scubacruiserx2

5 hours ago, Heartgrove said:

Something your grandsons might enjoy. We were on the Carnival Venezia in November and had a port call in Puerto Playa, DR. Our ship excursion was with Mega Adventures. We rode around the area in the back of 6x6 ex-Army trucks. They also offer zipline excursions.

 Thank you . We will run it past the kids and grandsons . One great thing for our son , DIL and 3rd grandson is that 2 of them are native Spanish speakers and our Son is fluent . DIL is from Peru . We speak survival Spanish and Russian . Were you in the Navy ? I was  a Corpsman in the early 70's . HAL gives a $ 100 credit but when we went to Antarctica on NCL this year they gave a 10 % price reduction on our Suite which is HUGE .

1 hour ago, 0106 said:

The beach at Grand Turk is beautiful.  The younger folks may appreciate the excitement at Margaritaville.  However, I walk about 10 minutes down the beach to Jack’s Shack.  I’ve also done private snorkeling tours with Blue Water Divers.

 

Don’t hold your breath with Key West. It is frequently cancelled.

 Thanks , we did charter a boat for snorkeling for everyone . We have 3 SCUBA divers but they may get bored watching us so we're all snorkeling @ Blue Water divers . There are a of couple nice places to eat lunch near there .

 We are the only ship on that date as we were in 2023 . Here we are at Mallory Square in Key West .

 This is where the locals gather to watch the sunset . We had a couple of late people that almost made us block the sunset which is why the natives get restless .

 We did move in time and it was a good one .

 Key West and the DR is where we mainly need some ideas . and help .

1 hour ago, Haljo1935 said:

Welcome to HAL!

You will automatically get CO with your Neptune Suite. 

 Thank you , but it's for the rest of the family .

4 hours ago, CruiserBruce said:

Get a villa on HMC. Fun splurge for a group like yours.

 We did book that along with a butler like we  had on the NCL Star in Antarctica . He was great . We saw them when they were being built in 2012 .

  It will be our Family holiday for the first time on HAL . Us , 3 kids and their husbands , wife and 3 grandsons ages 13-21 . HMC ,Grand Turk , Dominican Republic and Key West . Any ideas especially for the Grandsons ? All are Club Orange except us in the Neptune Suite .

29 minutes ago, 0106 said:

I figured out the night of the Morimoto pop up by looking at reservations for Tamarind.  The night there are no reservations available in the Tamarind will be the night of the Morimoto pop up.

 

My DH loves osso buco and was very happy when Canaletto started offering it every night!

  We look forward to that and it makes planning meals easier . We also tracked down the Morimoto dining option . It was premiered on the NA and is a permanent option every night on the NA . It is a pop up 1 night on the other HAL ships that have the Tamarind .

17 minutes ago, CruiserBruce said:

All of this would depend on the nights that are dressy nights. So, if the dressy nights are not the second night and the next to last night, that would move the nights you are asking about.

  I'm not sure what you mean . Days at sea are # 3 and # 6 .

 Does anybody know what night Osso Buco is served at the Caneletto and what night Morimoto's pop up night is in the Tamarind on a 7 day cruise ?

  Heading to the backside of the Grand Cascade we headed toward the lower gardens where the whipping wind caused a spray rainbow of Samson .

All of the running water moved us out toward the rest rooms where these school kids had just been . In the distance behind them and to the left of the fountain , was the Chessboard  Hill cascade with 3 dragons spitting water .

  Above the Grand Cascade and the Grand Palace is the Upper Gardens . 

The focal point of the Upper Gardens is the Neptune Fountain which was made in Nuremberg , Germany in 1650 but required too much water to operate . Russia bought it in 1782 but it was stolen by Germany in WW II . It was tracked down in Germany and returned to Peterhof in 1956 .

 We had parked on the other side of the street near the Peter and Paul Cathedral .

