St. Petersburg (Catherine’s Palace) to Tsarskoye Selo, Russia--Wednesday, May 28, 2015

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St. Petersburg (Catherine’s Palace) to Tsarskoye Selo, Russia--Wednesday, May 28, 2015



Rainy skies and cool.

Once we got underway for our tour, our guide for this trip talked the whole way through and then out of the City. She pointed out various buildings that we passed—government offices, parks, memorials, newer high rise apartments, Soviet-style housing, etc. She also talked about prices for rents, usual income for a family, the education system, and various historical facts associated with St. Pete.

The Catherine Palace is located about 25km southwest of St. Pete, very near the Palace of Peter the Great, and was used by the tsars as a summer residence. The Palace built in 1752, is painted a bright blue with gold and white trim in a very flamboyant rococo style. More than 100 grams of gold were used to gild the façade.

By the time the bus arrived with our tour group, it was pouring rain, which after walking several blocks to the gates, and then standing there for over ½ hour before we were let inside, left us all soaking wet. Have no idea why we didn’t pack our plastic ponchos as we have carried and not used them for every other trip. Maybe that is why we were so wet—just a Murphy’s Law type thing. Once inside, we put on the mandatory cloth booties over our shoes to protect the floor and left all the bags and our sopping wet jackets with the coat checker.

Unfortunately, this palace with all its beautiful excesses in decoration and art work, was intentionally destroyed by the German forces retreating after the siege of Leningrad. Thankfully, Russian archivists had been able to document most of the interior and had stored many of the paintings. Therefore, reconstruction was able to be done from the burned shell that had been left. It opened for tours in 2003.

The rooms in this palace are magnificent with the Great Hall being the crème de la crème. It is as wide as the total width of the palace, lined on both sides with floor to ceiling mirrors and windows, with walls painted in blue and gold. In the evening, for balls and important receptions, 696 lamps were lit on 12 chandeliers near the mirrors. I don’t think I have ever seen so much gold used on statues and other ornamentation in one room. (One wonders how much $$ went to re-gild the palaces instead of feeding the average Russian.) The ceiling is painted with a lovely mural as are most of the other rooms.

Another of the famous rooms in this Palace is the Amber Room. So called, because it was completely “wallpapered” with thin slices of amber. During the German occupation, all the amber from this room was stripped off, crated up, and taken out of the Palace. There is a great mystery as to where it is, as no one has been able to locate the original amber from the Amber Room since the end of War II. I understand the value of all the amber and the uniqueness of such a room, but I frankly thought the duplicated Amber Room was dark and ugly. I much preferred a mint green and pink room done with white Grecian frescos and embellishments. Then I am not much of a fan of the rococo style anyway.

Hopefully, Valerie’s pictures will give you a sense of this Palace. Another instance where a “picture is worth a thousand words.” Walking several blocks out in the rain again, we caught our bus waiting with several others from our ship, and were quickly driven several miles out into the countryside to this huge restaurant. It was obviously built to accommodate the large tour bus groups as it had at least 4 huge busloads of people already seated for lunch when our buses arrived. We were efficiently served a set menu of a salad, a stuffed chicken breast entrée, and then dessert, with the kind of drink you wanted, the only choice given.

After waiting for everyone who had wine and liquor to pay their bar tabs, we donned our wet, wet outerwear and hurried ourselves back through the continuing rain and onto the bus. Once inside, we took the wet stuff off and placed them in the overhead racks. When all were accounted for, the driver started driving back into the City center.

Of course, before we got back to the ship, we had to stop at a very nice souvenir shop located in a basement on a side street. As I have speculated before, we wonder if the tour guides get some sort of cut of the purchases as every guide in every part of the world we have traveled, wind up taking their group to shop. Valerie stayed on the bus while I took in what was for sale in the shop. I didn’t see anything we hadn’t seen before—sets of nesting dolls, some amber, crystal, lacquered boxes, etc. Lots of the group bought lots of things.

That evening, we watched the passing sights for several hours as the ship sailed out of St. Petersburg proper and into the Gulf of Finland. We passed islands, towns, villages, and some old stuff that looked like fortification ruins.

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