Wanderung 31

Once Around the Baltic

August - September 2016


 

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September 3: St. Petersburg, Russia - Katherine Palace

We got up with the sun. The breakfast buffet lines opened up at 6:00 am, which made it just possible to get up, shower, and have breakfast before meeting with Linda and Jerry at 7:00. The English-speaking tour of St Petersburg was even smaller than the French-speaking tour, consisting of only 6 people. After passing through the mandatory Russian passport control and getting our temporary visa, we climbed aboard a small shuttle bus with 8 French-speaking folks and two translators.

Our first stop was Katherine's Palace, which was built by Czar Peter the Great for his second wife, Katherine I, after returning from his adventures in the western part of Europe, dumping his first wife into a convent, and killing off his son. Since Katherine The Great killed her husband, familicide seemed to be something of a tradition with the Romanovs. Peter also enslaved most of his country's population by converting them to serfs tied to the land, so an anti-democrat for sure.

In any case, Katherine's Palace was a huge building with most of the extensive interior done in Russian Baroque style, which was to my eye similar to the French Baroque style I have seen in Versailles, France. High ceilings with equally high windows gave the white and gilt decorated rooms a spacious airiness that was quite pleasant. The ceilings typically had frescoes painted on them representing classical themes.

We toured a grand ballroom and then several audience chambers that ultimately lead to the throne room, if I have that correctly. All rooms had beautiful parquet floors. Since most of the palace was destroyed in the WWII fighting, what we were really observing was the supremely artistic reconstruction of the palace according to original plans and photographs that had occurred after the war, which was a true labor of love I am sure.

On the other side of the ballroom were a series of less and less important rooms including several dining rooms.

We finally ended up in a very fancy, but not extremely ornate storage room. Curiously, those rooms had some of the nicest examples of inlaid wooden furniture, ornate clocks, and other beautiful furnishings in the whole palace.


 

Once out on the grounds in back of the palace, we walked over to a nearby lake and passed by some large ornamental outbuildings including a boathouse and a tiny "Hermitage" for relaxing, and the many steeples of the private church, all very pretty. We ended our tour at a statue of Pushkin, the Russian Shakespeare, and then boarded the bus for our ride back to the city.

We had lunch at a small but very nice restaurant back in St Petersburg. The appetizers were potato salad and crepes with caviar and sour cream. The caviar was a very mild red type of fish eggs, and combined nicely with the sour cream on the crepes. The next course was borscht soup, which was different than what Heinke had prepared for us at the beginning of this Wanderung, but still quite tasty. The entree was beef Stroganoff, and I learned that there was actually a Russian noble named Stroganoff who had owned a palace in St Petersburg and apparently developed the original dish. Who knew? Desert was an apple strudel type of thing, but with a thin pastry crust. And that gave us enough energy to first walk around town a bit and then take a boat ride on the canals that circle around the Old Town section of St Petersburg .



Copyright 2016 by R. W. Holt and E. M. Holt


 

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