May 16

Today's plan was to get an early start so we had breakfast at 7:30 and were out of the hotel around 8 AM. We had a short walk to the metro station (not the closest but would avoid having to transfer trains) and took the metro one stop to one of St. Petersburg's rail stations, the Vitebsk railway station. Our plan was to go south to have a day visiting palaces. Our first destination was to be Pavlovsk, the same area where we had eaten at that wonderful Russian restaurant with my relatives the Saturday before, but this time to visit the palace there.

Hindisght is better than foresight - I should have just asked where to buy the ticket, rather than going to the place that said (in Russian) ticket window. We had about 25 minutes before the next train left. There was a short line, seemed like this would be easy, but after about 5 minutes the line had not moved at all. So I had Michael stay in line and I walked over to a machine that sold tickets. The machine had an option for English so I thought I was in luck. Next step, place one's credit card in the machine which I did and then all of the instructions were in Russian. I was able to figure out that I was to type in the destination which I did and received a message that the destination could not be found. However, there was no option to cancel the transaction or go back so I stood and looked at the machine very frustrated - no ticket, no credit card. I got Michael to come over and thank goodness he is so tech savvy,; he did something and the credit card came out of the machine. We went back to the line, having lost our place and there was a woman in line and I said something about Pavlovsk and she indicated this was not the correct line and we should should go upstairs. So we left and went upstairs and found another line, but this time smarter, I said Pavlovsk and the person in line signaled to go through a door at the end of the room. We ended up in another very large room with trains at the end. I asked someone about Pavlovsk and was directed to a cashier at the end of the room. For a little over $1 each, I got two tickets finally and we dashed out of the room and got into the train with less than a minute to spare.

The ride took about 35 minutes. We saw the restaurant we had eaten at on Saturday and just past it was the train station. We exited the train, crossed the street and saw an entrance to the ground of the Pavlovsk palace. There were a few signs that did guide us and after about a 20 minute walk through nice parkland we could see the palace and we walked toward it. We were approaching from the rear so it was a bit confusing about how to get to the front, but we did. The palace was quite beautiful and we passed a fenced in garden with roses and other flowers (that we could never figure out how to access). There is a large plaza in front of palace and as we walked in, some tour groups were arriving. We walked up to the ticket window . There was no one there for about 5 minutes and then a woman entered the little booth. Credit card - that wouldn't work, so we tried to pay with a large bill in Russian rubles (like 1000, I think, which is about $30, and that wouldn't work either. We were directed more or less to the ATM in the restaurant, but the restaurant was closed and the doors were locked. So another challenging experience of trying to spend Russian money in Russia and having the Russians refuse to take it. Finally the woman took our money, left her little booth, went in a door, and came back a few minutes later with change so we could buy the entry tickets. By then a couple of large groups of tourists had arrived (the palace opened at 10 which is just about when we had arrived) so we had to stand in line for a while to get in. Turns out that just about all the other tourists at the palace were French. We tried to tag along and listen to some tour guides, but it was hard to understand and my French comprehension for spoken French is not so great.

This palace was built in the 18th century by Tsar Paul 1 and Empress Maria Feodorovna . The Germans occupied Pavlovsk palace for two and a half years. The morning after the initial German attack on St. Petersburg in June, 1941, the museum curator began packing up the items; by August 13,000 objects had been packed and sent away in crates to be stored in the basement of St. Isaac's Cathedral in St. Petersburg. The larger antiquities were put in the basement of the palace and a brick wall was constructed around them. As the Germans came closer to the palace, the park and Palace came under bombardment. The museum staff began to bury the statues which were too heavy to evacuate. They calculated that the Germans would not dig deeper than one meter eighty centimeters, so they buried all the statues as deep as three meters. Pavlovsk was liberated on January 24, 1944. When the Soviet troops arrived, the Palace had already been burning for three days. The main building of the Palace was a hollow shell, without a roof or floors. Pictures are present showing the shell of the palace; the restoration that has been done by comparison is amazing. The grounds reopened in 1955 and the first rooms of the palace in 1958. By 1977, on the 200th anniversary of the beginning of the Palace, fifty rooms were finished,

