Candy and Craig's NEWS

Saturday, July 28, 2012

All,

Today was the day we became more adventurous. Some sites are not in walking distance. In particular we wanted to go to the Summer Palace complex. There are a number of ways of getting there, but perhaps the best is with public transportation. So, we learned to use the St. Petersburg subway and bus system. In total, it took about an hour to get to the palace. The bus was quite the experience. At least the driver understood “summer palace”. Figuring out how to pay was an experience. The bus was crowded and we were standing at the front. As people would get on and the bus get going, they started handing me their money. I would then place it on the console next to the driver and while driving down the road he would sort it, make change and put the rest away. I then would get the change back to the riders. After about 4 of these, I put our money out and got the same treatment.

Once we arrived at the palace complex, you might find this hard to believe, but they liked gold there too. The palace is much less complex and much more crowded than the winter palace (the Hermitage). It took another hour to get tickets and get into the palace. Among the famous sites in the palace is the Amber Room. It is pretty incredible. The original was dismantled during World War 2 and moved. The history gets a bit cloudy, but the original was lost and likely destroyed during the war. As part of St. Petersburg’s 300^th anniversary, it was reconstructed. It was truly amazing. Unfortunately, they did not allow photos, but you can see some on the web. Actually, there was lots of damage to this complex in World War 2 and also to the Hermitage. There were some pictures here describing the reconstruction and restoration. Quite the process of organizing pieces, putting puzzles together and having the craftsman to do the work.

One of the neater things we saw was the collection of royal carriages. As you will see in the posted pictures, most are pretty fancy and then there is the simple black one. The thought was, I wouldn’t be caught dead in such a simple one. Not far from the truth. The description indicated that this was the coach that Emperor Alexander the 2^nd was assassinated in in March 1881. Should have stayed with the gold.

It turned out that at the site where we changed from the subway to the bus, there was an airport express bus and we discovered that we were not far from the airport. On our return, we grabbed the airport bus and stopped by the Lufthansa office to see if the iPad had been turned in. No such luck. There remains some optimism as it is very likely that it was not discovered on the flight as it was in a pocket in front of a seat that no one sat in. We will check in Frankfurt on our return.

We returned to the subway station and there was a McDonald’s there. Yes, we ate there. It was pretty fun as we are now in a section that is clearly non-tourist. Nearly everything is in Cyrillic and this included the entire menu. This is one of the busiest McDonald’s that we have ever seen. We slowed them down a bit with trying to order where the server spoke no English and got another one who spoke some, but they sort of gave up and brought us a chart with pictures of everything. We sort of got what we wanted and smiled about the whole experience. As was our usual practice, we drug ourselves back to the hotel and crashed.