St Petersburg Day One

We spent the July 4th weekend in St Petersburg, Russia this year. It was a great thing to do in hindsight because Germany was in the grips of a serious heat wave and it was sunny and mid 70's in St Petersburg. We definitely won.

We stayed in the Hotel Helvetia, which was a great hotel. I'd highly recommend it. It's not right downtown but St Petersburg is enormous and it's impossible to stay in a hotel that's near to all the sites. Most sites you want to see are outside of town and require day trips so I'd choose a hotel near a metro station before worrying about where the sites are. We used the metro multiple times per day to get around and we still easily walked up to 10 miles each day.

On our first day we set out to see Peterhof, which was the summer palace of Peter the Great. This requires a half-hour boat ride and at least $100 by the time you've bought the boat tickets, garden tickets, and palace tickets. They really charge you for every little thing. Also, pack a lunch, snack, water, etc when you go because once you're there your only option for food and beverages are little kiosks that charge exorbitant prices.

What's amazing about Peterhof are all the fountains. The palace is impressive but the fountains are what makes it really special. There are miles of walkways through the gardens as well that are filled with fountains. Below are some pictures of the palace and the main fountains along with pictures of the crowds. This is a very popular site but there's no good time to go because it's only open 10-6 so there are always tons of tourists there.



There was this neat fountain cascading down a checkerboard-patterned runway with dragons at the top of it. Neat.



A few more fountains. Really, there were fountains around every corner of the gardens.



There were bird houses in some areas of the gardens as well. Here is a picture of one of them - they were really nice little buildings - but the little old ladies guarding them made you pay to enter so we stayed out.



After touring Peterhof, we had a late lunch/early dinner at Terrassa. This restaurant is on the 6th floor of a building (no buildings in St Petersburg go higher) and it had a very extensive menu with reasonable prices. Definitely worth a lunch visit if you're in the area. Martin, of course, got borscht. He can't get enough of that stuff. I got this amazing garden salad that was just cucumbers, radishes, and tomatoes topped with sun-dried tomatoes and some herbs and a vinaigrette. Really amazing. We topped it off with pizza and beer.



After our lunch/dinner we wandered over to the church of the savior on spilled blood, so named because Alexander II was assassinated on the spot that the church was built around. On the way to the church, there were tons of kiosks selling touristy things and several people making espresso from the backs of their vans:



The church of the savior on spilled blood was really impressive on both the outside and the inside. It could be seen from all over St Petersburg. On the inside, all the walls and ceilings were vibrantly-colored mosaics and, right at the apex of the church was Jesus looking down at you. A really beautiful church. Sorry some of the pics below are a little blurry.



This is a picture of the ceiling.



Later in the evening, we attended a St Petersburg Philharmonic concert in the venue below. It was the last concert of the season for the Philharmonic and they had a guest pianist who was absolutely amazing. After the concert, we enjoyed wine and dessert at Claret, which is one of the restaurants attached to the Hotel Helvetia. We enjoyed a glass of wine there almost every night of our trip because it had a cute terrace to sit on while we drank our wine.

Ladenburg and Die Kartoffel

Yesterday we visited the village of Ladenburg with a group of friends. Two of our friends had been to a restaurant there before, called Die Kartoffel (translates to "the potato"). At this restaurant, you order a piece of steak or other meat and you cook it on a hot stone in front of you at the table. More about that in a bit.

Ladenburg is east of the Rhein (we live west of it) and about 35-40 minutes away from us by car. There are some really old ruins in Ladenburg, which has been inhabited since before 200 BCE. Below are some pictures from around the town.

The town is surrounded by these high walls:



Then inside the town there are walls that are labeled with the year they were built. The earliest was from 70CE, I think. Others were from 200CE, 700CE. Really old walls.



Super super cute town; every house was different. Many had the years they were built painted on them - some as early as the 1400's:



Our little group, minus Martin who was taking the picture:



Here's the outside of our little restaurant (it's quite small inside as well, though it has a main floor and then a basement level):



Everybody was listening intently while the waitress told them how to cook their steaks and what the 3 sauces were that came alongside them.



What comes with the steaks are baked potatoes absolutely covered with sour cream (or butter, if you so desired). These potatoes were amazing:



A few posed shots with all the meat and potatoes and wine. Martin actually got venison instead of steak so he had smaller pieces to cook up. And I got a salad, since I don't eat steak and don't like venison. You could also order a turkey breast to cook on a stone but I wasn't very excited about that so I stuck with an enormous salad (that I couldn't even finish). Long story short, Ladenburg and die Kartoffel are definitely worth a visit if you're ever in the neighborhood.

Weinwanderung 2015

FYI, "weinwanderung" translates to "wine hike". Every year, Martin and I organize this event for a weekend afternoon/evening in June. We get around 30 adults every year, plus some kids, to visit a winery for a wine tasting, tour, and walk through the vineyards. Then we all go out to dinner. All the people who came are affiliated with BASF, live in our town or in nearby towns, and most of them are Americans. Actually, only 3 of the people from this event were not American.

This year the event was at the Fitz Ritter winery in our hometown of Bad Dürkheim. We've tried and enjoyed many of their wines before and we knew it was a nice winery (and it's close to home!) so it was a natural choice for this year. Fitz Ritter was started in 1785 and is currently run by the 9th generation of Fitzes which is pretty neat.

We started off the afternoon in their tasting room where we tasted 6 wines and 1 sekt (sparkling white wine). The kids even got their own little table where they tasted grape juice.



After the tasting we wandered out to the vineyards for a brief description of how the grapes are grown, which is done organically at this winery. This was a little disappointing because we did not get a "hike" this year due to a wedding occurring on the winery grounds. We will be sure to get the hike promised in the title of this event back next year.



These are baby grapes, just starting to grow:



After our brief excursion outdoors we went down to the cellar where we saw the stainless steel barrels where white wines age and the oak barrels where the red wines age (sorry I didn't take any pictures of those). Also in the cellar is the "Sekt Museum" which is where they showed us how they make and bottle their Sekt. This museum room is also where they house all of their "noble sweet wines", which range in date back to 1925 and are not for sale but are used for auctions. Each wine on the wall in the pictures below is tasted every 10-12 years to ensure it's still good.



After we tasted our final Sekt in the Sekt Museum, we of course bought some wine and then headed off to dinner which was in the infamous Bad Dürkheim Fass - the largest wine barrel in the world. We had almost 40 people for dinner and so we got the whole middle level of the Fass to ourselves which was a fun experience. Pics of the Fass that I took back in 2012 are below, followed by pics of a few of our tables at dinner.