Peterhof: where your fountain-related dreams come true

On Friday we decided to go to Peterhof, which is about half an hour by hydrofoil from St Petersburg. Peterhof is basically a complex of palaces and gardens, started by Peter the Great. Others added to the complex to make it as awesome as it is today.

There are at least half a dozen hydrofoil companies that are docked behind the Hermitage and they usually leave every 30 minutes, so it's not very difficult to rock on up to a boat and get going. It cost us about $40 return. This may seem expensive but the alternative was to catch the bus which would have taken 90 minutes each way. I'd rather spend $40 than waste a good part of my day on the bus.

A day out at Peterhof can end up being quite expensive if you want to go into all of the palaces and buildings, as each one has an entry fee on top of the 450 rubles you have to pay to enter the gardens to begin with. I think we were both getting a case of museum fatigue so didn't really mind missing most of the smaller buildings, but made an exception for the Grand Palace which set us back 550 rubles.

The Grand Palace is pretty grand to be honest. It sits on a hill, so when you enter Peterhof from the pier and take the main path, there it is staring right at you and judging you because you don't have sparkly gold fountains.

The entry to the Grand Palace is through the doors right in the middle, but the sneaky thing is that individual visitors need to buy their tickets from an unmarked ticket office just out of view of this picture, to the right. Well, pretty much unmarked - because the sign next to the ticket office said "buy your tickets inside the museum" as opposed to just inside this door.

It's as fancy on the inside as it is on the outside. The rooms are adorned with gold and sparkly things, but you have to contend with thousands of other people who also adore shiny things.

The fountains in the lower garden are really something and it's easy enough to spend the whole day just wandering around.

Aside from the more "normal" Roman-inspired fountains, there's also a bizarre side they like to show off:

Sometimes they like to keep things simple and make fountains out of regular rocks:

But sometimes the regular rocks are only used to make bigger and better fountains, like this cascading chessboard one. If that isn't enough, there are also colourful sculptures of dragons at the top of it.

Not only do they rule at making fountains, their gardening skills aren't too shabby either:

Animal fountains are also a big deal. The mechanical ducks even quack.

If that's not enough, Peterhof even has an assortment of  real animals like squirrels and ducklings!

At the end of a long day you can sit down, cool off, and admire the view:

For now I will leave you with photos of people running through fountains:

P.S. Finally got to use my umbrella:

Statues of Moscow

This  post is dedicated to all of the statues and fountains I came across in Moscow. They seemed to be everywhere, but not all of them have made it into the blog so far. And that's where this post comes in - they are all pretty damn awesome and deserve to be seen.

This the monument to Cyril and Methodius, who are said to be the founding fathers of Cyrillic. Although scary at first, Cyrillic isn't actually all that bad. Some of the letters are similar to the Latin alphabet (but some have different sounds), some are similar to the Greek alphabet, and others I have never come across before. Being an English speaker and having learned some Greek at uni, it hasn't been too hard trying to figure out what signs say especially if you put a little effort into learning the letters in that third miscellaneous category. It sure has helped when catching the metro, because once you are inside there isn't much English at all.

I came across several fountains in Alexander Garden just outside the Kremlin.

This one is of four horses and is apparently known as the "Four Seasons of the Year" fountain. You can't tell in this photo, but three of the horses are looking in one direction but the fourth looks a little bit freaked out and has its head cocked towards the Kremlin.

Also near Alexander Garden is a series of fountains known as the "Heroes of Fairy Tales". They are set along a small canal type structure between Alexander Garden and the underground shopping mall below Manezhnaya Square.

The underground shopping mall is literally just that - a three storey shopping mall that is underground. It looks like any other shopping centre, but the elevator is a little trippy. Instead of regular numbers, it uses -1, -2, and -3. This fountain sits in the atrium (on the -3rd floor) by a cafe.

Outside St Basil's Cathedral is the monument to Minin and Pozarhsky. Apparently they win at life and deserve a monument because they got together a volunteer army and kicked some bad guys out of Russia.

Lenin's Mausoleum was closed for several months because they were trying to repair the foundations. There were rumours around that they were actually planning to finally bury Lenin. Luckily for us, it reopened about a week or two before we arrived.

