Another Quiet Week

This last week was quiet week, except for a new baby granddaughter:

Sarai Rose Schmalbeck was born late Sunday night October 4 in Orem, Utah, to proud parents Tim and Shelby Foote Schmalbeck of Lehi. This picture says it all!

Here in St. Petersburg, we had occasion to do a few things that do take time.

Ken completed and submitted his latest major documentary for his television show on the Palo Alto local cable station. He also posted it on his YouTube Channel. It's called "Journey Back in Time." It is the story of our family visit to the Middle East a year ago at Christmas. It chronicles our journeys to Petra, to the Holy Land to visit religious sites, to the pyramids and museums of Egypt, to the Valley of the Kings, and to the Aswan Dams and Lake Nasser on a river cruise up the Nile.

Here is the link to YouTube for "Journey Back in Time."  (Program length 1:09:00)

Closer to "home," Ken found some time to ponder Holy Scriptures. In particular, lately he has been studying a few chapters in the Book of Mormon, 1 Nephi 11-14.

Having studied those chapters Ken wrote this commentary:
"For several months I have been reading and rereading Nephi’s vision found in 1 Nephi 11-14, trying to decide what if anything I should write about it. The vision shows the relation of the Plan of Salvation and Christ’s mission to the history of the  world."  (Continued at the highlighted link above.)

This past Sunday was Stake Conference for the St. Petersburg Stake, where those from all the congregations in an area get together for Sunday meetings. Living one's religion, other than the State Church, is hard in Russia, but there is strong motivation to strengthen the weak of faith and support the faithful.




The Stake President is Boris Leostrin, a spiritual man and a dynamic speaker. He is a professional tour guide in St. Petersburg who learned his near-perfect American-accented English as a missionary. He encouraged all the Church members to always have a "spare" Book of Mormon in their home that they could give to a friend who might have interest in the LDS Church.  After the meeting the young volunteers gave away about 150 Books of Mormon!

Among Ken's and Sue's contributions to Conference was technical assistance to connect far-flung congregations to a video feed via Skype. In our area in Palo Alto, people drive from south Palo Alto or San Carlos into Menlo Park for Stake Conference. Here the drive can be up to 6 hours, or a 1.5 hour plane flight from Kaliningrad. That's why we video-conference the meetings to those locations. Ken ran the camera while Sue managed the Skype connection, which was put together literally at the last moment. The regular Church video conferencing system was not yet "repaired," due to the complications of technical restrictions on Internet usage recently imposed to comply with national laws. It did finally get fixed on Friday this week, but too late for last Sunday's meetings.

Sister Camano, Dooguun, Sister Mohlman, Sue & Ken

After the Conference was over, while we were downstairs in the office for a few minutes and the doorbell rang. It was a young woman from Mongolia. She is LDS and is here studying in St. Petersburg. She was very glad to find the Church! She came to dinner at our apartment on Monday night with our Center Sisters and she and a fellow Mongolian student from her hometown came to Game Night Saturday.

Sisters Camano & Mohlman, Elders Franckowiak,
S. Jensen, Wallace, Mortensen, Ken, Sue

Next Wednesday are Transfers, so this Tuesday was the last meeting of our District. We don't [officially] know until Monday morning who will be sent elsewhere and who will join us. But our District includes the two Assistants to the President, and they decide together who will be transferred and where. The Sisters make the travel arrangements, and plane tickets to/from Kaliningrad are usually done a week ahead. Sue has two-click access to the on-line transfer board, so tends to peek. Not many secrets in our District. But President has been known to change assignments of Elders or Sisters after the new ones arrive on Tuesday night and he interviews them. Nothing is really "done" until Wednesday.


Thursday March 8 was International Women's Day, which is a big-deal holiday simply called Women's Day in Russia. It's the Russian equivalent of Mother's Day, except more so. Everyone was off work and school. The buses and trolleys all had small Russian and St. Petersburg flags flying on top.

Because it was a Thursday, everyone got Friday off, too! There was no one in our office. The six Church employees were all out for two days. (They do visa/travel, accounting, and physical facilities for the LDS Church all over Russia, and just happen to be housed with our Mission Office in the same church building.) President and Sister Rawson had gone by bullet train to Helsinki for their quarterly visa trip.

So we decided to play hooky from the office for a couple of hours in the middle of the day, too. Last Saturday on our shopping trip to Oxta Mall, we left a suit to be dry-cleaned. They do it in one day, but we drag our feet about the long (1-mile) cold (below 20F) walk back just to pick up a suit. This week it got postponed until Thursday. The mall was more crowded and worse than a Saturday afternoon! People everywhere--including lots of off-school teenagers hanging out.  



We went to Teremok in the mall food court for lunch. Blini (Russian crepes) are a favorite, and Teremok is a soup-and-blini fast food chain restaurant. They have "savory" blini filled with meat/cheese/veggies, etc. They have "sweet" blini filled with sour cream, sweetened-condensed milk, fruit, etc. We opted for one chicken/mushroom and one ham/cheese and split them both between us.


When we walked into Lenta, the big grocery store in the basement, we immediately saw big tables selling flowers and chocolates for Women's Day. Some things are universal.  

One important purchase was "babushka candy." Sue always keeps a bowl of small hard candies on her desk for those who come by the office. She had run out!! So, now the stash is refilled.
Another purchase was a couple of rubber balls for game night with the young volunteers and their guests. More on that below.

Because the weather was so sunny all week (but still with temperatures in the teens F), there was a lot of serious snow & ice removal going on. We saw people on rooftops all over the city pushing the snow down to the ground from five stories up. They did it on our building, too. During District Meeting, it looked like it was seriously snowing outside through the windows, even though the sun was shining brightly. It was just all the snow and blocks of ice being pushed off the roofs.




Friday afternoon we took our usual volunteer shift at the Hermitage. We went a little early and took the trolley bus. Traffic was so light that we made the trip in just thirty minutes. It was a good thing, as the lines were out the door. We stayed an extra half hour helping with bar-coded tickets at the turnstiles, and then we toured the rooms, including the new exhibits. We liked one room which had photographs of the interior after its artwork had been removed for safekeeping during one of the revolutions and wars. You can compare a scene here.

One exhibit we couldn't photograph was about the ancient land of Dilmun, once thought to be mythical, but since discovered to be the Persian Gulf island of Bahrain, dating back some 5000 years!

The Neva river is still frozen solid, so people wandered out onto the ice. This photo is from a window of the Hermitage.

The Hermitage has a 150-seat theater we had never seen before. We found this cutaway model and decided to find it and so explored the east side of the complex. Using our volunteer staff passes, we slipped into the theater for a few minutes to witness a rehearsal of an anthology of Russian ballet.

Saturday Sue joined the returning Rawsons on a car trip to the Metro Cash and Carry superstore, where she bought enough groceries to last till Spring! [We hope that isn't long....] That evening was Game Night at the Church. The volunteers taped four-square lines on the hall floor and had three games of four-square going on, using rubber balls we had purchased on Thursday at the mall. (You can barely see two of the green balls and one orange ball in this photo.)

After an hour, we all joined in a game of human foosball using PCV poles that filled the room. We had two balls going at once, which made the game very interesting.

After the games, the Elders taught a lesson about the foundations of faith, comparing the world represented by a balloon to scriptures, and showing that one cannot build true knowledge on a flimsy foundation. There were some twenty or so visitors joined by the eight volunteers. The night ended with many friendly discussions and refreshments, including a crowd favorite, Sue's fresh-made lemon squares.