St. Petersburg - Day 2

Peter Paul Fortress

The second day of our trip we met our tour guide and went to the Peter Paul fortress. Russia likes their fortresses. This one is on a tiny little island, you have to walk along a bridge to get to it.

Inside the Chapel where the family of Nicholas II is buried.





After the chapel we visited the jail


This is just moments before the canon went off, (it goes off at 12 everyday) and it was crazy loud.

We went through the gate that they take prisoners to be executed, this is the view from the dock

Catherine the Great's Summer Palace

After the Fortress we made our way to Catherine's summer palace, which is about an hour drive outside the city, which wouldn't have been bad but if it wasn't spent with our lovely driver. When I first saw this palace I was blown away a bit, it's massive and totally fabulous.

I'll tell you know what I know about this place, it was built by Elizabeth the I (I think it's the Ist anyway) who owned 15,000 dresses, one for each day for 40 years. She never lived in it though, it was Catherine who lived here. She also has a Winter palace, which was right next to our hotel, I'll post pictures of this place next time, and a palace in between where she can rest. It's pretty shocking to see the extravagance these people lived in, while so many people were suffering and didn't even have food to eat. It is beautiful though, the attention to detail is amazing. Still I can't help but think how messed up it all really is. Does that make me negative?

Before going into the palace we stopped and got blineys, which are crepes with different filling, mine was mashed potatoes and mushroom, but the chocolate and banana was the best. Right next to the restaurant they had a little mini museum and I saw this anti nazi poster that I liked, a lot of the soviet art is pretty neat actually.

This is the first room you see when you walk into the palace. So lush.


Every palace and every church we've gone into has had fantastic ceilings, like I said the detailing is crazy, thinking about how much work went into it is mind boggling.



As amazing as the ceilings are, you have to also appreciated the wood work in these floors.

I liked that they didn't put any space between these paintings.





Everything so far has been in the Baroque style, but we got to these set of rooms that are in the classical style and I liked them a lot better.








Portrait of a young man

If it looks like we didn't want to take this picture it's because we in fact did not want to. Aunt glo asked if she could get a picture of us with the guide, I didn't realize until later that this was for her own amusement, I had no idea why she wanted use to do this at first. She had to keep telling us to get closer.

We took some pictures while aunt glo went to get more blineys. Tip: After walking for a whole day do not attempt to take a jumping picture. My feet hurt so bad after this shot.
In the states we have pretty much one sign for the girls bathroom and one sign for the boys, here I've seen several variations, this being one of them.

Phew. That was a lot of pictures. I am trying to keep up on blogging, I've only gotten to day 2 of our trip and we have done so much since then! I need to be better about not getting behind or I'll forget what we did.