Thursday, 11 am

We are touring a buffet smorgasbord lunch on the Lido Deck as we sail toward our noon arrival in the city of Kalmar, Sweden, another place I have never been.  It’s much too soon to eat again after a big breakfast in the Pinnacle, but all the Scandinavian specialties sure look good.  We had a gorgeous day in Stockholm yesterday, but that will have to wait until I give you our second day in St Petersburg and our day in Tallin, Estonia (fortunately, just before President Obama’s arrival and the security involved with that).

Monday, 1 September 2014

St Petersburg, Russia, Day 2

How appropriate to be in Russia on Labor Day, although it doesn’t seem to have much impact on modern-day St Petersburg, which bears few reminders of the Soviet Era.  Our day begins with a drive through a different and less monumental part of the city as we head south to the small town of Pushkin (formerly something else in Russian) to visit Catherine’s Summer Palace, to complement our visit to the Winter Palace yesterday.

 

Our guide (female today), talks us through a seeming unending series of ornately decorated rooms and vestibules, pointing out those pieces of furniture she would like to take home.  She also gives us a brief history of Catherine’s reign and the lives of the later Romanovs, including the ill-fated Nicholas and Alexandra (there’s a beautiful film about them). Although most of us think of Anastasia when we think of the last Romanovs, the Russians themselves are more fascinated by the family’s involvement with the mad, mystic Rasputin, who was called in to help heal the young prince’s inherited hemophilia, but eventually became an important influence on the family, especially the Empress.  There was never a love affair between them, but that story was allowed to circulate in order to hide the fact of young Nicholas’ illness—which would have been much more disturbing if the news got out.

The highlight of the interior is the “Amber Room,” painstakingly reconstructed by the Soviets after the end of WWII (no photographs permitted here).  The original amber panels and pieces were stolen by the Nazis and have never been recovered.  They are either gone forever or someone is sitting on a huge cache of very valuable semi-precious stones.

   

After a short walk in the gardens here, we are off next to the southwest to visit Peterhof, the main palace of Peter the Great, built to rival Versailles.  More important than the castle itself are the gardens, built along the southern coast of the Gulf of Finland (with Finland visible in the distance and reachable by hydrofoil).  There are rows of ornate statues and fountains, all gilded in bright gold.  The designs are not nearly as imaginative as at Versailles, which is truly remarkable, but the garden is quite lovely.  The day is overcast, but we have been blessed with no rain since we left Amsterdam.

We stop at a small café in the gardens to have coffee and to contemplate eating our box lunch—with exactly the same food as yesterday—but decide to wait and eat on the return trip, when we can sit more comfortably.  As we continue to walk through the gardens to the hydrofoil pier that will take us back to the city, we come across a small black shoulder bag, the kind used everyday by many European men, sitting by itself on a park bench.  Since no one comes to claim it after we watch from a distance, we pick it up to turn in to the security guard we had seen recently.  He is nowhere to be found at the moment, so I take a look through the bag to make sure it is not just an empty throwaway, and find a treasure trove of credit cards, Russian rubles, identity card, house and auto keys, etc.  Not wanting to turn it over to someone who might just decide to keep it, I hold on to it—very outwardly visible—until we reach the security guard at the pier.  A tour guide is standing by who translates into Russian as I report the finding, and the security guard takes the bag.  He spends a lot of time looking through it—I mean a lot of time—but eventually radios in to his superiors (at least that is what it looks like).

After my good deed we board the hydrofoil for a 30-minute high-speed ride back to the center of St Petersburg (and eat our lunches on the way).  Back in the city our driver and van meet us at the pier and we head for the Yosoupof  Palace, where we will hear the rest of the story of Rasputin and the Romanovs. The Yosuoupofs were a wealthy Muslim family that came to St Petersburg in the late 19^th century to serve the Czars.  As a result, they increased their wealth and ultimately came to own 49 estates, in addition to the one here in the city.  Of course, everything was confiscated after the Revolution, but this one palace was retained intact as a museum of how the upper crust used to live.  In addition to the usual things you find in such palaces all over Europe—fine art, furniture, rugs and tapestries—this palace has a lovely small theatre, that is still in use for concerts.

Because the family was close to the Romanovs when it came time for the plot to assassinate Rasputin, Felix Yousoupof was one of the ring-leaders.  The mad “monk” was invited to the palace for tea and cookies laced with cyanide.  For some reason, the poison didn’t work as well as it was supposed to and eventually Rasputin had to be shot several times as he tried to flee from his murderers.  His body was dumped in a hole in the ice of the Neva River, where rather than disappearing it floated to the surface.  After his body was recovered, the autopsy proved that he had died not from the poison, or the bullets, but from drowning.  Although he was buried by the Romanovs, he was later dug up after the Revolution, cremated, and his ashes scattered to the winds.

At the end of this grisly story we make a brief stop at a very large souvenir shop, with an equally grisly array of useless and tasteless artifacts.  Then back to the ship to collapse before our martinis and dinner. While we watch daylight fading as we sail from St Petersburg, we pass close by the former naval base at Kronstadt, at one time totally off limits to everyone except the military.  Today we get right up close as we sail by into the night and toward Estonia tomorrow.