Happy Birthday Dad, I'm in St Petersburg!

Today is my Dad's 97th birthday. I'm sorry that I'm not there sharing it with him but my gorgeous girls are and I know he'll love that. I also know he's amazed that I've been able to travel and see things he's only ever read about, he couldn't possibly know just how grateful I am for the opportunities I've had in my life. 

Today's view from the window is from the Wnter palace window looking out at the palace grounds.

There's a long story of deprivation and taxes that the Russian people had to endure to complete this amazing palace but the short version is that it was built by Elizabeth the spender but she died before she got the chance to live there. Catherine the Great lived here, and she was a great collector. So prolific that she had a hermitage built to contain her collections. She was also pretty feisty in the boudoir so she had a small hermitage built (you can just see it below - the 'little' green and white building to the right of the long green and white building. This was to allow herself some privacy to entertainment of smaller  groups & for assignations. So this complex has three main buildings. 

this square is too big for the 21st century photographers of my calibre (not cool guys)

The palace is amazing, as all restored palaces are. I walk around them thinking this was someone's home. To think that people lived inside them, real people used this staircase to enter their homes seems absurd to me.

This is the small throne room

 This is the large throne room. And this was their normal.

 The chapel. It's beautiful, but I had to keep adjusting my ideas for the definition of opulence.

Catherine the Great's doctors recommended exercise, so she commissioned this replica of the Vatican Grand gallery as an excerise yard for inclement weather when she couldn't walk outdoors.

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and here's what her small private apartment looks like. She had a dining table here that had mechanical place settings. When a course was finished each person's place setting would be lowered away from the table, descending to a room where the servants would remove the dirty dished and replace them with the next course. This place setting was winched back up to appear in the table ready for the hungry guests to begin the next course. All to maintain privacy so the guests and servants never set eyes on each other. 

I bet you dollars to donuts that those servants knew exactly who was at that table every single time.

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 the big Hermitage is filled with Catherine's collections. The DaVincis are considered to be the big draw-card. Our guide insisted we wade through the massive tourist-crowd to see them, I complied for one but I refused after that. I am not the wading through crowd type of tourist.

  

It was lucky though that our guide mentioned in passing as we rushed head-long to the DaVincis that Gainsborough's 'Woman in blue' was 'over there'. I'm so happy to have seen this with my own eyes. I love this painting and didn't know it was part of this collection.

Also the Rembrandt collection was worth the visit

 We saw many many many other collections, you name it she collected it. Won't bore you with it all but will share this bronze because I'm wondering, is it just me or does this look like the current guy in charge over there?

Don't you think that face is 

a) creepy

b) Putinesque

In the afternoon we went back to some of the churches we passed by yesterday. I couldn't get to St Isaac's or Smolny Convent Cathedral but did inside Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood and wow!

all the decorations are mosaic tiles not painted!

 This is the shrine that marks the spot were Alexander II was blown up.

We also went to that church to atheism I mentioned yesterday. It is a church now, was originally built as a church, modelled on st Paul's in Rome, and for a time after the revolution in 1917 it was closed. In 1932 it was reopened as the pro-Marxist "Museum of the History of Religion and Atheism." When you hear all that from the back of a van from your Russian guide who is already moving on to describe the next thing it get condensed in your head to church of atheism - hey I was tired! 

 Of all the cathedrals we've seen this was the least special, quite dim, very dark and sombre. None of the gilding etc. Maybe this was a cathedral for the people ant not for monarchs I don't know.

 Service are held here & there is an icon that must be important, people were lining up to pray/kiss it.