st. petersburg, russia (day 2)

The second day of our stay in Russia was spent visiting the Summer Palace's of Peter and Catherine Romanov. Apparently their Huge palace's in St. Petersburg just weren't enough so they built summer palace's in the country.

Once again we had our lovely tour guide, Alexandra. She was such a cute 22 year old that knew everything, spoke 4 different languages and loved our silly American questions. Every time (without fail) she went to address our group she would start with "Dear ladies and gentelmen ...." we tried to catch her and see if she would start talking with out saying her opening phrase, but not once did she let us down.

The summer palace's were about 45 minutes outside of the city and we were all excited to get a change of scenery from the day before. I can say that other than the palace grounds, the Russian country side is not pretty. It just seems like a sad, gloomy country. I expected to see beautiful homes but apparently most Russian's live in apartments in the city and can't afford to own a home. We also learned that it is too expensive to have a lot of children and most families only have one or two.

We first arrived at Catherine's palace. Like the other palace's in the city it was a large museum with several rooms filled with gold. My favorite part of the palace's were the grounds and gardens. Once you've seen the inside of one palace you've seen them all. But they really know how to keep they're royal gardens nice and it was so fun to stroll through and see the amazing landscapes.

Next we headed to Peterhof, or "Russian Versailles" where we took a tour of the GRAND palace and park. The Peterhof was by far, the nicest of all the palaces we saw in Russia. It was Peter the Greats summer palace so of course it had to be the most beautiful palace of all. The rooms were beautiful but our favorite was the Amber room. This room's was were completely covered with Amber. There wasn't one inch that was bare. Now I think it was a little much and that Peter the Great was asking a little too much when he demanded the construction of the room, but I did enjoy seeing a room completely covered with presious stones.

The best part of Peterhof was the amazing grounds with its 150 fountains, cascades and various pavilions. The fountains were everywhere. In fact it was so beautiful that there were several brides getting their pictures taken there (basically the equivalent to our Temple Square). After walking around the grounds and taking pictures of all the fountains we walked down to the water and boarded a Hydrofoil (really fast boat) that took us back to St. Petersburg via the Gulf of Finland. There we said goodbye to our cute tour guide and boarded the ship and set sail for Finland.

Catherine's Palace



S&J waiting to go into Catherine's Palace


A crazy Russian bride and her groom's legs


The many fountains at Peterhof





The Tree fountain


The Hydrofoil