Now on to our first day in Russia. We arrived in St. Petersburg around 6AM. We had a two day tour scheduled and were to meet our tour guide within an hour after the ship cleared customs. So we crawled out of bed extra early (after turning our clocks ahead one hour each of the past two nights) 6AM but our bodies thought it was 4AM.
Sunrise over St. Petersburg
We needed a ream of paperwork to clear customs (which we had). Once through customs we met up with our tour company and we were on our way by 7:30AM.
We took a quick bus tour through St. Petersburg; prior to 1991 it was known as Leningrad and Petrograd. We stopped for a quick photo op at St. Isaac’s church and drove past a statue of Lenin on our way to the Palace of Catherine the Great.
Our first guided tour was of the above mentioned Palace. Wow! What a fantastic place. Leningrad was under siege for 900 days (almost 3 years) by the Germans in WWII but was never taken by them. The Palace was all but destroyed. They had saved a lot of the art work and sculptures before the Germans got to the Palace. With the help of many photographs and the knowledge of the people who worked at the Palace they were able to restore it to almost its original condition. The gold you see in the photos below is real gold.
I couldn’t believe it they had a painting of my brother Joe in one of the rooms.
Actually it is a portrait of Alexander the 3rd.
From here we went on to the Palace and gardens at Peterhof, the summer palace of Peter the Great. It is located about 20 miles outside of St. Petersburg. The highlight of the palace is the parks with 157 fountains that are powered by gravity. The water that flows into the fountains are supplied from a spring that is about 20 to 30 meters higher than the fountains. The flow downhill builds up the water pressure to work the fountains.
In the photo below, the object was to step on the magic stone to prevent this sprinkler from going off.
Well you can see Ray and I didn’t have much luck finding the magic stone. That ended our first day in Russia.
2 comments:
Gosh, I can't believe how much that does look like Joe! Amazing
Did you find my picture anywhere?
Connie & Frank
Sounds and looks like you are all having a great time and great weather!! Everything here is fine. We had a nice visit with Kristin on Saturday. Our weather could be better -- hot and HUMID with thunderstorms. Keep up the great posts and have a great time!
Love, Hap and Susan
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