General Conference Week

The semi-annual LDS General Conference was held this past weekend in Salt Lake City and broadcast live worldwide. It was in the middle of the night here, but the sermons were recorded and made available on www.LDS.org. This coming weekend it is being presented in Russia on video-delay via the Internet to the local congregations here in Russia. In the meantime, we can listen and watch in English at any time.

Elder Jeffery R. Holland's sermon in the first session of General Conference was particularly powerful and poignant to me. We wish everyone could hear it, see it, read it and ponder it. The link to his talk is >> here <<.



On Saturday afternoon, Elder Gary Stevenson talked about the blessings and problems of social media. One of his comments was how we tend to post only the best and most exciting and most beautiful parts of our lives.  People think their own lives must be dull compared to others. We are  personally guilty of that.  This blog shows you the "fun" stuff we do for 2-3 hours each week. But here is Ken during the other 40-50 hours each week that he spends in the office. That's his lunch of an apple and 2 slices of cheese sitting on his mouse pad on the far right. No time to go home for lunch on some days. (Most days??)

We were once again hosts at the entrance to the main building of The Hermitage on Wednesday, and after our shift we toured a few more of its FOUR HUNDRED rooms for the first time. We feel singularly privileged to be able to explore at our leisure the world's largest museum--for free! We take tickets in the hall in front of this, the Grand Staircase, which leads into two staircases that lead to the second floor. Our station is down at the far end of the center hall in this panorama. 

The Grand Staircase - pan southeast to northwest

It is said that it would take eleven years to contemplate each of its exhibit items for just thirty seconds, and after eleven years one would have to start over because the displayed exhibits would have changed. (It is reminiscent of the job of painting the Golden Gate Bridge. The workers start at one end and by the time they reach the other end, it is time to start over!)

Here are some of the works we saw this week. The Chapel has only recently been restored. It was closed as a place of worship in 1918. In 2012-2014 it was restored to its former splendor with the paintings and icons returned to their previous locations. But it has not been reconsecrated as a church. It remains just an exhibition room of the museum. 

Hermitage chapel - Spherical Image - RICOH THETA

There is a special exhibition for a few months of restored textiles. This includes tapestries, silk horse saddles, hats, dolls, and clothing. There are even have clothes that belonged to Peter The Great in the early 1700's. The artisans have been painstakingly restoring these artifacts over the last fifteen years.

Tapestry - Christ raises Lazarus

The famous Peacock clock is animated, but to preserve it, the works are only fully activated four times each month, but we were not there at the right time.

The Gold Peacock Clock

Here is a link to a video The Hermitage made of the clock doing its grandest.

Back at home, the young volunteers have been kind enough to invite us to join in their daily morning workouts--a 6:00am floorball game in the church's multipurpose hall in the building next door to our apartment building. (See the blog dated September 23rd for a video of a full-length competitive game.) We were flattered to be asked, but we begged off any immediate participation, claiming  exemption incident to our advanced age. And Elder Allen is not a morning person!

It rained every day this week, although the sun poked through the clouds almost every day. Temperature is in the low 50's with a chilly wind. The volunteers are beginning to get head colds, and we are all planning to receive flu shots next week at Zone Conferences.

We have now been here exactly six months, less a few days, and time once more to renew our three-month humanitarian visas. Arising before dawn to catch a van ride at 7:00am, we headed once again to the border crossing to Estonia. We found it pretty much as it was before--a rickety wooden causeway from a back street to the border posts, the Russians on one side of the bridge over the Narva River and the Estonians on the other. Following established procedures to enter the country with our new visas, we returned to St. Petersburg to register our residences. Here are some scenes from our latest morning excursion to Estonia.

FLAT Countryside

We are in Estonia!
We stopped long enough for a photo, and then headed back.
Sister Allen, Sister Pitt, Elders Despain, Houston, Parker & Hansen

The Victory Arch, gateway to St. Petersburg, 
marking 70 years since the end of The Seige

Saturday morning we stayed home and cleaned house.  Also once every year at General Conference time we are to change the water filters under the kitchen sink. We have two kitchen faucets. One is a normal faucet with hot/cold water just like at home, as seen in this photo with the new filters. The other is next to it, a small cold-only faucet that is filtered for drinking, cooking, washing fruits/veggies, etc. The water in St. Petersburg isn't too bad--but has a definite silt content, so we don't drink it.

Taking it all apart and cleaning is a bit of a challenge. There are three different canisters for the stages that the water goes through.

These are the old filters--not too pretty.

Gunk accumulates in the tops of each of the canisters of the filter system. Here they are--after cleaning. 

Ken cleaned everything out, as much as he could, scrubbing the insides of the filter holders, putting in new filters and putting it all back together. It took him a couple of hours. And now he needs to do it all again upstairs in the spare "Transfer" apartment.

In the afternoon we went to the church to watch the Saturday afternoon session of General Conference. (We had listened to Saturday morning session a week ago live while we were in Novgorod.) We gathered on the second floor with the other volunteers and President & Sister Rawson to watch in English. Those watching in Russian were upstairs in the chapel on the third floor.

After Conference we had the privilege of witnessing the baptism of a new member of Central Ward.  

Elder Wilson, Nikita Shchelkunov, Elder Muhlestein

There was a good group of friends there to participate in this great event.

Russia is feeling some unrest these days. Evidently the three airports in Moscow were all evacuated for a time on Friday, and today (Saturday) four large shopping malls around St. Petersburg were evacuated for an hour or so due to bomb threats at some individual stores-including Okhta Mall where we often shop.  But so far these are all just threats. We feel safe, and all the volunteers stay away from places where there might be demonstrations. There were some arrests of demonstrators in the city center this evening, but we were all happily watching General Conference. This month is the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. The Russian Federation's current government (Putin, et al.) want to mostly ignore it. They don't like the idea of revolution. But there are others dissatisfied with the current governance who are demonstrating--mostly against corruption by lower officials. Putin is almost universally well-liked.