stateroom as well. Figure out what port that you're going to be coming into, in this case all of the ports are up at the north end, in some cases you walk off the ship and literally just walk right into town, in other cases there's a really handy bus called bus #26 -- from the ship you might walk 5 or 10 minutes, hop on bus number 26, and that takes you right into town. There's also a train connection that's a little bit further walk, so you've got lots of options. You can see there are the cruise ships right there within pretty easy striking distance of those spires, which represent-- in that dome there, represents the sights of Copenhagen. As I mentioned, this is an extremely user-friendly area to be going on a cruise. I've never seen this in the Mediterranean, but you walk off the ship in Copenhagen and here is an idiot-proof map that shows you exactly where you are, exactly how you walk out if you want to go to the bus stop, or if you want to go to the train station, it's all right there for you. And there's that blue line that takes you out of the port. Once you're in the city, there's a lot to see. The cruise ports happen to be at the north end of town, which is also where you'll find one of the famous landmarks of Copenhagen, which is the statue of the Little Mermaid, based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. And not too far from the Little Mermaid, again, still pretty walkable from most of the cruise port areas, is one of the great palaces of Copenhagen. This is Amalienborg Palace, where they stage
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their changing of the guard. If you're in town and check the schedule, it's pretty easy to catch this changing of the guard. I think they do it most mornings. By the way, a lot of these places we're talking about have a very proud royal history -- Copenhagen and Stockholm and Oslo -- so you will see things like palaces and changing of the guards. There's great sightseeing in this part of Europe and Scandinavia, wonderful palaces that you can tour. This is Rosenborg Palace in
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Copenhagen, which has a fantastic history. It's all about the Renaissance king Christian of Denmark, who left his mark on the country and collected an amazing treasury of crowns and jewels. Even if just a few hours in town, when you're here for your cruise you can check out some of these things. If you want to explore the town center of Copenhagen, there's a really enjoyable pedestrian shopping street called the Strøget. This was actually one of the first pedestrianized shopping zones anywhere in Europe. In the 1970s, some civic leaders said, "Hey, let's block off that road for traffic and make it really nice for pedestrians," and everyone said, "You're nuts, that'll never work." Sure enough, it worked great, people loved it, they still flock there, and cities all over Europe and even now some in the US are starting to do the same. You can go for a stroll there. Copenhagen is a beautiful city with lots of canals so it's a great place to just go for a walk on a canal, enjoy the monumental architecture. The best way to see all of that is to take a canal boat cruise. Hop on one of these low-slung boats that kind of glides you past some of the great landmarks and beautiful buildings here, downtown Copenhagen. It'll also take you out into the harbor area where you get a look at some of the more interesting modern recent architecture. These are very wealthy countries that we're talking about, they're building a lot of new stuff. This is the Opera House of Copenhagen -- it looks kind of squat and short to be an opera house but it's actually excavated below the waterline, is where a lot of the seating is, and it goes down to the stage, which is well below the waterline here. Really fascinating, in just a one or one-and-a-half-hour canal boat trip, to learn about some of these things that are going on in Copenhagen. Not just in Copenhagen but really anywhere you go, take advantage of local guides. You can hire your own local guide who'll take you around for the day and kind of tailor the trip to what you want to see, but you can also check for local guides who have regularly scheduled tours that you can meet up with when you get off your ship. This is a guy named Richard Karpen, he's dressed up as Hans Christian Andersen, the most famous Dane and certainly the pride of the Danish people. And Richard is actually an American who's lived in Copenhagen for I think 20 or 30 years, and every day he does these guided walks that take you through Copenhagen and tell you about the history of the place, and it costs maybe $20-25. If you did a similar thing with your cruise line it'll probably cost you $60, $70, $80, so hey, skip the cruise line, hop on that bus into town, find out in your guidebook what time and where to meet Richard for his tour that day, show up and pay him, and you've got a guy to show you the city of Copenhagen. It's a great option not just here, again, but really anywhere you go. One thing that's a bit of a challenge for cruising in Northern Europe is a lot of these countries still have their traditional currencies. A few of them have switched to the euro which is the currency of most of Europe, well Finland for example is on the euro, Germany is on the euro, for if you're going to Berlin, but a lot of the other countries, for example Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, each have their own version of a currency called the kroner. It's not the same currency but it's the same name in all the countries and the exchange rate is slightly different, so it can be a little bit confusing. In our guidebook we've gone to great pains to