st. petersburg 2011, day 4

I’m starting to think that pretty soon I’ll be able to post about what’s currently happening in our lives.

Until then, more pictures and details from our August trip to St. Petersburg, Russia.

On Day 4, we decided to go to Peterhof, Peter the Great’s Summer Gardens and Palaces. We had to walk over to the Neva River and take a 30 minute ride on a hydrofoil boat. While we were waiting for the boat, it started to rain. By the time we got to our destination, it was pouring.

Don’t we look a happy bunch? When we arrived at the dock, it was raining SO hard and was really windy. I was disoriented at first, and didn’t understand where we were supposed to go (I thought we had been stranded out on some type of platform!). Once we figured out how to get to the gardens, we speed walked a couple hundred metres to the entrance, thrilled that we beat most of the crowd! However, it turned out we had to pay an entrance fee and nearly everyone else figured out where to buy the tickets before we did! (We thought the entrance fee was included in our boat fee.) btw, the ticket booth has some weird glass so you could barely see the people sitting inside, especially difficult with the rain and wind.

Anyways, in this picture Sofia is especially miffed because a) she doesn’t like wearing a hood and b) she couldn’t carry one of the 2 umbrellas we were sharing between the 5 of us (it doesn’t work to have the shortest person carry the umbrella – because she won’t carry it higher than her own head).

The moods are starting to improve as the downpour lessens.

A pool fit for a princess.

One of many fountains.

Statues and more fountains.

You can see the platform where the hydrofoil boats dock in the background.

A palace fi´t for a princess . . .

Gardens and more fountains.

Still more fountains.

One of the fun fountains.

A hydrofoil boat arriving.

After we got back to the city, we walked around the Hermitage before heading back towards the hotel.

I caved and let the kids hold the monkeys that we had seen the day before.

The bigger monkey is flossing his teeth with a strand of Sofia’s hair he had plucked when Joel was holding him (you can see him examining it in the first picture).

After buying a few more souvenirs, we went over to Nevsky and found a place to eat dinner. We chose “Chatty Chicken”. Joel complained that he didn’t want to eat food that talks . . . It was a nice place, but they don’t get so many tourists . . . the manager had to go through the menu with us and tell us what they had . . .  no English menus!

Later in the evening we decided to go up to the colonnade of St. Isaac’s Cathedral. It was 250 steps up a spiral staircase . . . then 50 more outside:

. . . to a fantastic view! This shot shows our hotel and the church we visited yesterday.

The vendors have their shops set up in the trees on the left . . . that’s where I bought my chinchilla scarf.

Going back down the spiral staircase.

That’s all for now. The next post will wrap the trip up!

PS Ann (who commented on my last post) – yes, things pretty much shut down in the summer in St. Petersburg. For example, the Social Worker who met with us had been on vacation up until the day we met her, and our agency’s in-country director was on vacation while we were there. (And back in 2008, when we adopted, our judge was on vacation for most of September).

Barb