Hi all, Ian here, (cough cough) in bed, (sneeze), at Burford, UK, (wheeze, cough!)
And we had been so well so far! But today I succumbed to a Russian cold and had to take to my bed to try and shake it off. Damned man sat next to me on the plane from St Petersburg and sneezed and coughed all the way to London!
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| The front entry to the New Hermitage museum. |
The last few days in St Petersburg were great. We went to the Peterhof - the summer palace of the Tzars from 1715 onwards. As Jane noted in the last blog, it was, like most of the big cities in Poland, completely rebuilt following the devastation of the War. However in St Petersburg, (then Leningrad), the Germans never actually took the city - but the 900 day siege did mean half the population died anyway.
The authorities at Peterhof are recouping their rebuilding costs by charging the throngs of tourists a fee for every room/building you can look in - there were 20 different "sub-palaces" to see.
And "no photographs inside" was the rule there too! But it was worth it in most of them - and the contents were generally original, all having been taken away and hidden before the Nazis arrived in their tanks.
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| Jane under a huge vase in the Winter Palace! |
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| Secret photo in a Peterhof palace! |
The no photos rule was a bit odd really as the Hermitage / Winter Palace and Russian Museums did not have the same ban, as you will see with the pictures of the artworks below, just "no flash".
Whist there I bought a bit of light reading - "Crime and Punishment" by Dostoevsky. Its a ripping yarn, but not a lot of laughs so far. It is set in St Petersburg, so you can trace the places he names - makes it all a bit more real.
Other highlights during this week were Russian Museum, mostly fabulous artworks from 12th C onwards, including 20thC Soviet Realism and well as the most fabulous Kandinskys and others artists like Kazimir Malevich, (think Black Square).
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| Do you think it is big enough for the dining room wall? |
And other pictures so big you could live on them if they were laid on the floor!
Also a "small world" moment when I ran into Russell D, a colleague from Brisbane, in the Russian Museum, and then again in the square in the front of the Hermitage Museum the next day. What's the chance of that!!!
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| Kandinsky - |
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| An early Da Vinci, one of 2 in the Hermitage |
We also visited the St Peter and Paul Cathedral in the original city fortress on an island in the Neva River. Again, built 250 years ago - and home to the graves of most of the Tzars of Russia from Peter the Great onwards. It is now a post-Soviet shrine to the history of the Russian empire and its leaders, with thousands paying their respects each day to those buried there.
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| Peter and Paul Fortress from the River Neva. The Tzars are buried here. |
They have even moved the remains of the last Emperor / Tzar, who was executed with this family by the Bolsheviks in 1918, to the cathedral in the last few years.
We did go back into the Hermitage Museum for a second time on the last day, as it is such a huge and wonderful place. On this trip we did a special extra tour of the "Treasury" which was wonderful - but no photos allowed there. There were the most intricate Greek and Byzantine pieces of gold jewelry, not like anything I had ever seen any museum of those cultures before. Incredibly fine and detailed workmanship, some only visible under a magnifying glass. And then going onto gifts given and received by the Tzars and some pieces by Faberge - but no eggs - they are now all in Moscow - darn!
I loved St Petersburg as a place to visit, easy transport, even mastered the buses. Car drivers seem to have precedence on most streets, and there were no particular laws related to car parking that we could see, you could park anywhere, on pavements, double park on the side of streets, across pedestrian crossings. The weather was fine for us - hot even a few days, and as Jane said before, life on the street continued to midnight and beyond.
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| kerbside dining - Gastronome |
We ate some good meals out too. Russians love their meat as much as the Poles, but there was a curious lack of vegetables in the shops during the middle of summer. However one of our best meals out was in a vegetarian restaurant, The Idiot. Highly recommended!
But all good things have to come to an end - so after 9 days we again packed our suitcases and set off to the airport for the flight to the UK.
After battling our way out of Heathrow, surely the world's ugliest airport, we picked up a hire care and set off for a trip around the M25, that world renowned 125 mile long car park around London! For what happened next see the next blog.