explain where the closest ATM is to each of the cruise terminals to help you get that cash when you need it. One thing I'll warn you about, especially in Scandinavia and the countries that I just mentioned -- credit cards are really very commonly used except, in Europe these days, they're using a different technology than we do. It's called Chip and PIN. This is really catching on in Canada, basically everywhere in the world except the United States. Banks are starting to come around with this but you probably don't have one of these Chip and PIN cards yet. It looks like a credit card but it's got a little microchip embedded in it. The challenge with this is local people use it for everything -- they don't usually use a lot of cash in Denmark or Sweden -- but Americans trying to use their magnetic stripe credit cards find they often don't work in Chip and PIN machines. So it does take a little bit of ingenuity sometimes, and there've been cases where I would love to pay with my credit card but it doesn't work so I have to go find an ATM, get out cash, and then use cash to pay for what I couldn't pay for with my credit card. I don't want you to be scared or intimidated by it but you need to be realistic that you'll probably encounter this if you're cruising in Northern Europe, and just be aware that there's, that it might take a couple of steps to get what you need to get. Our next port is the capital city of Sweden and that is Stockholm, another big, beautiful, sprawling city with multiple cruise ports. A lot of the cruise ships put in this thing right here in the middle at the bottom part of this picture is Gamla Stan, which is the Old Town of Stockholm. That's probably where most folks are going to be heading first. If you go down the embankment, it's just down and to the right from there, that's where a lot of the cruise ships put in. You can walk from there right into the into the Old Town or you can hop on a bus and shave a couple of minutes off your commute. There's a different port also that's well off of this map. From that port, you have to take a public bus that brings you into downtown, so it takes a little bit longer. But again, everything is still very accessible by public transportation. Here's a look at both of those options. As you can see, boats just kind of clog up this embankment that's right here in the heart of the city of Stockholm. By the way, this little ship, right in the middle in the front of this picture, is a hop-on-hop-off tour boat, and that can be a really great option here in Stockholm. Now of course you've probably heard of hop-on-hop-off tour buses -- you pay one ticket price, maybe $30 for all day, and you can hop on boats as they come and go. Stockholm has so much water it's basically a city built on multiple islands. Sometimes it's faster to go by boat, and these ports that are right here, right in the town center, there's a dock for this hop-on-hop-off boat, you buy a ticket, and it might be the easiest way for you to connect to some of the places that you're trying to get to. You might just want to skip the buses entirely. This is that other port that I was mentioning -- it's called Frihamnen -- that's further out from Stockholm. Again, big, dreary, ugly, it looks a little intimidating, but there's a really slick public bus connection that brings you right into town, and there's that blue line that tells you exactly how to get to that bus stop. Very handy. Once you're in town, you can explore that Gamla Stan, which is the Old Town with a beautiful charming old square and tight twisty back lanes -- that's kind of an easy place to experience and explore. Let's talk a little bit about food, because what I like to do when I'm traveling not on a cruise ship is do a lot of research and find great restaurants. That's kind of a priority for me. When you're on a cruise ship and you're only in town for a few hours, you don't have the luxury of a long lunch, so you want to find something that's local and authentic but that's also pretty quick so you can get in and out and have more time for sightseeing. Now, I mentioned earlier that things are very expensive here in Scandinavia, in Northern Europe, and that's also another challenge that you've got. I was on a cruise in Bergen and I stopped off, I wanted to get a quick lunch, I went to a hot dog stand, and I think for a hot dog and a cup of Hawaiian Punch it put me back about $10 or $15. It's incredibly expensive. I'm not necessarily endorsing this but I know that Rick Steves is pretty shameless about, at the breakfast buffet, kind of tucking away a few rolls and cold cuts and maybe a banana to help keep your costs down. Just to illustrate how expensive food is in a lot of these countries -- I am so thrifty and so stingy that I'm in this habit when I'm on a cruise ship of buying a bottle of Diet Coke before I go back to the ship at the end of the day. If I'm in Greece, I can go to a convenience store and buy a bottle of Diet Coke for $1, and if I don't and wait till I get on the ship, it's going to cost me $3. I had a sobering experience when I went on my Northern European cruise in Norway because I bought a bottle of Coke at a convenience store for $5 and then realized when I got on the ship it would have been cheaper to just raid my minibar on-board the ship -- that's how much more expensive things are in Northern Europe. Anyway, so there's challenges involved with eating lunch, not just quickly but affordably. But a lot of restaurants in these cultures have these daily specials in the-- here in Sweden it's called "Dagens ret" or "Dagens special" -- it's a fixed-price meal because it's prepared and it's the daily special they can get it out pretty quickly. That's