Catherines Palace

After breakfast at our hotel we caught the metro to Vitebsky station by 10 only to find the train service wasn't running until midday. So back into the metro we went to the station where you can get buses to Tsarskoe selo, where the palace is. The metro was uninteresting except that it was so deep. The escalator just kept on going down. The other new thing was that when we got to our station there was no platform initially, and then doors opened in the wall next to the train doors and you stepped through the doors onto the platform.  It was now getting light at about 11 o clock.  We found a bus easily enough and using the GPS on our phone we could work out when the bus was near the castle. There is not always English around in Russia.
The castle was pretty, but to be frank I'm a little tired of them now.

Catherines palace

 There was a room with all the wall panels made of amber. The Germans trashed this along with the rest of the palace in 1945, and a German company paid for the amber room to be recreated. No photos were allowed in this room.

Dining rooms

It was quite a bit colder out here, but sadly still no snow so we didn't bother looking for the horse drawn rides. The locals say it should have snowed a month ago already.

Freezing pond at the palace

 We couldn't find a bus that was going to the right station (we used Roys phone to convert the station name to it's cyrlic version,  but still couldn't find one, so we gave up and walked the 2km to the station and caught a train back to St Petersburg.

 Cold Russian station

 We found a nice restaurant on trip advisor,  halfway back to our hotel,  so walked the km there and had a lovely meal. As promised, the atmosphere was great and the waitresses spoke English. We did note the South African wine on the menu was 10 times the price of what it costs in SA. I had the R60 glass of Italian red, which was awful :)