Touching Thousands of Lives, Sand Castles and a 315-year-old Wooden Palace

This was a really quiet week, so time for some commentary on normal life here.

How the garden grows! We are going grocery shopping today and will buy bacon. It's time for BLT's!

Sue's big accomplishment for the week is a six-day streak on the New York Times crossword puzzles. She usually can get all of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and sometimes Thursday. This is a first to get a Friday AND a Saturday puzzle all correct. And for Saturday she only Googled two clues--Kathy is the main character in Singin' in the Rain, and Sammy Cahn is the lyricist, not Caan. Usually she doesn't Google any--but to be so close and lose the streak? But now, is it really a streak, since Google helped? She usually misses 5-10 letters on the Sunday puzzle, so the streak will be gone anyway.

After the successful talk about Utah for the British Library here, the Elders decided to take their show on the road. They are trying for similar presentations at other libraries around St. Petersburg. An upcoming English-language lecture and practice at another public library is being well advertised by the library! This one will be on September 14.

Our big outings this week were to the Hermitage. We are now helping there on Wednesday mornings and Friday afternoons while our number of regular volunteers is down. We have eleven new ones coming in the next two months, so then we'll go back to once a week.

Our twice-weekly "commute" via the METRO to The Hermitage takes us through the Admiralty Metro Station, which has this wonderful bigger-than-life-size mosaic at one end of a long hallway.

And Admiraltyskaya Metro station is the deepest in St. Petersburg and Europe at nearly forty stories. That's one long escalator ride--about 2.5 minutes.

Even the ceilings are architecturally interesting. That's a compass. 

We emerge at the edge of Palace Square and walk across the square through the gate of the Winter Palace and the inner courtyard inside to our post at the turnstiles. We each greet about twenty people a minute for each three-hour-plus shift. We have literally "touched the lives" of thousands of people (and they don't even know it).

Other than that, life was quiet. Monday some of the Elders and Sisters came to the office to do their emails to home. We had our usual Tuesday afternoon District Meeting with Sisters Kosmynina, James & Bettinger, and Elders Cummings & Packer. And then our Thursday afternoon Office Staff meeting with President & Sister Rawson, the Pecks and the two Assistants, Elders Cummings and Packer. So there is something every day to break up the desk-sitting monotony.


Now for the touristy stuff:

When we served in Hamburg, Germany twelve years ago, we went up to Lübeck one day for their summer Sand Sculpture Festival. It was pretty interesting, so when we saw an ad in the subway for the St. Petersburg Sand Sculpture Festival we knew we wanted to go. It's been on the to-do list all summer, and now it only has about  three weeks left, so we needed to get there. This Saturday P-day was the time.  Rawsons said they would like to come along, too. It was another beautiful day--hot and muggy, but with a nice breeze along the river.  

The sculptures are all of famous art works--from Egyptian carvings to Salvador Dali. There was an Inca pyramid, Easter Island statues, the Great Wall of China, the Mona Lisa, Michelangelo's David and DaVinci's Last Supper--among many others. It's amazing how the artists could do all this with sand and water!

This is a sand replica of Kizhi Church that we saw last week for real. But at least here it doesn't have all the remodel scaffolding in the way of the domes.

Sand Sculpture Festival at Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg Russia, with the Rawsons on 18 Aug 2018. - Spherical Image - RICOH THETA

After enjoying the Sand Sculptures, we left the Peter and Paul Fortress and walked up the river to the "original palace" of Peter I. This wooden home was built in May 1703 in just three days! It has a study, a dining room and a small bedroom. Peter lived there just a few weeks, and then left to fight more wars against the Swedes. By the time he got back the Winter Palace across the Neva River was ready for him to live there. The Winter Palace is the big green and white building of the Hermitage Museum complex pictured above on Palace Square.

The outside of the building was of hewn logs, so they lay square, then they were painted red to match the style of buildings in Amsterdam, where earlier Peter had lived incognito for three years while studying shipbuilding. Now the whole building is inside another brick building to protect the "original palace." It was made a museum way back in 1729, the first museum in Russia. 

Our studies of the scriptures are coming along. Sue is resolved to read the Book of Mormon in Russian for thirty minutes a day--that is perhaps five to seven verses. It's a painful process.

Although Ken has been struggling with studies of Russian, he has also been studying the Book of Mormon, lately the Old Testament chapters of Isaiah found in 2 Nephi. That section has often been a stumbling block and barrier to those who read the Book of Mormon. That's understandable because to modern readers, it doesn't seem to make sense. However, Ken thinks he may have "cracked" what he calls the Isaiah Code. Here are his notes on 2 Nephi/Isaiah. What do you think?