Winter Palace

We bumped into a couple of Australians of all people in the Palace Square, although the wife was originally from South Africa and the husband sounded English!! They asked if we were from England 😂 sounds like they do a bit of travelling - lots of cycling round Europe etc. They were an older couple, quite friendly. I think the conversation started cos they heard us speaking English and asked if we knew what the memorial was for in the square - we didn’t have a clue either.

We spent a couple of hours at the winter palace which is now an art museum of sorts. This was located at Palace Square mentioned earlier. It was so beautiful inside - very ornate and decorative. It blows me away how every room was different as far as design. You think they’d run out of ideas! Eli and I had a little difficulty getting in to the palace. We had bought tickets from booths outside - Heidi was apparently free. This saved lining up to get a ticket inside. But they wouldn’t let us through without a ‘free admission ticket’ for Heidi!! Whoever heard of such a thing. So we had to go back and line up at the ticket office to get her a free ticket. Crazy.

Heidi was pretty good in the palace. Hmm, except for the one room where they had a decorative rotunda which had do not touch signs all over it - Heidi decided it would be good to climb on much to our embarrassment 😳 We weren’t able to bring the backpack in with us so of course this is when she decided to go to sleep and Eli had to carry her round in his arms. Michael had a turn lugging her when Eli’s arms gave out.

There is still a bit of snow around as you can see in the photos - Heidi enjoyed tramping around in it.

Another observation - there doesn’t appear to be much in the way of road rules over here. People don’t use their indicators and seem to travel at all kinds of speeds around the place! When there’s roadworks or work going on the side of the road there’s no orange cones and slow down speed signs and all that! We had a laugh at how different it would be in Australia!Read more