Bob Visits A Palace

Bob really isn't the kind of dog one expects to see in a palace. He doesn't have a whole lot of class...in fact, when you push his tummy in, he says in  nasally Spanish,  "I am getting hungry....VERY hungry". What can we say, he started life as a Taco Bell Chihuahua.  Someone recently told us, after he heard Bob "talk"... "That was the creepiest voice I have ever heard",  and he could be right.

But Bob was along for the ride and a Palace was where we were headed. It was cloudy when we arrived at Rundale (roon-dah-lee) and a few rain drops started falling as we parked the car in a grassy area. 

Rundale Palace is so big and such a tourist attraction, there are four different places to eat there. And we were hungry!   We got out of the rain by ducking into a little Kafenica. The food was hot, homemade and inexpensive. We were all happy, even Bob.

While we were eating, it started raining "buckets". Oh no!  Everyone of us, had left our umbrellas in the car.  The parking lot is a long walk away.   We decided we had to brave the elements and headed into the storm.  Below you see Sister Millet and  Sister Davis with our hoods up.

This is just where the horses were kept!

The palace is still a little way further....just keep walking, and walking...

We enter into the courtyard and still have a ways to go before we get to the entrance...

but at.  And now we have arrived! Rundale Palace.

 Rundāle Palace is one of the most outstanding Baroque style buildings in Latvia. It was built between 1736 and 1740 as a summer residence for Duke Ernst Johann of Courland.  At the time the Duchy of Courland was a part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. This palace (it is really big!) was designed by Bartolomeo Rastrelli, an Italian architect, who designed many Baroque palaces for the Russian nobility. The Duchy of Courland was taken over by the Russian Empire in 1795, and Catherine the Great took a dislike to the Duke and did what any spiteful woman would do....she gave the palace to someone else.
She decided to give it to the brother of her boyfriend...Valerian Zubov. He died in 1804 and his young widow, a local girl got the house to herself. During the German occupation of World War I,  the German army established a hospital and a commandant's office there.

It has over 50 rooms that are open to the public and others are still be renovated.  The entry hall could house  a small army all by itself.

The rooms are opulent and ostentatious and we had no "tour guide". You are just allowed to wander around at your own leisure.  Each room had it's own detailed description list that we could read. 

The first room we went into was the "green" room.  We soon found out that every single room had gorgeous European paintings on the walls.  The Duke was a serious art collector.

Nearly every room had a handpainted mural on the ceiling....

And the long hallways are just as gorgeous as the rest of the place.

Because of the rain, we didn't get tickets to the garden tour but we got a great view from some of the rooms.....

A design made of hedges, grass, flowers and ground cover....pretty creative.

This is the Dukes bedroom. Notice that HE has two furnaces in his room....

This was the ladies bathroom....



And now back to the real world, where two senior missionaries have a small apartment, a short bed, no yard, no view, and no thermostat.  But as nice as this palace is to visit...who would want to live in a palace everyday?  We are happy where we are, thank you very much!