St Petersburg Day Two

We started out our second day in St Petersburg at the Hermitage Museum which is housed in the winter palace and its adjoining buildings. We spent our time in the rooms that showed Russian Palace Interiors ... and there was a ton of gold everywhere. It was really grandiose. Below are some pictures of the outside of the museum/palace and some of the rooms we walked through. The pictures don't do any of it justice, fyi.



Somebody's (Catherine the Great's) boudoir. Martin made me stand in it for a picture so I gave him an "I'm barely tolerating you today" smile.



Some more golden rooms:



The church and the throne room. We didn't get a picture of it but the throne room was enormous. I would totally hold court there. I know we've seen tons of castles but this is the first throne room I've ever seen.



A few more fun pics:



After spending several hours at the museum (you could spend days there) we headed over to our chosen lunch spot, a restaurant called "The Idiot". It has a mostly vegetarian menu (no worries there's lots of fish and some meat too) and they served us free shots of vodka with our meal. Which really ruined the rest of my day! Being drunk after lunch when you have more sites to see isn't much fun.



First is a pic of some buildings we walked by on our way to lunch. On the right is a picture of one of our beers, a shot of vodka, and the bread basket. We really loved the dark russian breads. Martin's going to try to duplicate them.



Next up was St Isaac's cathedral. Everybody says this is the church to see but the spilled blood church was much more impressive, in my opinion, both inside and out. The advantage to Isaac's cathedral is that you can climb it but we didn't do that until day 3 so you'll have to go there to see pictures of the view from the top.



There's a big Jesus in the front of the church, staring at you. We couldn't get an in-focus picture of him but it was imposing.



After a brief siesta back at our hotel, we headed out to dinner at a restaurant called Tsar. The food there was really good and the service was excellent. Martin ordered beef stroganoff, his fave thing after borscht, and I ordered chicken kiev. I ordered the chicken kiev because I wanted to see if it was the same as what I had eaten in the BC dining hall 15 years earlier. Martin called it "chicken football". And, you know, that's actually what arrived on my plate! The only difference was that the chef had somehow attached a smaller bird's leg to the end of the chicken football to make it look artsy. The potatoes it was on were also delicious.



Some more free shots of vodka, these had a drop of cranberry juice in them. Just enough to take the edge off.



The throne toilets at Tsar. We were amused by a lot of things after our vodka ...



... including this hysterical Putin mug. It's so great. And, interestingly, we saw a lot of Russian men wandering around the streets shirtless during the heat of the day (it was, max, 80 degrees, with a stiff breeze, so not really that warm) so it seems to just be a Russian thing to go shirtless whenever you can. I'm generalizing here.



A few random street views from throughout the day: