Katherine the Great
Trip Start
Sep 13, 1997
1
16
22
Trip End
Oct 02, 1997
St. Petersburg,
Russia
Saturday, September 27, 1997
The interior of Peter's Palace in Peterhof is not as marvelous as that in Catherine Palace (Pushikin). The most interesting part of this summer palace is its garden. Modeling on the Versailles Palace outside of Paris, its garden is full with fountains, gilded and marble sculptures, and beautiful paths, all in delicate symmetry. We had to pay an extra fee for taking pictures or video inside the Palace, but not so in the garden. I did use this FREE opportunity to take a lot of pictures of this garden!
I'm always a frugal person when traveling. This "extra fee" sometimes just doesn't make much sense. Who cares to pay that since the exterior view is better than the interior? And the lighting outside of course is better for photographing . . .
Our trip to Peterhof ended around 3:00 p.m. when we returned to our boat back in St. Petersburg. The weather turned bad again. From mildly cloudy, it started to rain again. I and Mom decided to follow our plan: our own city walking tour of this nice city.
It's late afternoon already and the weather was as miserable as the day before. We tried to manage to walk from "Gostiny Dvor" Metro station (comparing to the Metro of Moscow, taking metro in St. Petersburg is only the sophomore level of difficulties) to St. Isaac Cathedral. It has the hugest dome (sorry, not onion-shaped) in Russia and the scale is almost as grand as the St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome. We would try to get in to have a peek at the icons (oh! More icons!) inside but the "foreigners' admission fee" is too expensive (about 8 dollars, 10 times the amount of "Russian admission fee") and we didn't have that much Russian Rubles. We had a short peek of the interior when I entered to inquire the admission price. It is magnificent! We also passed the famous Astoria Hotel and some canals. Back to Nevsky Prospekt, we shopped in "Don Knigi" mega-bookstore (not in American standard). I bought some nice postcards for reasonable price and Mom bought more amber necklaces and Russian souvenirs. We both were happy, hallelujah!
You might not know how complicated it is to make a purchase in Russian bookstores. You have to tell the clerks what you want (in Russian, or in sign language), then she will write down the price on a note, then you take the note to the cashier, pay the cashier, take the receipt and go back to get your purchase. More complicated if you don't even speak any Russian. I guess this paying system is retained from the communist era.
And next, we did something sort of laughable - Eating Chinese food in Russia. There is a new Chinese Restaurant called "Chopstick" in the Grand Hotel Europe (the most luxurious in St. Petersburg). I told mom it couldn't be good for a Chinese restaurant called "Chopstick" (just plain no imaginations at all), so we headed to the "Shanghai."
Oh, what can I say? It is nicely decorated, a little dark, the service is very slow and nobody speaks either Chinese or English there!! The nice Russian lady took our order (fortunately, the menu is in Chinese and Russian) and kept coming back to tell us: "Sorry, we run out of tofu; sorry, we ran out of pickled cabbage; sorry, we run out . . . " We ended up having "beef with onion" and "eggplant with garlic sauce" (Yu-Hsiang Che-Tz). At least they had eggplant. Most of the steamed rice is soggy though.
Now I know the Chinese food in the U.S. is good, very good . . .
It's our last night staying on this boat. I just wandered around to have the last look of it . . .