a good way to go. Honestly, the food here-- there's great food in Northern Europe but it's probably not known for its cuisine and if you just want to kind of have a quick bite on the go to charge up, just stop in to a grocery store or a supermarket or convenience store and get a sandwich and do a little picnic-on-the-go. That's a good way to go. But there are some kind of fun local alternatives. I mentioned that hot dog in Bergen. Hot dog doesn't sound very local but that is the local kind of quick pick-me-up snack food. They don't go out for a hamburger or falafel in Sweden or Norway, they go out to the Pølsevogn, which is basically a hot dog wagon, and you can find some really interesting culinary treats even, at these hot dog wagons. They're starting to top them with some really interesting things. Back to Stockholm, you've got lots of options beyond that Gamla Stan Old Town area. There's a lot of royal sights here, there's palaces that you can tour, and then, as in Copenhagen, there's that daily changing of the guard that runs right through the middle of town. This one's a long parade that basically cuts right through the heart of town every day. If you know what time it is, you can-- it's really not even that hard, and you don't have to go that far out of your way to be in the right place at the right time to enjoy this show of Swedish royalty. There's also some really outstanding museums in Stockholm. You won't have time for all of this, by the way, so be selective, but there's a little clump of museums in an island called Djurgården, which is right across from where the cruise ship is. This is one of those places that if you hop on that hop-on-hop-off boat it'll take you right here. Three great museums. One of them is the Nordic Museum, which is a great cultural history museum. Then you've got the Vasa Museum. This is actually an old war ship that sunk to the bottom of Stockholm Harbor on its maiden voyage hundreds of years ago, and it just sat there for centuries, and finally in the 20th century it was raised and restored and is now the centerpiece of a fantastic state-of-the-art museum. And then there's the Skansen, which is the open-air museum, an open-air folk museum where you can see examples of traditional architecture from around Sweden, you've got costumed docents who are kind of celebrating these Swedish traditions. All of these are within a quick walk of each other. You could do all three of those in one day, if that's what you wanted to do. You might not have time for much else. As in any big city, the key is reading through your guidebook, figuring out what sounds good, and then coming up with a plan that makes sense geographically to fit everything in. Another treat about cruising to Stockholm is the sail-away or the sail-in is one of the most spectacular anywhere in Europe. You go through the Stockholm archipelago, which is a series of thousands and thousands of islands that's scattered across -- basically on the way from Stockholm eastward to-- whether you go to Helsinki or Tallinn, you'll go through this. Just an absolutely delightful place to just sit out on the deck for two or three hours, you've got some of the best nautical scenery anywhere in Scandinavia floating past you all the time. It's just really a breathtaking experience. When I went on my most recent cruise in this area, we left from Stockholm and I went out on that deck when we pulled out because I knew I was in for this great scenery, and I was just stunned that so few people on the ship seemed to know how great this was, very few people were out there with me, but my wife and I were out there, and we just loved every minute of it. You wake up in the morning and it's, "Hello, Helsinki!" You've made it to the Finnish capital, right across there for the Baltic Sea from Stockholm. This is another one of these complicated ports where there's multiple ways to come in. Some of the ships come in right within walking distance of the main square -- you can walk off your ship and head right in. There's also another port that's further out but well-connected by public transportation. And most of the sites that you want to see are very concentrated in here, Helsinki, right in the core of the city. This harbor in the lower right part is where most of the ships come in, and then there's this secondary harbor that's further out. Multiple ports there but either buses or trams are always available, part of the public transportation system, for $2 or $3 they'll bring you right downtown. Once you're downtown, Helsinki is a really fun and interesting, an easy place to see. One interesting thing about Helsinki is it doesn't really have an "old town." It's one of the youngest European capitals -- it was basically all built within the last 200 years. So you don't find the kind of quaint, cobbled cuteness, but they've got a real knack for design and for architecture and it's just a beautiful city to stroll around. This is the Lutheran Cathedral overlooking the harbor, and then right in front of the Lutheran Cathedral you've got a delightful market where you can just sit back and enjoy the people- watching and maybe go for a browse. This is one of those places where you can pick up a great, fast, affordable, very local meal. One of my favorite meals on the cruise I took in this area was this delicious grilled salmon that I bought from a vendor right there at the market. It took 15-20 minutes and I had a lot of time left for sightseeing. Just because you're on a cruise doesn't mean you have to resort to ducking into a McDonald's and grabbing a hamburger. There's always an affordable local option that's just as fast. You could also browse for a picnic here, and also this is a