We walked out of our hotel this morning to be verbally abused by a mad woman with a beautiful cocker spaniel. She had a wooden stick in her hands so we were a little careful of her! Tatiana, our St. Petersburg guide appeared, and steered us back into our hotel. After a few minutes, Arpana, Ray and I together with Tatiana, carefully stepped outside again, and seeing the way clear and the van parked by the side of the road, headed directly into it. Don’t know what was up, just a random wacko!! Tatiana though seemed quite upset by it. I guess she understood what the woman was saying; we could only guess!
We travelled about an hour (24 km) to the town of Pushkin on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, population about 100,000. It wasn’t an interesting drive though, as St. Petersburg is built on a swamp, which accounts for the mosquitoes we have been battling in our bedroom because I left the windows open one night. The attraction in Pushkin is the summer palace of the royal family “Catherine Palace”. It was originally built in Baroque style around 1752 by Catherine the Great. However, it was substantially destroyed by the Germans in WWII, and then by the Soviet government who destroyed the internal structure. In 1979 the Soviet government started restoring the Palace and this continued for 25 years. Today, the palace is stunning. The outside is painted blue and gold and surrounded by gilded black-iron gates. The first few rooms are heavily decorated in what was gold-gild and what is now gold paint. Then, because Catherine didn’t like all the baroque gold, the next few rooms are pained in classic blue and green, with white moldings ornately carved. Access to the palace is closely controlled. You have a “time slot” and move through with hundreds of other visitors in controlled groups. It’s certainly not the most pleasant experience, but I guess if you want to see historic sites of this caliber, this seems to have become an accepted method of controlling the crowds (remember our visit to the Potala Palace in Tibet?)
After our “controlled” viewing inside the palace, we walked through the beautiful Catherine Park with its English and French gardens, large pond where the reflections of the buildings glistened in the sunlight, and other out buildings. When we left the town of Pushkin, our driver had an unfortunate accident and managed to wrap the back end of the Mercedes van around a lamp-post and shatter the large window at the rear left side of the van. His van had been squeezed in by a car in front leaving him no room to maneuver, however, he kind of didn’t help himself because when the first grating sound came, he just kept reversing harder into the pole as opposed to stopping and checking out the circumstances. Anyway, we finally got out of the tight spot but the back-end was quite damaged. As we turned out of the parking spot, we were almost hit broadside by a vehicle travelling about 100 km down the road! I am sure our driver was “harassed” at the whole scrunching deal, but after jamming on the brakes to avoid being hit by the flying car, I am sure he was even more harassed. We hadn’t driven very far when someone said: “Oh, is there an accident?” I turned to look out the window and saw an elderly grey-haired woman lying prostrate on the road on her back and a highly distraught younger women standing by her car about 6 feet away from her on the telephone, but our van squeezed past and we were gone. It was a “traumatic” moment that left an indelible image in my mind. I don’t usually look when there is an accident; I don’t like to see injuries. Tatiana turned to us and said: “That’s been three things today: the verbal abuse by the mad woman, the van incident, and now the accident with the old lady.” I am glad to say, the rest of the day was good!!
When we got back to St. Petersburg, we had a great walk across the city by the canal from the Church of Resurrection to the Church of St. Nicholas which unfortunately is closed for renovation. We went into the Mariinsky Theatre which is the second most important theatre for ballet and discovered there were no seats available for Monday’s performance of “Giselle”. We were a little disappointed until we discovered the price which was about $150 to $165. By the time we arrived back to the hotel it was 7:00 pm.
Today was also “Navy Day: so there was lots of activity along the embankments of the Neva River. A lot of drinking too!! It amazes us that Russians don’t consider beer to be alcohol! This despite the fact I have noticed that their beers are quite potent and range between 4.7 per cent alcohol to 5.7 per cent alcohol. You can walk around the streets with a beer in your hand – not that we have done that – but all along the embankments are tons of empty beer bottles. Someone comes along and collects them all but to us, it’s a really weird concept.
We met Arpana, around 8 pm and went to dinner in the same Russian restaurant we went to two nights ago. Then it was back to the hotel and a very much needed bed around midnight.
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