Candy and Craig's NEWS

Monday, July 30, 2012

OK, I lied about our next report coming from Rome. We are sitting in the airport lounge in St. Petersburg waiting for our flight. I have posted a few photos from yesterday and this morning on our blog and FaceBook. There are a few sites left to see in St. Petersburg that will have to wait another day. We thought we might be able to get to Peterhof this morning, but the boats did not start running soon enough. It has a garden that it is patterned after the gardens at Versailles and lots of fountains. There was also a church that I wanted to visit that I had gone to years ago. The concierge figured out the name and location for me, but it was past where the Branch was that we went to church in. We simply ran out of time. Unlike the other churches we were in that were primarily museums, this one was still functioning as a church. It has the distinction that it was one of the only churches that never closed after the revolution. During the siege of Leningrad (St. Petersburg’s name under communism and during the second world war), some 800,000 people died. Families brought many of those that died to this church. It was pretty sobering back then and would have been good to visit again. On the flip side, we saw lots of things that we had not seen before.

We are catching a bit of the Olympics in the lounge. We had two English TV stations in the Hotel – one was Euro TV news and the other was BBC World News. Two Russian stations were showing the Olympics and as long as you wanted to see Russian athletes it was OK. The German station showed some part of the time also, but it was unpredictable. Besides, when we were sitting in the hotel we were usually falling asleep. We did catch the men’s 4x100 free relay. Darn.