What was really nice about this palace is that it had a lot of furnishings. The dining room had the table set as if ready for a royal banquet to occur at any minute. The museum houses decorative arts, sculpture, paintings. The day we were there was a beautiful sunny day and after we toured the palace we walked the magnificent grounds for close to two hours. There were few people (except a group of rather noisy schoolchildren that we did our best to avoid) and the atmosphere was tranquil and verdant and royal. The grounds have small lakes and streams; isolated fisherman were fishing. A favorite scene of mine was an older woman on one of the bridges who was pensive and immobile for the longest time. It was a glorious experience to be out of the city, away from a lot of people, enjoying nature and doing that with my son.

We made our way back to the train station. I was getting tired and wanted to stop for a rest. There was a very long walkway which approached the station lines with benches. All were bright green and had a cardboard sign on them that looked as if it probably said "Wet Paint", so no rest for the weary. We had the option of taking the train back to the next stop in Pushkin but the train station was not really near the palace which was to be our next stop. Many buses and the small minibuses stopped across from the train station. One stopped and it had a sign in English that said Palaces, so got on and verified with the driver that he really was going to the palace in Pushkin. He was very nice, indicated when to get off, and pointed where to walk. Since I had been there twice and Michael once, we knew where to go. Our first stop was a shop we had seen on the side of the palace that said something about the Amber workshop. We went in and asked for Boris, said we were his cousins and he was expecting us. (I had previously sent him an e-mail that we were coming.) The woman in the shop made a phone call and then escorted us out and to another building which houses the restoration workshop. We met Liliana there and briefly saw Leonid who we had met on Saturday. We never did see Boris. However, we were introduced to Ilka, I think her name is, who works with public relations for the workshop. She is responsible for the workshop tours and travels when there are traveling exhibits. The workshop area we were in was not large, but it was fascinating to be there. We got an explanation about amber, saw how it is colored and how the artisans create the mosaics. We saw a completed panel that is ready for installation in the amber room and another competed piece of art that is going from the head of state in Russia to the head of state in Lithuania. The workshop also does furniture restoration and we saw a bureau from Peterhof that was to be restored and some doors from Catherine's Palace. It was a very special experience.

So who is my cousin Boris?

Director of the Tsarskoye Selo Amber Workshop, born April 14, 1956, in Leningrad, he worked at Stonecutter's Association "Russian Gems"; since 1984 - at the State Museum-Preserve "Tsarskoye Selo": a master of artistic stonework, supervised by a team of manufacturing Florentine mosaics, since 1995 headed the reconstruction of the Amber Room in the Catherine Palace, an art restorer of the highest category, is married and has a daughter and a son.

And what is the Amber Room?

The Amber Room was commissioned by King Friedrich I in 1701 for his sumptuous City Palace in Berlin and required eight years to complete under the guidance of the master craftsman Gottfried Wolfram, French jeweler Tusso and architect Andraes Schlüter. In 1711, the panels were placed in a room in at the palace where Friedrich played ticktacktoe and piquet games with his friends. He died in 1713.

The Amber Room was presented as a gift from King Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia (King Friedrich I's son) to Peter the Great of Russia. Friedrich Wilhelm I reportedly gave the room to Peter to cement an alliance with Russia. In return Peter contributed 55 exceptionally tall men to Friedrich Wilhelm's army of giant men. Peter took the panels to the czar's summer residence at Tsarkoye Selo (now Pushkin) near St. Petersburg in 1716. Peter was not so fond of extravagance himself. The amber panels were considered be too opulent and flashy for his taste. After he received the panels he had them stored away in their boxes. The panels were not taken out until 1740 when Peter's daughter Empress Elizabeth decided to build a special room for the amber, which was completed in 1755. The room was designed so that the amber blazed with golden light in the setting sun.

On September 17, 1941, the German army captured the town of Pushkin, south of Leningrad, and immediately occupied Summer Palace of Catherine the Great. The women of Pushkin were able to remove nearly all the art work in the summer palace but were not able remove the Amber Room. Rolls of wallpaper were placed over the amber but that didn't fool the Nazis. Within hours after the Nazis arrived, the Amber Room was dismantled and carried off by the Germans to Kaliningrad (then known as Königsberg). After the war the amber room panels disappeared without a trace. At that time the panels weighed six tons and were valued at more than $150 million. It is said that Hitler planned to put the panels in the colossal Fuhrmuseum he was planning to build in Linz.

