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The person who helped us arrange our visas to St Petersburg (Alexei) picked us up from our hotel and drove us out to Peterhof village. We actually hadn't intended on going to Peterhof, but Alexei told us that us had more time than we thought and that we couldn't actually get into the Catherine Palace until 12:00pm as it is only open to tour groups before then. If anyone wants go to Russia I would totally suggest that you get in touch with Alexei's company - Palladium Travel - as he has been totally amazing. He helped us, free of charge, with our visa documents and this cost me a lot of money last time I wanted to go.
On the way out of the city we stopped off briefly at the Smonly Cathedral. We had seen it in the guidebook but it was a bit out of our way so we didn't go and see it on foot. Luckily because we had a little bit of time on our hands Alexei drove us past it on our way to Peterhof.
Peterhof was just glorious. We have been so lucky with the weather. Each day has been beautiful blue
skies. Peterhof itself is a little village and the main thing to see there is the Great Palace and that glorious parks that is assosciated with the Palace complex. We arrived ast 10am and the Great Palace didn't open until 10:30. However it was a Saturday as well as being the 9th of May, which is the day that the siege of Lenningrad was lifted - which is a public holiday, so it was busy. Very busy. And there were an awful lot of people in uniform wandering around. Because it was so busy we decided to not go inside the palace and instead spent the two hours that we had at Peterhof wandering around the glorious park. There is an upper and lower park associated with Peterhof. The upper park is free to enter but the lower park you have to pay to enter. The lower park has amazing fountains (check out the photos). They wer only turned on at 11am so we wandered off and saw the rest of the park, and it was huge.
After we finished with the park at Peterhof, we met up with Alexei again and he took us off to Tsarkoe Selo.
This is another village just outside of St Petersburg that was constructed by the Tsars. In Tsarkoe Selo there are two palaces. One called Catherines Palace and one called Alexander's Palace. Apparently Alexander's Palace was the favourite palace of Tsar Nicholas the 2nd and was were he an his family were arrested after the revolution. We were visiting the Catherine Palace.
In particular I wanted to go inside the Catherine Palace and see the recently opened Amber Room. However we got caught in some traffic on the way to the Palace and by the time we arrived at the Palace there was quite a queue to get into the Palace. And they don't people through very often. After standing in the queue for about 20 minutes we decided that we didn't want to waste all of our time standing in a queue so we decided to leave the queue and go for a walk in the park. This park was enormous, it even had a big lake with boats on it. The parks of the palaces are just amazing. They were so beautiful and we saw them when the flowers weren't out and the trees still had no leaves,
so in spring proper they must be jaw dropping.
After finishing wandering around the parks Alexei took us off to the airport were we dropped off David and then me to the Finland train station where I caught the 4pm train back to Helsinki.
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