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At 2:00, Polina picked us up with Rialemma and took us to the Russian Museum (Russkij Musej) which is just around the block from the Church on Spilled Blood.

It was founded in 1898 in the Mikailovsky Palace, but now includes the Engineer’s Castle and both the Marble and Strogonov Palaces. The museum system here is much fairer regarding using a video camera. If you elect to, you simply pay a little more for your entrance fee and you are permitted to take all the videos and photographs you want. I paid the extra and did just that. Others wondered why I was being allowed to video everything. This museum was magnificent and can only be described by the photos I have taken of the great Russian art housed here. Do you like it?

By 3:30 we were done and it was time to drive to Peterhof (Petrodvorec), an hour away (19 miles) in the eastern outskirts of the city located on the Gulf of Finland. On the way we drove past Trinity Cathedral (Troitsky sobor) with its 5 dark blue domes.

This is where Peter the Great married Empress Catherine I (a previous Lithuanian washerwoman). We had the chance to see artists painting pictures of the beautiful and historic building. We arrived in the beautiful little town of Peterhof at 4:30 and began our tour of the Peterhof Palace which was built by Peter the Great after his victory over the Swedes in 1709.

Peter was inspired by his visit to Versailles in Paris in 1717. It was designed by Jean Baptiste Le Blond and took from 1714-21 to finish. The gardens between the Palace and the sea were designed by Bartolomeo Rastrelli for Empress Elizabeth in the mid-18th Century.

We entered and climbed the stairs of the ornate entry with its gilded carvings and caryatids and then toured through all the rooms of the palace which were of course quite spectacular after their recent renovation for the city’s 2003 tercentennial. The Throne Room was the largest. The ceiling art was quite nice and one of the rooms was covered with portraits so that from a distance the walls looked painted black.

At 6:00 we left the building and toured the palace grounds which were absolutely spectacular. The Grand Cascade is a sequence of 37 gilded bronze sculptures, 64 fountains and 142 water jets which pour from the palace terraces to the Marine Canal and to the Gulf.

The main attraction is the statue of Sampson breaking the jaws of a lion symbolizing Peter’s victory over Sweden.

We walked down the main canal to the port on the Gulf and it wasn’t a short walk.

By 6:20 I snuck off from the 3 women and had a cappuccino at the palace café. They soon found me and at 6:30 Polina drove us back to St. Petersburg so that we could get dressed for dinner.

Polina had a special dinner planned for us and she picked us up and took us to the Palkin Restaurant [Nevsky Prospekt] at 9:00. She left us there and we went up to the 2nd floor and it was obvious that this place was for entertaining wealthy patrons.

The service was impeccable and the food was great. We started with champagne and then I switched to Russian beer and then we shared a bottle of Italian Bataliono Gavi di Gavi white wine.

Marcia had tomato soup, artichokes & cream, and sturgeon & olives while I had king scallops, duck leg confit with veal-stuffed cabbage, and cauliflower.

We then shared the 7 course Desert Palkin with a glass of port followed by an espresso for me and a caffe latte for Marcia. The singer was great and the bathrooms were exquisite.

I couldn’t imagine such a 1st class place in communist Russia. They have a casino next door and they allowed me to purchase some Russian casino chips (50 and 10 rubles) to add to my chip collection. This was indeed a splendid experience in dining. So far, Polina has been worth her weight in gold.

She picked us up right on time (thanks to our Russian phone chips from Megafon) and then she took us for a ride at 11:30 so we could see the midnight “opening of the bridges” that occurs every night. All the bridges throughout the city open up at one time (around midnight) and stay up for about three hours to allow ships to navigate the canals and rivers.

You don’t want to be caught on the wrong side of the river especially if your parents are expecting you home or you face an extortionately expensive boat ride.

The lighted bridges all extending into the air made a spectacular sight. She then drove us back to the hotel and Marcia and I went over to the Astoria Hotel bar for a beer & chardonnay while I emptied the photos from the memory stick into the computer. It really was a romantic evening and we got to bed at 3:15 in the morning.