Our Wonderful Adventure

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Last night we enjoyed a great dinner at our hotel. We enjoyed their vodka. The trick to serving it is an ice cold glass and freezer stored vodka. It is not a drink that you travel any distance with. I had crepes with their least expensive red caviar. It was delicious. No, John would not partake.

Today, hired a guide who John met at the Hermitage. He was a former university professor who is visually disabled. We went by very hectic taxi ride and a little scary to the Puska Palace which is the summer palace that Elizabeth and then Catherine built. As beautiful as the Hermitage is, this is even more fantastic. It had been destroyed by the Nazis and has been restored to most of its original magnificence. The amount of gold leaf used is eye popping. The rooms again are mammoth. The floors are beautiful parquet. It is worth looking at our pictures to see it. I have never seen anything like it. I cannot adequately describe it. There is one room that is considered the 8th wonder of the world by the Russians. It is a room completely done in various shades and sizes of amber. It goes floor to ceiling. Some of the stones form beautiful pictures with the framework done in elevated amber. Amber is from the fossilized pine trees and they add various shades of honey to it to get the color differences. The Nazis stole all of the amber and the present room has been restored to its former beauty. They still do not know what happened to the original amber.

There are beautiful gardens surrounding it. Today they were totally snow covered with much ice in the pathways. It has snowed off and on ; today the snow did lay. Though it is cold , it is not uncomfortable.

John has taken at least 1000 pictures. We can bore you forever. What we have been seeing has just been so overwhelming that it is hard not to photograph it.

We leave tomorrow night on the overnight Lithuanian train. Tomorrow we will do the bus tour of the city and just generally explore. Hope all is well at home and that spring has come. John will finish his teaching on Thursday. We will stay in Vilnius until Saturday morning as there is still much to see.

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Photos

Entry Hall of The Hermitage
Catherine the Great's Winter Palace

First Class Train
How trains are meant to be.