June 10, 2017     St. Petersburg               St. Catherine’s for Mass

I’ll keep it short.  Google told me that St. Catherine’s had a Catholic English Mass at 9:30 on Sunday.  I Googled the location of St. Catherin’s and we went to check it out on Friday the 9th.  There wasn’t anyone at the church who spoke English and it didn’t look promising.  We checked it out at the hotel and they confirmed that there was a Mass at 9:30 on Sunday.  We even went back on Saturday the 10^th, there was a lady who spoke English as if she was born in Michigan, but she said there was not Catholic Mass here, but she thought it was at the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul.  So we went there, it was an Evangelical Lutheran Church, and he told us the English Catholic Mass was indeed at St. Catherine’s on Sunday at 9:30.  So we determined to go back to St. Catherine’s on Sunday to see if there was a Mass.  Because it was a nice day we decided to go to the Peterhof Palace that is about 1.5 hr west of town by public transport, or 30-40 min by Hydrofoil, so we took the Hydrofoil.  The boat brings you to the Lower Garden that has all the fountains, and of course there is a fee, which we paid.  There is another fee to tour the Palace, but we passed on that.  As you can see from the photos we spent too much time trying to take selfies.  Sue is a determined to get this right.  We eventually saw how it was done, so now we are taking as many selfies as art photos.  Sue won’t let me post the “really” bad ones, most of them are all pretty bad.  After that we waited on the pier until our Hydrofoil left to take us back to St. Petersburg.  

Sue picked out a place for dinner, she always finds these wonderful places.  She spends as much time on restaurants as I do on museums.  It was “only” about a twenty minute walk, I fires up Google Maps and we were off.  Google showed the place as in the middle of a block, not on the street.  Google Street View showed the address as an entry into a courtyard with the map marker inside the court yard.  We got there in about half an hour and walked into the courtyard that was connected to a couple of other courtyards.  There was no restaurant there.  There was a young couple who we didn’t speak English and then we noticed that the gate to the street was closed.  We couldn’t push it open.  After a brief panic the young man showed us that the button I had been pushing (and the door didn’t open) unlocked the door for a brief time and the door could be pushed open, so we did escape.  We went ate near the hotel.

 

2017 06 10 St Petersburg