great place to do some shopping here at the Helsinki Harbor market. These are trivets here that you see in the foreground and they're made from juniper branches that are cut in cross-section. I bring home a stack of these every time I go to Northern Europe. They're mostly here in Helsinki but I've seen them all over as well. The best part about these is because they're juniper wood, if you put a hot something on top of it, it releases some of that beautiful wood smell that kind of comes out. I was just over at my parents' house and they put some hot food on one of these trivets; a couple minutes later it smelled like we were in a forest all of a sudden. Lots of-- it's not an, it's not an affordable, cheap place to shop but there are some really good and not too expensive souvenirs that will really remind you of your trip there. The main street here in Helsinki is called the Esplanade, which stretches up from the harbor up into the modern urban part of town. And I mentioned earlier, the Finns have this great knack for architecture and design. This Esplanade is a great place to go window-shopping and check out, for example, Marimekko is a famous Finnish designer who has a couple of different shops right here. I think that this Finnish knack for architecture is really exemplified in this Temppeliaukio which is called the Church in the Rock. From the outside it looks almost like a bomb shelter but basically what this is is it's a spectacular church that was blasted out of the granite upon which all of Finland sits. They carved out this beautiful church and they topped it with this copper roof -- that's one single coil that twists around and around and around. Really a beautiful sight to see. We're gonna head-- it's very quick, if you took an express boat it would be two hours from Helsinki across the Gulf of Finland and you're in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. Estonia was one of the three Baltic states, this was part of the Soviet Union for much of its history, from the early 20th century until 1991, but now these states are free and independent and very, very proud not to be Russian anymore, for the most part. So two of them I'll talk about in this talk. This is Tallinn, Estonia, the other one's Riga, Latvia, and they're both very popular cruise ports these days. And so this is a great place to kind of see Estonian culture. It's a tiny country of 600,000 people but they have a very vivid local culture that they're very proud of. Tallinn is also a really easy place to arrive in. I'm standing right here at the top of the Old Town of Tallinn and I can look out and there's my cruise ship right there. You can easily, easily walk from the cruise port into town, maybe 15-20 minutes, walk off the ship, find your way with that blue line, and the next thing you know it, you're walking through the main gate to the part of the Old Town. I mentioned a minute ago that Finland, that Helsinki doesn't have an "old town" but Tallinn more than compensates. Tallinn has one of the most charming cobbled Old Towns I think anywhere in Northern Europe. It's a really delightful place, just to enjoy the history and the ambiance and the people-watching. This is the main square here of Tallinn's Old Town, and then you can hike up to the upper part of the Old Town and you get a great view looking down over the walls that are still largely intact encircling the Old Town of Tallinn. Part of that wall has been turned into a little shopping zone; they call it the "sweater wall." So this is another good place to shop for souvenirs. You know, it's really a good idea to be aware of which countries you're going to are expensive and which ones are less expensive. Norway is the most expensive country you're going to, I don't care what other countries you're going to, I promise you Norway's the most expensive. Sweden and Denmark are also quite expensive. Estonia is much less expensive because it's in a different place economically, so this is a good place to do shopping. This is a good place to stock up on groceries, this is a good place to splurge on a more expensive lunch. Be thinking about that when you're planning your time. You could do a lot of shopping in Helsinki or you could wait till Tallinn and get some similar stuff that could be quite a bit less expensive. Up at the upper part of the old Town you've got the royal palace of Estonia, which is currently the parliament building, and this is this relationship, kind of tense relationship I alluded to earlier -- right across the square from the Estonian Royal Palace is the Russian Orthodox Church. When this was part of the Soviet Union, the Russians imported a lot of Russian people to live here in Estonia to try to make it more Russian, and even though it's no longer part of the USSR, it's independent, a lot of those Russian people have stayed. There's a lot of tensions between the Estonians and the Russians who live in-- really throughout Estonia, but especially in Tallinn. That's something that's interesting to learn about while you're there. Alright, speaking of Russia, let's go to St. Petersburg. I'm guessing for a lot of you this will be the main attraction on your cruise and for a very good reason. This is one of the more spectacular cities in Europe, arguably in the world, but it's complicated and it bears explaining. What's complicated about it is, before you go, actually, 2 months before you go, you have a decision to make, you have two options. Americans visiting St. Petersburg, visiting Russia, are required to have a visa. You have to apply for the visa usually about 2 months ahead of time. It's not inexpensive -- it costs $250, once you figure in shipping -- and you actually have to mail your