 Thank you everyone for your help and responses . The link from @cbr663 was especially helpful but personal experiences from people on the NA are very beneficial . Thanks again .

 The anthem of Saint Petersburg was fully recognized on May 13, 2002, when the initial version approved by the Legislative Assembly of Saint Petersburg on April 23, edited and then signed into law by the Governor of Saint Petersburg .  Wikipedia

 It is called Hymn of the Great City by Reinhold Gliere , and it played when they turn on the fountains and when you arrive at the train station in Saint Petersburg . It was also played for Princess Diana when she visited Saint Petersburg , before it was fully recognized .

We told you that it would be crowded with cruise ships in port 

 So we will use photos from other visits when ships were not in port 

 The view from the palace looking toward the dock where our boat came in .

 Samson opening the jaws of a lion in which Samson is symbolized as Russia defeating the lion which symbolizes Sweden , from whom Russia defeated to take the swamp land which became Saint Petersburg .

  The view of the hydrofoils from our cruise in 2019 .

Note some people hanging out of windows of the Meteor  # 247.

 It's a long walk down the pier and through the park to see the fountains being turned on .

  What are the current costs and benefits of Club Orange on the Nieuw Amsterdam ? We plan on taking our family of 7 or 8 others with us . Thank you .

 Having spent a couple of hours looking at the countryside on the train from Moscow , we wanted to go into the countryside instead of the city . We had purchased a Saint Petersburg City card that gave us a free hydrofoil ride to see the fountains of Peterhof and free or reduced prices at other places .

We have been there in a car with a guide , but never alone on the boat . It's a 57 minute ride in the car but only 30 minutes on the boat .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterhof_Palace

 We boarded the boat near the Hermitage but we had to cross a dinner cruise board to get onto the hydrofoil .

One of the hostesses on the boat spoke English . 

We didn't pay for 1st class up front , but sat in the free seats . It's a diesel engine that was loud , smoky and stinky .

We past by the cruise port and saw a HAL ship in the port so it was going to be crowded .

  It was nice to go to Moscow but nicer to be back in Saint Petersburg at the Train station .

 It was a little late and the metro to our apartment was not crowded

It was nice having an apartment with a number of rooms . Looking from the dining room into the kitchen .

A living room with a Russian clothes dryer

A sitting room 

A bathroom . The bathroom and the kitchen had tile floors that were heated electronically with a turn of the knob . The clothes washer was in the bathroom .

 Several other photos of note before we leave Moscow .

  Lubyanka . Former home of the KGB ( Now the FSB ) was and is still a prison . It was said that you can see Siberia from the roof of this building .

Uncle Joe in all his glory . 

His daughter moved to , married and lived in the USA . His wife wasn't so lucky . She " Committed suicide " .

 And the founder of Moscow , a Prince from Kiev , Ukraine .

 Returning to Moscow we will finish our tour of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior . We walked out on the bridge crossing the Moscow River for a better view .

The view of the Kremlin and the church inside of the Kremlin

 There were thousands of people inside and coming out and in the Cathedral when we went inside .

I believe that the rebuilt church could hold 9,000 people standing up for hours for worship . It was going on and so we could look but not photograph . 

 The first church was looted and demolished by Stalin in December of 1931 .

Soviet leader Joseph Stalin chose the prominent site of the cathedral as the proposed site for a monument to socialism known as the Palace of the Soviets. It was to have modernistic, buttressed tiers to support a gigantic statue of Lenin perched on top of a dome with his arm raised in the air.

 Photo and text from Wikipedia

  The building was never built because Germany attacked Russia . After the war and with Gorbachev 's Perestroika ( Restructuring ) the Cathedral was rebuilt with funds raised from over a million citizens ( Including a large donation by Mc Donald's ) . It only took 6 years to rebuild instead the of 40 for the first one .

