Lunch and Catherine’s Palace

 

9/30

Gate to Catherine's Palace

We’re going to lunch at one of President Putin’s favorite restaurants.  Pushkin is a small town about 40 kilometers from St Petersburg.  The town now has an unpronounceable name (changed from Pushkin) and was the village where Tsar Peter’s servants lived.  He would go there to relax and feel ordinary.    Peter I and his wife Catherine had 11 children, but only two survived to adulthood—Anne and Elizabeth.

The meal was a 5-course affair with “cold starters”, “warm starters”, soup, entrée, and dessert.  Along with the meal, red and white wine and vodka were provided on the table (more about the vodka later).   The cold starter was sliced meat and pickled garlic, pickled tomatoes and pickled cucumbers.   There were halved tomatoes with white stuff on top—no body figured out what it was, but it was really good.    The warm starter was a kind of mushroom soup stuff.  The soup was borsht (very good taste).   The entrée was ground beef wrapped in cabbage leaves and baked.  Dessert was a cowberry filled blini with ice cream on the side.  (no, I have no idea what cowberries are)    

Very interesting meal and the entertainment (singers and accordion player) was very enthusiastic.   

Entertainers in the restaurant- note the instrument around his neck.

 Several of the musicians used percussion instruments that hung around their neck and clacked together.  I thought about getting one (they were selling for 15 Euro) for Lily, but her mom might have shot me.  Picture 8-10 playing card shaped pieces of wood hung on a cord with spacers between the pieces.  The pieces of wood clacked loudly together.  This instrument is called a trishoika.

We sat at long tables and the woman across the table from me was "loving the vodka". She must have missed breakfast because she cleaned all the serving plates of the cold starters.  She ate everything in sight.  She filled her friend's glass with wine when she wasn’t looking “so she’ll be less grumpy”.  Later this same lady went to another table where no one was drinking vodka, swiped a full bottle and put it in her purse.  A little something for later, I guess.    When we left the restaurant, the rain was coming down! 

We drove just a little way to get to Catherine’s Palace.  On the way, we passed the house that the last tsar, Nicholas II and his family used in winter.  This is the palace where he and his family were imprisoned before being sent to Siberia and their death. 

Rainy day at Catherine's Palace

Before we could enter any of the public areas of Catherine’s Palace, we were required to put on paper overshoes to protect the floor

We walked into the first room of the tour and the entire group gasped.  I don’t think any of us had ever seen so much gold before.  This room is purported to contain 9 kg of gold (1 kg=2.2 #).   This room alone was decorated with 19.8 pounds of gold on the walls, the ceiling and the decorative elements.    This was the ballroom and it was said that Catherine didn’t like to sleep so she danced the night away.  Lots of mirrors (framed in gold) in the room caused the gold to be reflected again and again, making it seem like there was twice as much.  From this room we went from gold room, to gold room to gold room.   Our guide told us that the entire house contains 100 kilograms of gold (x 2.2 for pounds).   

These rooms were designed by Empress Elizabeth, --when Catherine became Tsarina, she didn’t particularly like the ostentatiousness of all the gold.  She felt that the abundance of gold was bad taste.    Some of the rooms are much more simply decorated with a minimum of gold, but with silk wall coverings, or with red or green foil décor.

Gold Ball Room

There were several dining rooms, one with no chairs for dessert after dancing.  People just stood and helped themselves to sugar and vodka candies, chocolate covered with gold and marzipan. 

The palace contains 50 rooms, but only 26 are open, while the rest are being renovated. 

We passed through a hallway with photographs of the damage sustained by the Palace during the siege during WW II.  The ceilings had collapsed, furniture was destroyed, windows and doors were broken and floors damaged.  The renovations have been going on almost since the end of the war. 

Amber room

After touring several rooms of various designs, we came to “the Amber Room”.  This room is completely covered in Amber, but it is not original to the palace.  The Nazis took the original amber off the walls and it disappeared and has never been found.  This amber room is a recreation of what was in Catherine's time-- at a cost of $1million.

One of the rooms, originally a bedroom of Paul, Catherine’s son, had columns that look like stone.  They are really porcelain.

ceiling in one of the gold rooms

Note the ceiling in the picture to the left.  The picture is blurry, but most of the rooms had artistic types of ceilings.

The Palace is a breathtaking piece of history.  It is difficult to believe that people really lived like this.