passport to the embassy. Usually you'll involve a third party agency that kind of gets all the paperwork arranged for you. About $250 a person. Americans are required to have this visa but there is an exception if you're going on a cruise. If you're going on a cruise ship and you're in port for less than 72 hours, which most ships are, you're allowed to get on and off the ship without a visa, but there's a really, really big caveat -- you have to be accompanied by a tour guide the whole time and the tour guide is responsible for you while you're on Russian soil. So these are your choices: you can choose when you're in St. Petersburg to pay for shoreline excursions, which are quite expensive, and then everything you see and do will be filtered through a guide -- and a guide who's part of a big conglomerate of the tourist industry there, not a local friend but somebody who's just kind of punching the clock -- you can see a lot of the city that way but you'll be very constrained as far as what you can see. Or you can choose to pay that $250 or so and do the legwork and the headache of filling out the form and mailing in your passport and waiting a few weeks for the passport to come back to have complete freedom when you walk off the ship. And I'm not here to say one way is better or the other. You just have to decide for yourself what works for your plans and how adventurous you feel about getting around there on your own. I'll tell you a little bit more in a moment about what your options are one way or another and and what you might see there. I will say there's a bit of a false economy here that I want to be careful to warn you about. You might think, "Jeez, $250 a person, that's a lot of money, it sounds like it's just too expensive to get my visa," but keep in mind, once you have that visa you don't ever have to pay for a tour guide. You can walk off the ship and do everything on your own and it cuts your costs, once on the ground, dramatically. If your ship is in St. Petersburg for two days, which is very often the case, it's not just a one-day and then head back that same night -- you're usually there for two or three days. Anytime you want to get off the ship you have to pay the cruise line. You could very easily pay $4-5-600 a day just to get off the ship and see something other than just hanging out on your ship, and very quickly that $250 sounds like a very small investment for the freedom. Okay, let's talk about what your options are and you can think about whether that's worth it for you or not. This is what a Russian visa looks like. As I mentioned, it sounds intimidating, right, mailing your passport to the Russian embassy, but it's pretty straightforward. I would highly recommend using an intermediary organization. There's lots of visa services that do this, there's a section on our website, ricksteves.com, that can kind of walk you through this and advise a couple of visa organizations. But they'll help you get a letter of invitation and make sure you know what form you're supposed to fill out and so forth. But then you get it, it takes up two pages in your passport, and when you walk off the ship, you're free to go. St. Petersburg is a really big city and even the downtown here, the center of this map, where you'll spend your time, takes a really long time to get around, so don't underestimate how much time it takes to get around. It's just, even going two or three blocks, you look at a map and say, "Oh, that'll be 5 minutes," 15 minutes later you're still walking. It's a really big city. It does have good public transportation but it can be a little mysterious to outsiders to crack that transportation. Cruises have two options in St. Petersburg -- some of them dock right in the town center, the lucky few. It's usually small ships which means it's very expensive cruise lines. In this case you can just walk right off your ship and you're a 10-15-20 minute walk from some of the main landmarks. Most cruises, however, put in at a brand new facility called the Marine Facade. The Marine Facade is this gigantic horseshoe-shaped cruise port custom-built for cruising. It can accommodate seven gigantic cruise ships at any one time. I talked to my local friend who lives in St. Petersburg about this and I was commenting on, "Wow, this is a pretty slick facility, I mean you walk out of your stateroom in the morning and you look and as far as the eye can see, you see these embankments for this cruise ship." He said, "Yes, but here's what you need to understand -- the people who paid to build the Marine Facade cruise port, they also own all of the guiding organizations that employ all of the tour guides. They also own all of the restaurants that the excursions take you to. They also own all the shops that the excursions take you to." He said, "It's the favorite Russian model for a business and that is monopoly." And there's a lot of truth to that. If you're in St. Petersburg and you do pay for your cruise line, your cruise line will contract with this gigantic organization and very little of the money you pay will trickle down to the Russian person on the street; it's going into the pockets of this company, that it can afford to build this giant state-of-the-art facility. So just be aware that that's kind of what's behind the scenes here. If you want to do it on your own, it sounds intimidating -- it's this big gigantic facility at the edge of town -- but I sniffed around a little bit and figured out there is a public bus that goes around the cruise terminals. It's designed for the guy who mops the floors to get home after work, but tourists can take it, too. You walk out the front door of your cruise terminal, you pay a dollar or 30 