St. Petersburg Days 3 & 4

St. Petersburg—day 3 Day of Murder
Monday, November 15, 2010
Today we started off by visiting the largest private palace in St. Petersburg and possibly the most famous (at least in my mind) because Rasputin was killed in this mansion!!! If you don’t know the story about Rasputin you should look it up because it’s really interesting! In a few words though he became too influential with Nicholas II’s family and wife and so the upper class semi-royals had him murdered. However, Rasputin wouldn’t die. Rasputin was poisoned with cyanide, shot in a basement then crawled out onto the street and finally thrown into a frozen river. It was already creepy enough to see the actual spot where Rasputin was shot but to make matters worse they had these life size wax figure of the men involved in his murder, including Rasputin himself so things became extra creepy.
After leaving there we headed to St. Isaac’s Cathedral. St. Isaac’s is a beautiful cathedral with a huge dome that we were able to go up to the top of and see out above the whole city! It was actually a very nice view and not unbearably windy at the top of dome.
To finish out the day of murder we visited the Church of Our Savior on Spilled Blood. The church was erected to remember Alexander II who was killed by a terrorist attack. The church was built on the exact spot on which he died. One section of the floor is roped off and has a gazebo built about it to reveal the exact cobblestones on which he was killed, thus spilled blood cathedral. Apparently the story goes that Alexander II was riding along the canal in his carriage when a bomb was thrown under his carriage. The horses and other staff that were traveling with him were injured very badly but of course being a Tsar Alexander exited the carriage, unharmed, and continued walking along the canal. As he walked along another terrorist from the same group threw a bomb under Alexander II’s feet killing him there atop the cobblestones on which the church is now built.
After leaving the cathedral and finishing our very long day I started on my evenings of firsts. For dinner I had beef stroganoff for the first time! It was really really good but unfortunately it was not served on a bed of noodles, which I was told in the traditional way. Come to find out though later in that same week that NO where in Russia is Beef Stroganoff served on noodles, guess I will just wait to eat it again until I get back to the states. After dinner I watched Moulin Rouge for the first time with a bunch of other people in the group. It is a really good movie…surprised I hadn’t seen it before then.

Day 4—St. Petersburg
Tuesday, November 16th, 2010
The mansion we visited first in the morning was painstakingly boring. Not only way the tour guide not very good by providing extremely irrelevant information but it also had to be translated by our own tour guide into English which takes FOR-EV-ER! Oh I guess I forgot to mention that the entire time we were in St. Petersburg we had our very own group tour guide. She is a licensed tour guide that the Kollmann’s (my professors) have used several times and are very good friends with. Our tour guide teaches advanced English to Russians so her English is very good and it was incredible about how much she knew about EVERYTHING and EVERYWHERE we went in St. Petersburg. So if the tour was ever less than thrilling, (which it was one other time) it absolutely wasn’t her fault. She was a very good tour guide.
After the museum of boringness and a quick lunch we headed to the Museum of Curiosities. This was by the coolest museum I have ever been too. The day ended much differently than it began! Peter the Great started this museum because he was into collecting oddities and anthological artifacts about different cultures. Peter the Great was definitely an odd man, which is evident from this museum. We started the museum with a tour of North American Indian tribes costumes and cultural practices. This was a very interesting collection of artifacts. They have the largest collection of California Indian woven baskets in the entire world! To say the least the history of Native tribes in North America wasn’t exactly what I expected to see but I enjoyed it. There were also tons of costumes and artifacts from India and China but there’s oh so much more…. Such as… Dead babies! Peter the Great had this extensive, EXTENSIVE collection of preserved fetuses in jars from the 18th century. Some of the babies were normal fetuses and some were used to illustrate the different stages of birth but the largest and most disturbing collection was the display of birth defects. There were so so so many babies with awful defects such as Cyclopes, joined legs, missing limbs, twins joined at various body parts, giant heads, and others that I can’t even describe. Some of the kids in our group were so grossed out that they could not stay in the room.
That night we went out to a couple bars and took part in the Russian traditional of Vodka drinking.