St. Petersburg ... once again

After a day at sea and the first art class for this cruise, we arrived once again for a three day stay in St. Petersburg, on Friday morning (Aug. 17).  The weather was quite pleasant but the immigration officers were just as grumpy and miserable ... there must be a place where these people are cloned.  On the first day Gail stayed on the ship while John escorted a tour.  This was a long walking tour of the historical part of St. Petersburg, starting at some of the memorial parks, one of which has a huge statue of Peter the Great.  This statue was, apparently, also a great favourite of the local pigeon population. The tour continued to Michailovsky Castle which was operated as an engineering school in the early 19^th century.  Fyodor Dostoevsky studied engineering here before he gave it up for a career in writing ... to think he could have been a famous engineer instead. The tour then followed the Moika River to the Church on the Spilled Blood.  It is called this because this was the site where Emperor Alexander II was assassinated in 1881. This church is a massive cathedral in the Moscow style, covered in gold plated “onion” domes.  Inside the church, which had been used as a potato and vegetable storage building during the Bolshevik era, there are many mosaics, an extremely ornate altar and a memorial to the emperor. Most of the gold and silver from inside the church was removed (stolen?) by the early Bolsheviks. The walking tour ended at the Square of the Arts where there is a large pigeon-decorated statue of Alexander Pushkin (Russia’s Shakespeare).

Typical buildings of the 1980's

 

Church on the Spilled Blood

Altar detail

The second day at St. Petersburg was spent on the ship with unbelievably warm and sunny weather... a perfect opportunity to enjoy the pool.  On the third day, Gail and John each escorted 8 ½ hour tours to the Catherine and Peterhof Summer palaces.  The first stop was the Catherine Summer Palace, originally built for Catherine I, wife of Peter the Great, and further enhanced by their daughter, Elizabeth, and later, Catherine the Great.  There is gold everywhere, from every door frame and wall to the commode.  The Amber Room is most impressive.  The Nazis removed the original amber room and  it has never been recovered.  The present amber room is a recreation of the original from photos and diagrams that were found.  To date, a total of 25 million dollars has been spent restoring the room.  We were not allowed to take pictures in this room, but John managed to sneak a shot from the doorway before being accosted by a guard. The gardens outside the palace, all 1,482 acres of them, are outstanding and require amazing stamina just to walk through a good portion of them.

Catherine Summer Palace

Catherine gardens

Great Room

Part of Amber Room

Typical Doorway

 

After a disappointing lunch at a supposedly very good Russian restaurant (remember mystery meat from the school cafeteria), we went to the Peterhof summer palace.  This was the summer home of Peter the Great.  We were not allowed to bring cameras into the building, but once again we were in a very ornate and opulent palace, though is seemed somewhat subdued compared to the Catherine palace.  We were quite fascinated by the small bed that Peter the Great, a man who stood 6 feet 8 inches tall, slept in.  We were told that in those days, as in England, people slept sitting up so they wouldn’t choke on their own saliva. Interestingly enough, in the Catherine palace, the empress’ bed is absolutely enormous.  The outside of the Peterhof palace is an incredible maze of gardens , some 37 statues and 64 huge, gravity-fed fountains that require no pumps whatsoever After a tour of the gardens, we left Peterhof in a hydrofoil boat to go back to our ship.

Back of the Peterfof  Summer Palace -

Front of Peterhof Palace (with Gail)

Peterhof gardens

John at the Peterhof

Spectacular Peterhof Fountain (one of 64)

Hydrofoil back to the ship

 

While we enjoyed immensely the opportunity to visit some of the most opulent and extravagant buildings in the world, we did not get to wander around in Russia as we have done in other countries.  This is partly because we did not have visas, which were not needed as long as we were on ship tours.  Just driving through the city, however, makes us think that we would not want to roam around here.  All of our pictures in St. Petersburg were taken only with our small cameras. Many people have had the lenses stolen from their expensive cameras while they were distracted, and we were constantly on the lookout for suspicious characters who follow tourists, looking for an easy mark. Times are apparently tough in Russia these days.

We look forward to our next stop, Helsinki Finland.