rubles, you hop on this public bus, you ride it about 10 minutes, it drops you off at a subway station, you ride the subway three stops for another dollar, another 30 rubles, and about 30 minutes later, you pop out and you're in the middle of Nevsky Prospekt, which is the showcase street of St. Petersburg. You can pay for a taxi, it'll cost a lot more than the $2 that public transit will, but the point is there's always a cheap local alternative for any option that you're thinking about. Once you're on Nevsky Prospekt, this is really, like I said, the showcase street of St. Petersburg, beautiful, this is the place where they really want to show off the power of St. Petersburg, and there's a lot of fascinating history here, as well. Back in World War II this was a city called Leningrad and it's notorious for the Siege of Leningrad. It's the one of the longest military sieges of modern history, I think it lasted close to 900 days. And here, as a monument to that Siege of Leningrad, for example you're walking down Nevsky Prospekt and you see a sign that says, "Warning to citizens: in case of arterial-- in case of military bombardment, this side of the street is more dangerous" -- warning people that because the Germans were launching the rockets from that side of the street, you better get over on this side if you start hearing them or seeing them coming in. Really sobering to kind of learn about these many layers of history here in St. Petersburg. A lot of people are intimidated by the language barrier in Russia, and I will say it's not exactly a user-friendly place to travel. I've been saying "user-friendly" about Northern Europe -- this is the one exception. There is a pretty stiff language barrier. Relatively few people speak English. Outsiders are not necessarily welcomed with open arms the way they are in a lot of countries. But you know what, you can decode it. You can do a little homework, study the Cyrillic alphabet before you go. Before I went to Russia the first time I made myself some flashcards and I learned a few basic rules about what different letters are and before you know it, you can sound out complicated words or words that look complicated and find they're actually familiar. The general rule of thumb with Cyrillic: about a third of the letters are about the same as our letters -- k-e-t in Russian is the same as k-e-t in English. About a third are actually like Greek letters or characters that are unfamiliar to us. This "pi" in Greek is a "P" in Russian. And then about a third of them are what's called "false friends," which means they look like our letters but they have a different sound entirely, and those are the ones that trip you up. A "C" is an "S" for example, a "P" is an "R." Fortunately, a lot of times you'll find subtitles when you're trying to sound things out. Sbarro. No big mystery here, what this one means: Sub-vay. And I say if you are going to Russia, spend a week before you go and make some flashcards and every night spend 20 minutes going through them and you'll be amazed what you can sound out and words that look strange, once you sound them out, suddenly you get it. "Oh, I understand what that means, this is K-O, this is a Greek 'phi' so it's a 'fuh' sound, K-O-F-E -- coffee...coffee. This is a Greek 'chi' which is a 'huh' sound...house...coffee house! Coffee house. This is the Moscow version of Starbucks. This is for advanced users only. When I first went to Russia I saw this sign and I stood there for about 4 minutes trying to figure it out because I knew it must mean something. Once I figured it out, it means, "Dixie." [spelling in Russian] Dixie. A very familiar word. Just because it's in another alphabet doesn't mean that it's a exotic foreign word. Alright so we've got our bearings, we've practiced our alphabet. Now you head out to see St. Petersburg. This is another city where it's a great option to do a canal boat trip. They've got the canal cruises that let you get up close to all of this grand architecture here. This is an incredibly stately city and one of the great sites is the Hermitage or the Winter Palace. This is the the Winter Palace of the Romanov dynasty. It's one of the most amazing sightseeing experiences in Europe. Partly because it combines a spectacular palace, which, you see here, that's decorated with all sorts of incredible stuff, with one of the finest art galleries that you're going to find anywhere and a lot of the art here is Western European art, it's not Russian art. It's great artists, like even modern artists. Matisse, for example, has some wonderful canvases here. The Hermitage is extremely crowded any time that you go. This is a place where you can make a reservation ahead of time. If you know the day you're going to be going to the Hermitage, you can go on their website. It costs $2 more, but you can buy a ticket that you print out, and it lets you skip a long ticket-buying line. When you show up, you just show 'em your ticket and walk right in. Another interesting option that exists only for cruise people: your cruise line may offer an after-hours visit to the Hermitage. And this is really worth considering. It's an excursion. It's not, it's not cheap. It might be $100 or $120. But basically they let you go to the Hermitage after hours. You'll be with a guide the whole time so it's a very targeted tour, and it often includes kind of a concert as well. You don't have the time to linger and see the whole collection and find the artists that you like the best, but if you want just a quick, once-over lightly look at the Hermitage, this is an interesting option and it also saves some day time that you, that you might want to use for other types of sightseeing. If you're more