{"id":189,"date":"2009-10-07T20:26:21","date_gmt":"2009-10-07T20:26:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lebca.wordpress.com\/?p=189"},"modified":"2010-03-31T00:08:25","modified_gmt":"2010-03-31T08:08:25","slug":"peterhof-grounds-19-september-2009","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lebca.com\/fromrussiawithlove\/st-petersburg\/peterhof-grounds-19-september-2009\/","title":{"rendered":"Peterhof Grounds Saturday 19 September 2009"},"content":{"rendered":"

Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take photos inside Peterhof. This is quite a bummer as I can’t say I remember what any of the inside looks like. All I remember is that there were 3 architects and so 3 different styles. The first was Peter the Great’s architect, and his style was mostly wood and the most conservative in ornamentation. There is only one room left now in that style, and it is my favorite style out of the three. The second style was a Baroque style made by the Italian architect Bartolomeo Rastrelli for Elizabeth of Russia between 1745 and 1755. During this phase, the upper gardens were added and two wings were added to the palace to make it massive. It looked better as a quaint summer palace with Peter, but Elizabeth wanted more I guess. The last style was overseen by Catherine the Great and was in a Classical style.<\/p>\n

I remember everything looking exquisite and amazing, but no details. The funnest part was that because it was raining\/sprinkling, we had to wear these booties over our feet which were alike to the exercise board that simulated skating and you watched that workout video that led you through the workout. As a kid though I would just put the cloth booties on and slide across the 6 foot plastic board, which is exactly what we did all through Peterhof. Which reminds me, there were a lot of hardwood floors. This is probably why I don’t remember too much as we were skating the whole time.<\/p>\n

But after we finished with the indoors, we got to take photos of the outside:<\/p>\n

\n

\"The
The grounds from the palace upper level. Yes the white guard rail is supposed to be a straight line and the two vase things are directly to my left and right. But I didn't feel like fooling around with Photoshop to get it exactly right. It kind of has that impressionistic feel this way I think, k maybe not.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Looking
Looking back up at the palace. The gold statue is a man opening some fish's mouth so the water can shoot up. He's pretty strong.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Continuing
Continuing down the waterway.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Heading
Heading to the left in the previous photo we arrived at this fountain. Since Peterhof is the Russian Versailles, the grounds were huge and we in no way covered a majority of them.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"The
The grounds looked like this for the most part. If I lived here I would wake up every morning and run the perimeter or zigzag through it. The air was super clean and I was jealous. It's not like this in Moscow. Realistically though, I would probably run twice a week as a recovery. The day before each run I'd probably ride my bike along the coast trying to see Finland. I'd fill in the other days with huge capture the flag games. Mowing these lawns could be pretty fun with a tractor.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"It's
It's even got little creeks trickling through the forest.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Pipers!
Pipers! Or Russian Horns! I'm not really sure, but we caught the last bit of their show when we walked up. They were playing the Haydn Lo Speziale Overture, or a piece of it.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"The
The Stair Fountain, as I call it. After we walked to the upper level and looked around but it was mostly forest and a pond, so we came back down to look for the trick fountains.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We had heard there were trick fountains all over the grounds but we had yet to see one. After deciding to find one, we realized we didn’t know what to look for as it probably would look like a normal fountain. Luckily we stumbled upon one by accident:<\/p>\n

\n

\"After
After running across to check the response time (man it was laggy, I would hate to LAN with this latency), I decided to man up and get wet. I had a rain jacket after all.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Look
Look your enemies in the eyes when they attack. It freaks 'em out. It apparently worked. I delayed the gold head from shooting water at me until I was already running out of the strike zone.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"I
I got very wet. But it was worth it. Clothes dry.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Looking
Looking out past the distant ship, trying to catch a glimpse of Finland, I pondered what Peter thought when he decided to build his fortress and Palace here. No not really, but it seemed like a good caption.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"It's
It's night time and we are hitting up all the malls and shops in Petersburg because Austin and I want new shoes. I scored with some slip-on leather shoes with cyrillic on the inside, a rarety even in Russia I've been told. Then we walked back along ulitsa Lenina (every city has a street named after Lenin), and Moscow's got his body. This is a hotel along that street, I think. We stopped in Mango, Zara, and of course the Puma store before heading back to the dorm, stopping to notice the Carl's Jr. We ended up eating there the next day because we were all craving a Western Burger after seeing Carl's in such odd circumstances. Guess what? In Russia Carl's Jr. serves beer on tap, and it was the first food place that allowed free refills (of soft drinks)\u2014or at least had no sign saying "No free refills." \ud83d\ude42<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

That’s it for the night. We hung out inside the hostel for the rest of the night and took it easy. I read a bit more about Roland, Eddie, Susannah, and Jake listened to some music and got some shuteye (something I’m craving at the moment).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take photos inside Peterhof. This is quite a bummer as I can’t say I remember what any of the inside looks like. All I remember is that there were 3 architects and so 3 different styles. The first was Peter the Great’s architect, and his style was mostly wood […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-st-petersburg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lebca.com\/fromrussiawithlove\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lebca.com\/fromrussiawithlove\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lebca.com\/fromrussiawithlove\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lebca.com\/fromrussiawithlove\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lebca.com\/fromrussiawithlove\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.lebca.com\/fromrussiawithlove\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1289,"href":"https:\/\/www.lebca.com\/fromrussiawithlove\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189\/revisions\/1289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lebca.com\/fromrussiawithlove\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lebca.com\/fromrussiawithlove\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lebca.com\/fromrussiawithlove\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}