Renewal and Restoration

This week the Church introduced a new President and Prophet, President Russell M. Nelson, who succeeds the recently passed on Thomas S. Monson. The new president is a spry 93 years old who was called to the governing Quorum of Twelve Apostles decades ago after a career as a prominent heart surgeon. He selected as counselors, Dallin H. Oaks, former President of BYU and Justice of the Utah Supreme Court, and next in line of succession, and Henry B. Eyring, a former Stanford business professor who had long served as a counselor to the two previous Church presidents. All of these changes were announced in a special live broadcast last Tuesday evening, St. Petersburg time. Earlier that afternoon, Ken had set up systems for watching via the Church's broadcast systems, in both Russian and English, and that evening we watched the televised proceedings with the Mission President, as well as some of the young volunteers and local Russians. During the subsequent press conference, streaming live on Facebook, Ken posted a streaming comment after he saw a streaming post from one of our old friends in Hamburg, Germany. Surprise! Two people saw Ken's post and contacted Ken via Facebook. One was an old high school friend, Peter Armato, who told Ken most pleasing news. Thirty-seven years ago he and his wife had converted and joined the LDS Church! "How great shall be your joy!"

Restorations:
Communication via email is critical to our duties in the Office, but the computer communication systems have been acting up. This week, after much effort in Moscow and here, our email clients were fully restored and fixed. They are still working on the video conferencing system however

Speaking of restoration, our apartment plumbing had a slight breakdown as a tab broke off of a plastic lever in the toilet tank. But our resident Church handyman, Brother Leostrin, replaced the whole flushing mechanism. Ken learned a bit about Russian/Finnish plumbing fixtures from watching the process.

Last May we had the blessing of seeing a young woman, Dasha, become a member of the LDS Church. Then in August she moved to China for a year to study Chinese. She's already fluent in English, having spent a high-school year in Arizona. This week her father came over for dinner with our two young Sister volunteers, Sister Camano and Sister Mohlman.







In 1989 young violin eccentric Nigel Kennedy released his first album of Vivaldi's Four Seasons. We saw him perform it in San Francisco back then--and met him with our own then-young violinist son who was learning the piece. Nigel has played Vivaldi thousands of times since, and now he has his own jazzed-up arrangement. This week Nigel performed it at the Philharmonia Concert Hall in St. Petersburg. On Thursday we attended his  performance, along with President & Sister Rawson. He performed for three hours straight, prancing around in front of the orchestra, directing and improvising, never once looking at a sheet of music. The young orchestra was also fabulous.

In addition Nigel played his own compositions, dedications to artists he had known and who inspired him: guitarist Smietana, violinists Stephane Grapelli, Isaac Stern and Yehudi Menuhin, and Nashville fiddler Mark O'Connor. We particularly liked the dedication to Isaac Stern. (It is the second movement in a concert recording Ken found on the Internet starting at 13 minutes. The whole "Dedications" concert in Detroit with Leonard Slatkin is here.)

While we were at the concert, our mail-picker-upper went to the main post office. He usually goes late at night, because the PO is open 24/7 and it's in a downtown area where parking is very scarce during the day. He brought back six(!) boxes and over 100 letters!! Some were dated back to mid-November. He has been going to the main Post Office once or twice a week all this time. He's been getting packages regularly because we get tracking numbers from family and friends, so we know when those arrive. He's gotten a few letters each time--maybe 6 to 10. So we didn't think anything was missing. But someone was sitting on all our mail! Or lost a basket of it. Or didn't sort anything during the vacations between Dec 23 and Jan 9. Anyway, Sue sorted it all out and put into baskets by District. People will pick it up as they pass through the office over the next few weeks.

We are proud of our 100% arrival rates for all the boxes for Christmas. We found every box for which we had a tracking number. Unfortunately, one that got pulled for Customs check was addressed to the Church and not to the person, so we couldn't retrieve it, and so it got sent back to the US. But we did see it and know it was here. Now we are telling parents to only put the volunteer name on the Customs form, not the Church name at all.  And the name needs to be the same as the passport name! Passports have to be presented to pick up anything. Sometimes they even ask for Sue's passport at the grocery store when she uses a charge card.


OK. It is now officially COLD here! This is Sue on the way to the Hermitage on Friday afternoon. You can't see that she has on a 'tube hat' from the top of her head down to her shoulders underneath her coat with the fur-trimmed hood. And she has on fleece-lined tights under the boots and skirt. Temperature in the 20'sF. all week, except when it was down in the teens.




And the river finally froze, too. There's no ice skating on it. The chunks of ice floating down from the north got jammed together as the river froze one night, so there are 'plates' of ice sticking up three feet or more all over. It's a very bumpy surface.

We came into the Hermitage from a different door this week and found something we'd been looking for. We call it the Biblical Hallway in the Hermitage. Each archway all the way down the hall has four different scenes from the Bible. But we were late and had to run through it quickly. Another week we'll go back and find it--Room 227--and spend more time looking at it slowly. These are photos from the middle looking to one end and then to the other end. It's quite a place!

We also had a meeting Friday afternoon with the Volunteer Office staff. They have declared 2018 "The Year of the Volunteer." Volunteering and having volunteer organizations associated with Arts organizations--like museums or orchestras--is very unusual in Russia. The Hermitage is the only museum that has such an active volunteer office. It was the brainchild of Mikhail 15 years ago. Now this year he wants to have a round-table meeting, and maybe some workshops for other Arts organizations in the country around volunteerism. He's asking us to help. Sue wrote a two-page summary of volunteerism in the US--how we are a "grass-roots" country, and how volunteers help in Education, the Arts, politics, social welfare, churches, etc. We'll see what comes of it all.



Saturday morning it was snowing lightly and the city looked beautiful. We decided it was time for one of those "indoor" excursions we had been saving for bad weather. We took the bus downtown to the Faberge Museum. Karl Faberge was a Russian artisan in St. Petersburg in the 1800's. He is famous for his "Easter Eggs." These are bejeweled, egg-shaped boxes with a "surprise" inside. Each Easter for fifteen years, one egg was made for the Tsar during the time of the last two Tsars--Alexander III and Nicholas II.  


The museum is now housed in the beautiful Shuvalov Palace on the Fontanka River just north of the main street Nevsky Prospect (Avenue). The building has been beautifully restored and holds the still-extant eggs (only nine are known to exist) and many other items created by Faberge and other court artisans of the time. 

This egg-clock has a rooster that pops out of the top and crows on the hour.








This is a gold and silver tea and coffee service from the late 1800's. 

This figure of a peasant is one of many figurines made by Faberge.  It looks like ceramic, but each of the colors is actually carved from a different semi-precious stone.  

We came back to the office in the afternoon to meet with a Russian man who had called and asked to speak with the Senior Couple: That's us. But he was just looking for someone with whom he can practice his English. However, we are not allowed to do that. We are here on humanitarian visas to support the LDS Church members and teach those who are interested in learning about the LDS Church. In July 2016 there were new laws passed in Russia which severely limit what we can do. We are not licensed to teach English and so have to say "no" to anyone who asks us to help them with their English. We don't like it, but we obey the law.

Late Saturday afternoon we stayed a few hours in the office. Sue's computer was being used to Skype in a guest who wanted to attend a youth baptism that was taking place in the building. So Sisters Mohlman and Camano joined us while we practiced Russian online. They cheered Elder Allen every time he got a sentence right. So there is hope, we think.