Today didn't start so well for me because I was totally tired. I forgot to mention in yesterday's post that we seem to have a bit of a hot water issue in our room. Once again today we didn't have any hot water in the morning, so I only ended up with a partial shower. I did thankfully manage to get clean for the most part. The extra time it took to get any water made me late to breakfast, which made it hard to eat in time to leave. I was pretty exhausted from the day before, so fell asleep for every single bus ride. We drove 15 miles south of the city to another Palace. This place had something to do with Pushkin, which is interesting since in Prague we stayed at Pushkin apartments. Pushkin is a famous Russian poet. The picture above is a room that contains 16 lbs of gold just for that room. It was pretty insane. I actually almost fell asleep in the palace!
After the palace tour we went to lunch at a traditional Russian restaurant. Most of the food was great -- the soup above is borsch, a beet soup. Considering I don't particularly like beets the soup was pretty good. David of course loved it, and had two big helpings. Lots of free vodka too, though after a tiny sip from both David and I we stuck to water, it tasted pretty terrible. We then had an hour drive back to the city, during which we both fell promptly asleep. Finally, after this longer nap, I started to feel more alert.
We went to St. Isaac's cathedral next, which was also quite ornate and had lots of granite. We learned it can hold up to 14,000 people, and it contains no musical instruments or seats. After this cathedral we visited the palace of an aristocrat, which was less fancy than the palaces of the Tsars, but was still pretty nice! It was also the place of the attempted assassination of Rasputin (spelling?). He was first poisoned, then shot three times, and finally dumped in the frozen water. One person in the group read he eventually died of hypothermia. We got back to the room with just enough time to change for dinner hosted by Victoria's parents at a German Pub. At the pub we ate lots of meat, fried food, and drank beer brewed by the pub. We then started for a walk outside, guided by Olga, but got stuck in a thunder storm and had to sprint back to the bus. We didn't quite make it, as you can tell from the picture below.
Despite being wet, the Cornell crowd stopped for apple strudel on at the bar across from our hotel -- a good way to end the day! No touring plans for tomorrow, so we are going to sleep in and then go souvenir shopping. Tomorrow night is the big deal -- we don't know much about it (I think its possibly a surprise even to Jamie and Victoria), but we do know that we will be taking two boats to an island for the event.
No comments:
Post a Comment