Weather change.

The weather has reverted back to typical St. Peterburg weather, which is very similar to Washington state- chilly, damp and drippy. Quite the change from Colorado, and while I miss the warmth, my allergies are now completely gone, yay!

   Wednesday was... quite the "adventure". We had been told we were to visit the Pavlovsk palace, so most of us dressed for indoors walking. What Artemi had failed to mention, though, is that there was a 2 mile hike on dirt (read: mud) trails to get there! I was very much reminded of Washington and Hawaii on the way, as it was through a deciduous forest with ferns for undergrowth, and where there was any grass, it was supported from underneath by moss. Quite beautiful, moreso because I was actually dressed for the weather! (My backpack, however, is not waterproof, it turns out. The dictionary I have is now quite the worse for wear.)

          Two miles later, we got to the palace, which is quite beautiful. Since it was raining and icky, we were asked to put plastic booties over our shoes to protect the floors, and we all looked rather silly in our blue booties, but they did help warm our feet after the hike. The palace itself was quite pretty, but apparently it had been firebombed by the Nazis in WW2, and much of it had to be restored since then, so it was considerably newer than most historical buildings. 

    For some reason, I am ridiculously proud of this picture. It looks pretty normal, except for my smiling face and a small amount of frame in the upper corner. Yes, I took a picture of a mirror in order to capture the interior of a room! The glare on the picture behind me from the windows around the mirror made getting a picture very difficult, and it didn't capture the beautiful mural on the ceiling. 

   Ironically, Artemi, in the blue shirt on the left, saw me taking it, and made his way around the group and the tour guide to see if I'd successfully taken the picture. Apparently, he'd been trying to get a good picture of this room for a while, and hadn't thought of using the mirror. I showed him how well it had turned out, and he vowed to try that the next time he came through.

     And finally, here are the gardens (a picture taken from inside). Supposedly this is the high point of the Pavlovsk Palace, but since it was so horrible, we didn't get a change to get out and wander. The plan was the have lunch at the cafe there, then wander the gardens and grounds for an hour or two, but there were two tours' worth of people in the cafe, and it would have been a wait of 30 minutes to get any of us a table. Artemi decided not to wait, since there was another cafe nearby, but once we slogged through the rain and mud there, it turned out it had closed due to the weather.

     Slightly dejected, we wandered the mile or so back to the train station (the "short" way), only to find that it was lunch break on the railroads, and there wouldn't be another ride for 90 minutes. Since Artemi hadn't told us we'd be hiking so much today, some of the group was in highly inappropriate shoes and clothing, most of us were soaked, and I was the only one with foresight to bring a snack, so a lot of tempers were running short. 

   We ended up grabbing a bus back into St. Petersburg, which was hugely cramped and excessively humid, as most of the passengers were drenched. It took about 30 minutes to get back to the southernmost metro station, another 20 minutes to my stop, and a bunch of us descended on the closest McD's like a mongol horde. I don't usually condone McD's, but after the morning we'd had, I scarfed down a double cheeseburger meal as if it were my last one on earth. 

     Two hours to go home and dry off, then we hit an opera (blessedly in-town, and the rain had stopped!), which was done in English. Sadly, the singers were Russian, and had really bad accents on top of it being, you know, opera, so I actually got more out of the Russian subtitles than I did listening to it. Ironic, but it gave me hope for my abilities in Russian. 

    This weekend we're taking a (14-hour, ack!) trip to the city of Novgorod. I plan on taking extra sweaters, gloves, and every piece of waterproof anything I can find. :) I did spend some time waterproofing my backpack, and will not be bringing my homework with me this time (and more food!), so hopefully it will be better than Wednesday's trip. Finally, Sunday is a day off; time to find that bookstore!!