Of the tens of thousands or works of art that were looted in World War II, many regard the lost of the Amber Room as the most tragic and the most intensively sought. All that remains of the Amber Room is one color photograph, several black-and-white photographs, some pieces of amber panel and a few drawings and notes. What happened to the panels of the Amber Room is one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of the 20th century. Some people think they were deliberately burned or were carried by a ship or submarine that was sunk. Others, like former Russian leader Boris Yeltsin, believe they were reassembled in the home of a German or American collector. Most believe they were destroyed in Allied bombing raids in Kaliningrad. The Amber Room was recreated at a total cost of $11.3 million, with with a $3.5 million grant from Ruhrgas, the giant German gas company. The re-creation was unveiled to world leaders during St. Petersburg 300th anniversary celebrations in May 2003. Those who have seen it have called an "eighth wonder," "a jewel," and "astonishing."

After Ilka took us back to the shop and we had some tea and coffee. She is a young woman and told us she has Jewish roots in her family but does not know much about them and wishes she did. We talked about that a bit and some of her travels. She then took us to the entrance to Catherine's Palace. This would be my only repeat experience on the trip, but Michael really wanted to see the palace and it was just fine with me to go back in. It was, perhaps, more impressive the second time around.

After leaving Catherine's Palace, we walked about 5-10 minutes to Alexander's Palace which we had previously passed in the car. It was built between 1792 and 1796, commissioned by Catherine the Great for her favorite grandson, Grand Duke Alexander Pavlovich, the future emperor Alexander I of Russia. commissioned by Catherine the Great for her favorite grandson, Grand Duke Alexander Pavlovich, the future emperor Alexander I of Russia. This was the favorite residence of the last Russian Emperor, Nicholas II, and his family and their initial place of imprisonment after the revolution that overthrew the Romanov dynasty in early 1917. Not long after the departure of the Romanovs for Siberia, a museum was established within the Alexander Palace. It operated until the beginning of the Second World War. At the beginning of the war, the most valuable furnishings were evacuated to the interior of the country. The remaining parts of the collection were hidden in the basement. During the Nazi German occupation, the palace was used as headquarters for the German military command. The area in front of the palace was turned into a cemetery for SS soldiers. The palace has been undergoing renovations which are not yet finished and is now an exhibition space dedicated to the final years of Tsarist Russia. This was a palace dedicated to a very different time of Russian history than any place I had visited.

After we returned to the amber gift shop and I bought a necklace (given a small discount as I am Boris' cousin) and then I bought a scarf I had seen at a street vendor the first time I was there and really liked. We walked and looked at the street vendors and then thought we should get back to the train station. We had been given a bus number by the woman in the amber workshop. We got on a bus (wrong number) and when we realized that Michael got out his phone with the GPS to see if we were going anywhere near the train station and it turned out the bus dropped us off right in front of the station. A very nice woman showed us where to buy tickets and where to get on the train. Our ride back was seamless although we had some entertainment from a woman playing the guitar and singing.

We ended up at the same train station we had left from earlier in the day, but this time had some time to look at the station Vitebsky Volzal. This was Russia's first train station opening in 1837 with the first route being the one we had just taken from St. Petersburg to Pushkin. The décor which it is easy to look past is quite rich and opulent. We then walked to the restaurant we had chosen for the evening which was in the general vicinity (that would mean within a mile) of the train station, Khochu Kharcho . This was a fun restaurant that serves Georgian food. It is fairly large with the bar on the first floor and the restaurant on the second. We sat in the non-smoking section and were next to the open part of the kitchen where the shashlik was grilled. The counter next to our table had a chef who was making something out of dough, possibly khachapouri, and then putting it in a big oven that looked something like a tandoori. It was fun watching the kitchen and then eating the food as well. There was live entertainment with a small band and a female vocalist.

Once finished I deferred to Michael to find us the closest bus stop and bus that would get us back to the hotel and he lived up to the task.