 The construction of the pool on a site of the destroyed cultural heritage caused a negative reaction of the Moscow public. The history of the site's Cathedral, the unbuilt Palace of the Soviets, and the Moskva Pool was commonly summarized with the ironic expression "First there was a church, then rubbish, and now shame" (Russian: Сперва был храм, потом — хлам, а теперь — срам., romanized: Sperva byl khram, potom – khlam, a teper' – sram.)

 The new interior dome . Photo and previous text Wikipedia

  After our visit to Moscow we took the Metro to an pretty church in Saint Petersburg called Chesme  .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesme_Church

As we were there we saw a group of children from the public school being bussed to the church for a field trip . Can you imagine that happening in our public schools ?

The graves behind it were decorated for Victory Day .

 Inside of the church was a service with the priest sprinkling incense in front of the icons .

In my Bible reading this morning it says about Israel , " But the more they  were called , the more they went away from me . They sacrificed to the Baals and burned incense to images . "

 Is this a violation of the second commandment ? 

“You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. ⁵ You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, ⁶ but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.

 Our favorite church in Moscow is the Cathedral of Christ the Savior 

 The original church was build to honor Christ the Savior by Alexander I  "to signify Our gratitude to Divine Providence for saving Russia from the doom that overshadowed Her" when attacked by Napoleon in 1812 . The current church is the second to stand on this site. The authentic church, built during the 19th century, took more than 40 years to build, and was the scene of the 1882 world premiere of the 1812 Overture by Tchiakovsky . Wikipedia 

  We surfaced and began a walking tour with the building on the 100 Ruble note - the Bolshoi Ballet Theatre founded in 1776 , the year of of the USS's independence . Bolshoi means big or large and the note is worth 1 US Dollar .

 We loved the way that the fountain in the front formed a water curtain .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolshoi_Ballet

 Visiting here reminded me of a song from when i was in High School called Pretty Ballerina by the Left Banke.

 The last station that we visited was Belorusskaya a station with panels in the ceiling that pictured  everyday peaceful life in the USSR .

It's in the last panel that we see ( or don't see that counts ) . Originally there was a picture of Uncle Joe Stalin that was removed under the de - Stalinization program of removing him from history .

 De-Stalinization (Russian: десталинизация, romanized: destalinizatsiya) comprised a series of political reforms in the Soviet Union after the death of long-time leader Joseph Stalin in 1953, and the thaw brought about by ascension of Nikita Khrushchev to power,^[1] and his 1956 secret speech "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences", which denounced Stalin's cult of personality and the Stalinist political system.

Monuments to Stalin were removed, his name was removed from places, buildings, and the state anthem, and his body was removed from the Lenin Mausoleum (from 1953 to 1961 known as Lenin and Stalin Mausoleum) and buried.  Wikipedia

  The last mosaic known as “Embroiderers,” originally included a portrait of Stalin, but during the de-Stalinization period it was replaced with the Order of the Red Banner of Labor (hammer and sickle).

  The large mosaic in the previous station suffered a similar fate when the image of Stalin was replaced by a dove of Peace .

 At this end end the station was a mosaic that says "Peace Throughout the World." It is the Novoslobodskaya Station .

Looking back from the train platform and waiting for a train at the platform

  We went down in the Metro at Ploshchad Revolyutsii ( Revolution Square ) .

 Rubbing this dogs nose is said to bring good luck and that's why it is discolored .

 The last photo is Lyudimila Mykhailivna Pavlichenko (12 July 1916 – 10 October 1974 was a Soviet sniper. She shot German soldiers in World War 2. She was one of the top military snipers of all time, and is credited with 309 kills.^[1] She was the most successful female sniper in history. Wikipedia

 She toured the US during WW II to try to convince us to open a second front from the West against Germany before D-day .

 Our next stop was the Moscow Armory to see it's collection of Fabege Eggs . There was a long line to get in and our guide could not go with us past the book shop . We found the Eggs and took a photo until we were told no photos . We did buy a book at the book shop so we took photos from the book and found a video on line .