Picture of the Day: The Chronicles of Russia

Pavlovsk, St. Petersburg, Russia -- May, 2011

So, our little guide suggested three park and palaces to visit around St. Petersburg: Peterhof, Pushkin, and Pavlovsk, rather in that order of importance. Since we only had two days, we decided to visit just the first two. Ah, but Russia knew better than us.

Our book told us which station to go to, which was the same for both Pushkin and Pavlovsk, which were just a stop or two apart. We stood in line at the counter to buy tickets, pointed to the name of where we wanted to go in our guide book (since it was written in Russian there) and the lady, without saying a word, held up a nice English sign that told us to go up stairs to buy tickets to Pushkin. So, we went upstairs, bought our tickets (with the aid of some excellent sign language), and then we just had to find our train. As we stood around discussing whether or not the train in front of us was the right one, a very nice gentleman took pity on us. He asked "Pushkin?" and when we nodded, he confirmed our train.

So we hopped on and sat down. As the train started to move, hawkers took turns advertising their wares in each car. There was everything from plant bulbs to fabric to DVDs. And we ran into another problem -- while we had the name of our stop, we didn't know how many intervening stops (only the approximate travel time to Pushkin), and had trouble figuring out the names of the stops the train was making. After one stop, I thought maybe that was it, but wasn't sure and started having a loud conversation with Rasmus about it. About if that was Pushkin, the next one should be the one for Pavlovsk, and if so, we should just get off there. But when the train stopped, we were again unable to tell what the stop was. They may have announced stops over the intercom, but we couldn't understand any of what they were saying and couldn't separate the stop name from what was probably "the next stop is...." And when we could find a sign with the station name through the window, it would of course be in Russian, and it was difficult to recognize Павловск as Pavlovsk when we had just a moment.

Thankfully, our loud confused talking had again provoked the sympathy of another. The lady who had been sitting across from us for the trip met my eye, pointed out the door, and said "Pavlovsk." I smiled an exuberant "thank you" at her, and we hopped off the train.

We had a little trouble because our tickets were for one stop less than we had taken the train, so the machines didn't accept them. There was a guard standing there who tried to explain this to us in Russian, but gave up and just let us through.

Since we were there, we decided we might as well visit the Pavlovsk park as well. Now, all we had to do was find the park. We walked out of the station, and saw a bus sitting out front.We headed over, and tried to ask him where the Pavlovsk palace & park were. He looked at us like we were mad. We stepped away from the bus, and looked around, trying to find some clue as to which way to go. Then we noticed that directly across the street was a gated wooded area. Pavlovsk park & palace was literally right in front of us. Which explained why the driver had looked at us like we were nuts......