Russian Palaces=An Explosion of Color (Also, enough gold to pay off all my student loans and tuition)

           
           The fourth day in Russia was just as hot as every other day, but was also the most exciting because of the locations I visited: Catherine the Great’s Palace and the lower Peterhof Gardens!
Catherine the Great's Palace! This picture doesn't even cover how large it is!
Another view of Catherine the Great's Palace
More of the front of Catherine the Great's Palace (Clearly this palace makes me really excited)
              We had to meet up at 7 to leave at 7:30 and because I don’t like being late I was there at 7 (my friends weren’t even there yet and they’re the early birds). When we arrived at Catherine’s Palace I got pretty excited because the palace is amazing and is totally worthy of the title “palace.” The majority of my photos from today are from Catherine the Great’s palace. We walked through the rooms and my favorite rooms, besides one of the Great Rooms with windows and gold galore, were the red and green foil rooms—titled so because of the green and red colored foil under glass that continues to the ceiling. In a country and around a religion that loves gold, the color was a nice break. The Amber Room in the palace is a room you may have heard of before because of its history, but we were not allowed to take pictures while walking through it. Thankfully, Google exists and I encourage you to go do a search just to get an idea of how beautiful the room truly is. One reason I liked the palace is because all my favorite styles could be seen throughout the rooms: baroque, rococo, and neoclassical (Art History minor nerd moment).
The Palace's Ballroom. SO MUCH GOLD!

I couldn't get over the amount of detail that went into each piece of this room

The green foil in the Green Foil Room

The red foil in the Red Foil Room
An example of the Neoclassical design in the Palace
            We were able to walk around in the gardens for a while and they were very pretty as well. I can imagine many a person strolling to the lake in the spring, summer, and fall for some peace. I got some pretty nice pictures too. Next up was lunch. Lunch was by Peterhof so we had to do a bit of a drive to get there and I was starving by the time we got to the palace. Lunch was a weird salad that made me sick later, unfortunately, but I like to say that I’ll eat anything once. And, thankfully, I will only ever eat that once. Dessert was some apple/mystery reddish fruit tart/cake thing that was also delicious. A side note I find important is that the toilets there all had blue water that was not blue because of cleaner. Both random and interesting. 

View from the Palace gardens



Friends and flowers :)
            Peterhof was very close to where we ate lunch and there, we had the option to go off on our own. My friends and I took this option because Emily was at Peterhof the day before and told us anything fun/relevant we needed to know about the gardens in a fraction of the time it would have taken the tour guide. So we walked around the lower gardens in the sweltering heat and then down the walkway to bridges across the stream that leads to the Gulf of Finland. Then we actually walked to the edge of the gardens to where they meet the Gulf of Finland and while Sidney and Emily just touched the water with their toes, I waded in up to my knees because I decided to make the most of the cold water half-way across the world from where I live. It was a bit of a Kodak moment. There were also a lot of adorable kids in their little swim diapers and floaties frolicking (the best word for what I saw) in the water. After wading in the water we just laid down in the grass by the water and people watched for a bit. Peterhof was the last stop before souvenir shopping where I probably spent more money than I needed to, but still have no regrets about spending. The chances of me visiting Russia again are very slim for numerous reasons, but I am glad that I got the chance to visit the homeland of both my brother and older sister. I feel more connected to them than I did before my visit to St. Petersburg.

Welcome to Peterhof!
So. Many. Fountains.

Me in the Gulf of Finland!!!

This is my favorite photo from the lower Peterhof Gardens. I just love the fountains!
Bye, Peterhof! Bye, Russia! Time to visit Sweden!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tesco is like Narnia

Image
            I’m writing this on my last day in Scotland, a Tuesday if you’re curious, and my friend decided that we absolutely had to go to the Tesco in Greenock, just so she could say that she went to a supermarket that is so quintessentially British. At the beginning of our short excursion we did not have particularly high expectations of Tesco; we thought it would be just like any ordinary American supermarket but with different brands. Once we walked into Tesco though, we realized just how extraordinary it truly was. Tesco, as my friend Emily said, is like Narnia. You walk in curious, but not overly hopeful, only to be completely amazed by what you find inside. Those average, automatic doors hid a wonderland of aisles as far as the eye can see. There were groceries, a deli section, oh, and don’t let me forget the clothes that take up the entire second floor. One of the first things we saw was Tesco’s escalators (not the step kind, the gradual incline t...
Read more

The Russian Orthodox Thigh Master

Image
Be prepared for many pictures...              The third day of Russia was one of the longest, as it consisted of a tour of four of St. Petersburg’s churches: the Holy Trinity Cathedral (along with the Alexander Nevsky Abbey and a Cemetery), Our Savior of the Spilled Blood Church, St. Isaac’s Cathedral, and St. Vladamir’s Cathedral. If you have the chance to visit the Spilled Blood Church, I would advise you to take it! The inside is the most amazing thing. There are floor to ceiling mosaics that show important Biblical figures and famous parables and I wish I could have spent more time inside since I wanted to see each and every gold, mosaic-surrounded image. My other favorite of the day was St. Isaac’s Cathedral. For this church we had the option to either go inside the church or to go up to the colonnade—ascending 262 steps to get there! My friend Sidney and I chose this option, and you may think that 262 steps is no big deal. Let me tell you, i...
Read more

Burr(en) It’s Cold Out Here (Ireland Day 3, Part 2)

Image
           After the Cliffs of Moher Mist it was lunch time so we stopped at Fitzpatrick’s Bar, which is a pub with the most Irish name to ever be Irish. Here I had some amazing seafood chowder and had the chance to get out of the very traditional rainy weather for a while. The next stop was actually my favorite stop: Burren. This is an area by the Ireland coast against the Atlantic Ocean. It’s a huge limestone deposit that has crisscrossing cracks known as “grikes.” In these grikes it is possible to see arctic, Mediterranean, and alpine plants all growing together because of the odd environment. Since the area is full of cracks, walking around on the deposit is almost like playing hopscotch because you have to hop from stone to stone to avoid the cracks. It was amazing because the landscape was something so unlike anything I’d seen before, but, it was also the coldest stop we made. Rain was coming down and there was a chill that even my scarf and rain jac...
Read more