interested in Russian art than European art, there's a different museum for that. It's called the Russian Museum, appropriately enough. It's right there a couple blocks off Nevsky Prospekt, and it's a good chance to learn about artists not from Europe. This is a, actually in some ways, a more local, authentic experience than going to the Hermitage because you really get to see the history of Russian art in one place. Another interesting, and I think, a worthwhile place for shopping. They've got these wonderful stacking dolls, both traditional types that come in all shapes and sizes, but you can also get lots of interesting modern variations. For example, any sports team that you can imagine. I mean college or pro, football, hockey, baseball, anything you can imagine is available. It's a fun souvenir that's a great gift for a sports fan back home. Amazing churches in St. Petersburg. This is the Church on Spilled Blood, which was built literally on the place where as one of the czars was assassinated. This is a traditional classic old style with a very, sort of a neo-historical interior. It was built in the 20th century but they really wanted it to look old and classic. There's a church called St. Isaac's, with the golden dome where you can climb up and get sweeping views over the whole city. And then there's another church on a fortress that's on an island in the middle of the main river of St. Petersburg, the Neva river, called St. Peter and Paul's. That's the burial church for the Romanov dynasty. So, for example, the famous Princess Anastasia is buried here, Peter the Great's tomb is here in this church. Lots of different sightseeing options here in St. Petersburg. But while you're sightseeing, don't forget to duck into some of the local markets, and this is something that Russia does particularly well. You can slip into the markets, go for a browse, sample some pickled stuff, maybe get a taste of honey, and buy some stuff for a picnic. That's really fun. Our next stop is the port of Warnemünde. As I mentioned earlier, this wins "farthest port from the point of interest in Europe" award. Warnemünde is advertised as a Berlin cruise port. It's actually a three-hour train ride or bus ride from Berlin. Now I'm not saying you shouldn't take the effort to go into Berlin and if this is your one chance to see it actually you can have a pretty good time in Berlin even in a short time. Keep in mind that cruise lines know that a lot of people are making that long trip. You'll have a lot of extra time here in the Warnemünde port. Instead of 7 or 8 hours, they'll probably give you 10, 12, even 14 hours because they know that people are making that trip. Warnemünde is a very easy part to arrive in. Cruise ships put in here on the right side of the screen. Over in the center is the train station, a 5- or 10-minute walk from your cruise ship. From there, trains zip into Berlin and then the main town and the beaches of Warnemünde are off on the left side of the screen. Yes, I said "beaches." Germany has some really pleasant beaches here on the north coast, the Baltic coast. And this whole town has kind of a fun seaside resort ambiance. This is a place where people actually like to go on vacation and just sit out at the beach. So if you don't want to make the hike into Berlin, this is a good alternative. Just enjoy a day at the beach here in Warnemünde. You could go into a neighboring town of Rostock, which is only a half-hour away, but there's not a lot to see in Rostock, and I think it really is worth considering going all the way into Berlin. Berlin is a big, sprawling city, but if you've only got 4 or 5 hours there, you can focus on Unter den Linden, which is the pretty short strip that's right where a lot of the main sights are and famous historical landmarks. So even in a very short time in Berlin you can check out the Reichstag, the traditional Parliament building that's capped with a glittering new dome. You can check out, walk through the Brandenburg Gate, this famous landmark that was, for many years, was trapped as a part of a no man's land of the Berlin Wall. Now it's once again as it was before, a centerpiece of the city of Berlin. Head out to Museum Island, which has a beautiful cathedral and lots of world-class museums. All of the things I'm showing you are within an easy 5- or 6-hour stroll, if you want to just come in and get a taste of Berlin. You head a few blocks south and you can see the old Checkpoint Charlie. There's actually a kind of a museum and an exhibit set up which was the place where you could cross from East Berlin, East Germany into West Germany, way back when. And there are a few fragments of the Berlin Wall, as well. Most of the Berlin Wall has been taken down and has been turned into skyscrapers and this sort of thing. There's really no sign of it in much of the city, but there's a few fragments you can still check out. One option I wanted to mention, if you are going to Berlin, I said there's this three-hour train, but the train schedule's a little bit iffy. If you're going to Warnemünde on your cruise and you want to go to Berlin, go on a website right now called bahn.com. B-A-H-N.com. Plug in the day that you're going to be there and find out what the schedule is for that train. If the train doesn't happen to run at a time that's convenient for your cruise arrival, you might consider a transportation-only excursion. They call it an excursion, but basically you're paying the cruise line to give you a direct bus ride from your ship to downtown Berlin. It really isn't that much more than the train. If the train is $80, this might be $120 round-trip. It's un-guided, so you have free time once you get to Berlin, but it kind