Pushkin

    

Earlier this semester (take note of the orange and yellow leaves - we haven't got any of those now that it's December) I ventured out of central Saint Petersburg to the nearby town of Pushkin, where the Catherine Palace and Park are located.

It's a bit too far to go alone, so I went there together with my friends Juli (from Hungary) and Roosa (from Finland). We managed to get ourselves a bit off-track on the way to Pushkin, having gotten on a bus going in the opposite direction as the one we needed. We didn't realize our mistake for quite a while and ended up sitting in the bus parking lot at the end of the line for almost half an hour, waiting for the bus to turn around and take us back where we wanted to go. The bus driver had a chuckle at us when he saw that we were still sitting in the back of the bus after he'd stopped at the line's last stop, then asked if we were trying to get to Pushkin; when we said that we were, he laughed a bit more, told us that we could just wait in the bus, and then went off to go have some coffee. Eventually we did manage to get ourselves to Pushkin, though we took the bus one stop too far and ended up having to walk backwards for a block or two. We don't really have any good excuse for having had so many issues getting to our intended destination, as all of us speak enough Russian to be able to ask, "Does this bus go to Pushkin?" and understand the response. We got a nice tour through an area of the city that we'd otherwise never have seen, and that's got to count for something!

We all wanted to go and have a look at the park in autumn, and we timed our visit just right. The trees were bursting in color, their leaves beginning to fall from their branches. People wandered around, collecting the fallen leaves to weave into brightly-colored crowns, then photographed each other wearing the leaf-crowns that they'd just made.

We didn't actually end up going inside the castle (we were pretty wiped out from our extremely long bus trip) but we did walk along it's exterior balcony to have a look at the park from a higher perspective.

Walking around the park was like being inside a painting.

We wandered all the way around this lake; the small building from the picture that is third before this one is all the way on the other side, more or less centered in my panorama.

Roosa, Juli, and I agreed that this bridge would be an extremely beautiful and romantic place to be proposed to. Imagine that the view behind the bridge is like the one in the panorama above...

This is definitely a place worth visiting, especially when decked out in the bright colors of autumn. I'd like to go back in the spring to see the park as it starts to come alive again after winter, and hopefully to go explore the inside of the palace as well. (After all it's the Catherine Palace, and since my name is Katherine, it's basically my palace, right?)

(OK, maybe not. But I can still dream).