Russian Rendezvous part 2

I was so excited for this day because we had so much packed into a short day! Our first outing was to visit Puskin, the location of Catherine's Palace. Our guide Sergei was wonderful and I loved that he spoke into a microphone and we each a headset, so that I could actually here what was being said! Pushkin was so pretty with lots of summer homes and lots of green trees (it was much prettier than the city). The palace was a gift to Catherine from her husband and was enlarged to 7x its original size by their daughter Elizabeth. All the parts that are painted brown, used to be GOLD, but they had to redo the gold painting every year...got a bit expensive.

Have you seen the animated movie Anastasia? When they show the outside and the grounds and some of the inside of the palace... that's what this looked like! This is the palace they drew!

The palace was HUGE and I could not get the whole thing in one shot.

The gold domes are over the chapel. See all the brown? Imagine that gold...


Inside we had to wear cool booties to protect the AMAZING parquet flooring. We were allowed to take pictures, just no flash.
The ceiling
Look at that gigantic painting on the ceiling! Made up for 40 individual canvases.
We didn't do it, obviously, but the night before they had a ball in here for people from the cruise. How cool would that have been! Of course the Disney princesses showed up to it in carriages.
The Russians sure like their gold....
Most of the room had this fireplace (not sure how it works) made of blue and white Dutch tiles that were so pretty. I don't think it was used much as this was the summer palace.
2 rooms had panels like these that are made of foil! The other room was green.

A model of Empress Elizabeth's dress. How would you move with hips like those?! The crazy thing is that this model is made completely out of paper.
Beautiful inlaid wood.
One room was completely covered in paintings on all 4 walls.

How the palace looked after the war. (That's the grand staircase)

Quick shots of the Grand Staircase now.

After we left the palace, we went to have an authentic Russian meal. Every table of 4 was given a bottle of Vodka, a pitcher of wine, and some water. There was quite a bit of alcohol left when we were done. I tried borscht for the first time. It was ok, but it's a beet soup and I don't love beets. I tried the mushroom soup and I detest mushrooms! I think because I just picked at a few things, they decided I didn't want to eat because for some reason they brought everyone the entree but me. Oh well! Being pregnant, a lot of unfamiliar foods are kind of scary.
Where we ate.
I did eat this. The tomato was alright, the meat was super dry and tough.
I did not eat this. It's some kind of meat with a sauce on it...looked kind of like mayo.
Chris's main dish.
Instead of eating I had a long chat with family next to us. They were in the process of moving from Belgium to the States. After the cruise, they would go back to Brussels to pick up their cat and then fly to the states. They had 4 cute little girls and I love that they had Southern accents! They were from Tennessee and North Carolina, so we had a lot of fun talking.
Of course during the meal, we were entertained by singing and music. There were musicians EVERYWHERE we went. I was so surprised to see full on bands in so many places!

After lunch we drove to Peterhof to visit another palace. On the way, the heavens opened and rain POURED down. Luckily it was about an hour drive and as we got there, it turned to a sprinkle and pretty much dried up. Unfortunately the next palace had a 45 minute wait now outside the gates. The sun came up and we wandered the nearby grounds, tried to stay out of the mud and stay cool in the shade as the sun was hot and the humidity high.
The Palace.
Lots of fountains! They have no pumps and work on pure gravity, so these are original fountains!


We finally went inside, and sadly this is the only picture I could take...
I won't tell you about everything we saw, but I'll tell you about one. The Amber Room. All the walls are covered in amber! It's not the original, as no one knows what happened to it. It was taken down during WWII and has disappeared. They quarried over 50 tons to make the amber panels for the room and they only ended up using 2 tons!

Okay, I'll tell you really quickly about another room. I had brief glances of these 2 rooms actually. There were 2 Chinese themed rooms with original Chinese lacquer paintings covering the walls. We were told we had to walk quickly through the rooms and that we couldn't stay in there because our breath would melt the lacquer. Seems a little odd to me.

Here's where I was really bummed. We had to FLY through the sculpture and water fountain gardens because the most annoying family was in our tour group. Long story, but they didn't stay with the group so we had to wait around for them and lost all our extra time to see the fountains. I was not very happy as I had already been kinda bugged by them the whole day anyway. So here are the quick shots that I could get, including the largest cascading water fountain (in the world, I think?). All of them use gravity and physics to work...NO PUMPS!




I guess the Czar had a sense of humor as these benches look like a nice place to sit, until, SURPRISE! you get doused with water.


We can walk/run really, really fast so were able to snag more pictures than probably anyone else in our group. Because of the one special family, we missed our hydrofoil back to the boat and so they put us on a later one, but we still had to sit and wait for them. We got back to the ship way behind schedule, so we had to change really quickly and just grab whatever for dinner and then head out to go see the ballet. But I did snag this picture first!

The storm earlier uprooted many trees! So we left the ship late and were caught in traffic. We were off to see Swan Lake by the Russian Ballet. Never thought I'd get to do that!!! The ballet was supposed to start at 8:00 and as it got closer and closer to 8:00 I was getting nervous that we weren't going to make it! We got there at about 8:15, but luckily another bus was also late, so they started the show late for us. Phew. I was amazed to see we had 4th row seats!


Enjoying our champagne during the intermission (okay, not really, thankfully they also had apple juice).
The ballet was wonderful! I was glad I had read the synopsis beforehand though or else I would have been lost during parts of it. This is outside the theater and it's about 11:00 at night! Looks like it's 6:00!