of deals with the stress of having to do it by yourself. All you have to do is be back on the bus at the appointed time and they'll make sure you get back to the ship in time. So if you don't want to tackle that long train trip by yourself, look into your shoreline's excursion only options. Sorry, transportation-only excursion options. Alright, we're going to finish up here in Norway. I've got about 5 minutes left and we're going to finish up here with some of those Norwegian ports that I mentioned to you earlier. Norway is made-to-order for cruising. You've got a lot of great cities that are right on the water, and Oslo is one of those cities that's very easy - the capital - very easy to arrive by cruise ships. Most cruise ships put in right here in the town center. You can usually walk from your cruise ship right into the the part of the town that you want to see. Another city where it's a beautiful sail-in or sail-away. You go through the Oslo fjord and lots of charming little islands with vacation resort villas on the way in and out. Very scenic. Don't sleep in this day, when you're going into Oslo. Your ship docks right there in the heart of town and from there you can walk into town. You can head to the City Hall where you can tour that very important building for the Norwegian people. You can also see the Opera House. This is one of these other kind of modern architecture things that I was mentioning. You can actually walk on the roof of the Opera House. They've designed it so that the roof of the Opera House is a plaza that goes right down to the water and your cruise ship might be docked right across the bay from here. Lots of beautiful streets. A place to go for a stroll. Stately avenues and boulevards. Great museums. This is the Norwegian National Museum, where you can see "The Scream," for example, that famous painting. And also some beautiful romantic paintings of historic Norway. There's also a wonderful Viking boat museum where they've actually excavated and restored some original Viking boats that you can see. And a wonderful park called Frogner Park which was decorated with beautiful sculptures by Gustav Vigeland, a local Norwegian sculptor out on the edge of town. All of this is easily accessible by public transportation from the town center. Heading over to the west coast, you've got the beautiful coast -- the beautiful port town of Bergen. Another very easy port to arrive in. Most of the ships put in, as you can see, right out at the end of the harbor, and from there you can walk around the harbor and you're right in the heart of this thriving market. There are some interesting sights in Bergen, but it's also just a very charming town to hang out in, relax, enjoy. If you want to do some sightseeing, they do really good walking tours, historic museums, and you can take a cable car -- sorry, it's a funicular -- up to a hilltop overlooking old Bergen if you want views over the the Old Town there at your feet. Again, Bergen's a very easy port to enjoy even on a short day in port. And our last stop will be the Norwegian fjords. There's various ports of call along the Norwegian fjords. I'm going to focus on one that is the most popular, and it's a town called Flåm. Flåm is also at the center of a route called the "Norway in a Nutshell." If you're staying in Norway for a week, you've probably heard of this route. It's a train-bus-boat route that kind of lets you do a loop around all of Norway -- not all of Norway, but of the the best parts of Norwegian fjord scenery. If you're coming in on a cruise, you're coming into the little town of Flåm, and you can do the best part of this same Norway in a Nutshell route. It's designed to be done from Oslo or Bergen, but you can do it starting in the middle right here in Flåm. Let me explain how. It's a tiny little town of 500 people, so if there's three or four big cruise ships it can literally increase the population by tenfold, and you want to get out of that town, let me tell you. So from your cruise ship you walk about 100 feet and you hop on another little public boat. The boat does a little loop through the most scenic part of the Sognefjord, which is one of the most famous and most appealing fjords in Norway. You get this wonderful scenery for about 2 hours. It drops you off at a little town where you take a bus that twists you up to a viewpoint looking down over the valleys that lead back to the fjord. All of a sudden you're at the mountainous spine of Norway. You're above the treeline. You hop on a train that takes about an hour through this very dramatic scenery that's quite different than what you saw in the fjord. You transfer to a cog, a cog railway line that takes you back down to the fjord. Halfway down the route of the cog railway you've got a stop at a beautiful waterfall. The train literally pulls in about 100 feet from the place where you started 5 or 6 hours later. This sounds very complicated, but if you do your homework and use websites to check schedules and kind of see what the boats and buses are doing on the day that you're there, there's no reason why you can't have that extremely scenic day packed into even a 7- or 8-hour day in port in Flåm here, in Norway. You've got the best scenery of Norway all spread-eagle on a beautiful platter. Well folks, that's actually kind of the theme of this whole talk: do your homework. Understand your options. Think through what you want to do before you get off the ship. If you do that, I see no reason why you can't have a wonderful and very independent and very meaningful trip on a cruise through Northern Europe. Thank you very much for your attention, and I hope you have a wonderful cruise. Thank you very much. Thank you.
