10 days including stop somewhere in Russia?

[wobbly]

My DH and I are in the very early stages of planning our trip. We know we would like to go to Russia (he is from Minsk and hasn't been back since he was 3). Since we have two kids and would need someone to watch them, we are kind of limited to 10 days max. We also don't want to just go to Russia since we don't know when we'll be able to take a bigger trip like this again. I know we may be in the minority, but we'd rather have 2-3 days in one city vs. really exploring a city. We did Italy for a week and hit up Rome, Siena and Venice and enjoyed it even though everybody told us that would be way too short of a trip.

So all that being said, are there any good resources for a trip like this?

[Deleted]

Scandinavia, including a stop in St. Petersburg, would be a good trip. If you go to "Piter" via some ferry across the Baltic (from Estonia or Finland), you can even get visa waiver for a few days.

[anna7602]

Not sure about the visa stuff (so I will defer to what neeps says above) as I had a student visa when I went to Russia. Nevertheless, I highly recommend St. Petersburg. It's a really beautiful city in so many ways and is just generally a pleasant place to walk around and soak up the atmosphere.

I don't really care for Moscow and I also find it a difficult city to navigate if your Russian is not very good (although this might not be an issue for you). I felt like the people in St. Petersburg were much more gracious with foreigners than the people in Moscow. If you had more time, I would tell you to just go and form your own opinion. But with limited time, I would absolutely choose St. Petersburg over Moscow.

[Norticprincess]

[quote author=neeps board=trav thread=17420 post=262797 time=1339344402
The visa waiver scheme is very limited. You can't stay in port for longer than 72 hours, you have to take the ship excursions, you must spend your nights on the boat, and not all ships have this approval for their passengers. If you want to do anything outside of these parameters you're going to need to arrange a visa in advance.
.[/quote]

For St. Petersburg you can book private excursions that take care of the visa issue, you are not limited to the ship's excursions.

If you are looking into a Baltic cruise, check the port of call Baltics board on cruise critic. boards.cruisecritic.com/forumdisplay.php?f=192

[alleinesein]

You WILL need a visa to visit Russia. Travisa outsourcing can get the visa for you BUT you will also need an invitation to go to Russia. russiavisa.travisaoutsourcing.com/russia/homepage

I would highly recommend a cruise if you can only spend 10 days; it will allow you to maximize your time and you wont have to worry about coordinating travel between cities.

[wobbly]

Thanks! I guess it's up to DH if he wants to do Belarus or not and neither one of us are dying to see Moscow. A cruise does sound like it might make more sense for us. I'm sure I'll have a bunch of questions as the planning gets more serious.

[GilliC]

Jun 10, 2012 12:09:42 GMT -5 Norticprincess said:

For St. Petersburg you can book private excursions that take care of the visa issue, you are not limited to the ship's excursions.

If you are looking into a Baltic cruise, check the port of call Baltics board on cruise critic. boards.cruisecritic.com/forumdisplay.php?f=192

:Y: This is absolutely true. Private tour companies in St.Petersburg can arrange group visas for cruise passengers, so if you're going with an organized tour (even if it's not a ship's excursion), you do not need to apply for a visa. If you want to get off the ship and explore on your own, you do need to apply for a visa ahead of time. (There are separate rules for the ferries from Finland, but I don't know the details.)

In the past, a lot of cruiselines have made the rules seem very unclear in order to get people to book more of the ship's excursions, but this has been easing up in the last few years. The posts on the CruiseCritic forum have lots of suggestions for tour companies. I actually hooked up with a family on our cruise in the CruiseCritic roll call, and they let us join their private tour to cut the costs, which was great, since they wanted to see/do the same things!

If you do want to explore on your own, there are a few useful posts on CruiseCritic, but most of the posters tend to warn everyone off, because the visa application is expensive and a bit more complicated than most. If you do want to go it alone, don't let that scare you off.