St Petersburg, Russia - Day 2

Monday, May 19

After a very "fast" sleep, we were up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at 6am ready to meet the rest of our tour group at 7.15am as we all had to exit the ship as one group. What a day! We have been so blessed with the weather and today is forecast to be 28C (82F) - almost unheard of in StP for this time of year (They had snow on May 1).

The Canal ride

Our first stop was for a 45 minute canal ride through StP. It is the most beautiful city and even more so viewed from the water. It is easy to see why most StP residents are so enamoured with Peter the Great when you see all the things he did for the city and the lovely buildings he is responsible for. The palaces for the Romanov family and other nobility are like fairytale places and there are just so many of them. Peter had excellent planning skills and put regulations in place prohibiting buildings being any taller than the Winter Palace or being built forward of it towards the Neva River. The result is very pleasing to the eye. StP is Vladimir Putin's home town and when he came to power he gave US$2bn for building restoration and it appears to have been well spent.

Beside the Neva River with the Winter Palace in the background

From the canal trip we boarded our van for a one hour drive to Peterhof where Peter's Summer Palace is situated. The gardens are glorious and we saw more tulips here than in Keukenhof, Netherlands. Peter had studied boat-building in Amsterdam so there are a number of Dutch touches in StP and its surrounds. The Summer Palace is renowned for all it's fountains - all of which are gravity fed and run from 11am to 5pm every day, and then empty into the Gulf of Finland - no water is recirculated! They are really a magnificent sight and we really enjoyed our stroll through the gardens (along with thousands of others but stil nowhere near as many as in the height of summer).

In front of the Peterhof Palace

The Main fountain

The Sun fountain with revolving centre piece

By then we were all ready for a bite to eat so we boarded our van for the short drive back into Peterhof city area where we had another good Russian lunch. Thankfully we had a 40 min drive ahead so were able to have an "after lunch" snooze.

Catherine the Great's holiday shack

At the end of our drive we were in Pushkin where Catherine the Great's Summer Palace is located. My goodness, those Czars knew how to build ostentatious palaces! It was obviously a good thing to be the architect too as they were often gifted a small palace for their efforts!

The Gold Room (Ballroom) - shades of Versailles!

Our guide explained that during WW2 the Germans used the palace as their headquarters but near the end of the war when the Russian Army was getting close to StP, the Germans bombed the palace and the resulting fire destroyed most of it. It has now largely been restored and it is absolutely fabulous to see. There is so much gold throughout and the Amber Room is breathtaking. Apparently, despite efforts to conceal the original Amber Room at the beginning of WW2 with plaster walls, the Germans still found it, dismantled the panels and the amber has never been seen again despite exhaustive investigations by both the Russian and German governments. Currently the thinking is that it is probably somewhere in Argentina because of the large number of Nazis that moved there. Sadly, we were not allowed to take photos in the Amber Room so it has to be one for our memory banks (and we doubt we will ever forget it!)

A magnificent Delft Heater (no doubt due to Peter's time in Amsterdam)

On our return to the ship, we faced an enormous queue to go through Russian Immigration. It was quite hot standing in the sun but fortunately we were in Russia and not India, so the queue moved at a good pace and in 15 minutes we were facing the unsmiling face of an Immigration Official who carefully checked all details before handing our passport back with nothing more than a grunt. (Our StP native guide put the unsmiling faces and seeming lack of friendliness down to the fact that they don't see enough sunshine - so now we know!!)

 

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