It is open from 10am until 1pm, but is closed on Mondays and Fridays. Our common strategy on this trip seems to be the earlier the better, so we arrived just after 9am, got some McDonald's for breakfast and then joined the queue just after 9.30am (there were already about 20 people in line). We figured this would be our best bet because when we had walked past the queue the other day, there must have been at least 60-80 people in it.

The guards in charge of this queue drip feed people to the security area, where you have to go through a scanner and the security guards check your bags. And by check, I mean check in great detail. They go through all of your compartments and apparently even open up glasses cases in search of cameras (and other stuff too, presumably). Charlotte had to check her bag in at the State Historical Museum because the security guard found her BlackBerry, but not the camera she had hidden under some stuff. My camera is somewhat chunkier and was more difficult too hide, but it somehow remained concealed under my map and a packet of tissues. I must have had a more lenient guard though because he definitely must have seen my phone when he opened up the compartment it was in, but still let me through.

The mausoleum itself is VERY dimly lit - both Charlotte and I almost tripped going down the first set of stairs after entering the mausoleum from broad daylight. Seeing the embalmed body of Lenin was extremely eery and a little bit creepy, but I am glad I did it.

In the same secured area as Lenin's Mausoleum is a strip of the Kremlin Wall where important people are buried (or their ashes, anyway). There was a small group of Japanese tourists in front of me and one of the men (probably in his 60s) tried to read all of the Cyrillic names on the plaques. When he exclaimed "Staaaliiiinn... Look! Look! It's Stalin" to the rest of his group, I understood exactly how he felt.

Apart from recognising the Cyrillic for Stalin, what's even more awesome is that Yuri Gagarin is buried in the wall too!

With no disrespect for the dead, Lenin's embalmed body is pretty much a statue so here is a picture of the mausoleum (given that no cameras were allowed).

While in Moscow, we went to Cafe Mu-Mu (My-My in Cyrillic) more than once. It's a chain of restaurants, where you choose what you want from a canteen set-up and pay. The salads and carbs are charged at a per serve price, but some of the meat dishes are charged by weight. On our first outing I had a delicious pork chop covered in gravy and then the second time I pretty much hit my food jackpot by pointing at random: steak, topped with caramelised onions, then baked (I think) with some sort of delicious cream cheese mixture.

Each store has this awesome cow out the front (my definition of 'statue' is very broad today):

So awesome that they had to chain the cow to the menu board at this store:

On our last full day before heading off to St Petersburg, we paid a visit to the Krymsky Val branch of the State Tretyakov Gallery. It contains an amazing and huge collection of Russian art - by the end we had seen so much art that we probably didn't appreciate the last couple dozen of paintings as much as we would have, had we seen them at the beginning. I fell in love with the works of Mikhail Nesterov, who currently has an entire exhibition hall dedicated to him.

There is one particular painting called 'Russia, the Soul of the People' which is spectacular in real life as it takes up an entire wall. It is also fascinating because they have a number of small study canvases on display as well.

About 100m away from the Tretyakov Gallery is something known as the Fallen Monument Park (I found it on TripAdvisor as the Graveyard of Fallen Monuments). I have read that some monuments were dumped here before the collapse of the Soviet Union but it didn't become an official park until afterwards. Unfortunately the park was closed - the grass was overgrown, so I'm not sure how much longer the statues will be there - but because it is so large, we could still see quite a bit around the perimeter.

The area surrounding the Tretyakov Gallery is quite arty and there is a special area dedicated to artists, where they can paint and put their paintings on display. I found some people painting in the shadow of this statue:

On our way to the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, I came across this enormous statue of what looked like a pirate ship. It is absolutely gigantic, but for some reason it wasn't on the map I had. I had a bit of a google and apparently it is a monument to Peter the Great. Some people hate it, but I think it is awesome and wouldn't mind having something like that in Wellington!

Finally, the metro system of Moscow is beyond beautiful. Platforms are decorated with mosaics, chandeliers, and plenty of marble carvings. Legend has it that the brown circle line is there because Stalin put his coffee cup on the plans, which left behind a coffee stain. The person in charge was too scared to clarify what Stalin wanted, so the circle line was built.

This is the Biblioteka Imeni Lenina station, which is next to the Russian State Library, near the Kremlin. There is a statue in this photo, therefore my rambling about the metro, and all subsequent photos are totally justified (I am too lazy to write an entire post on the Moscow metro, even though I probably could).