Quiet week around the mission, so we've mostly been occupied by other natural phenomena around us. Sorry, not so many photos of volunteers this week. We didn't see much of them. They are all out doing good work while we sit in the Office.
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| Looking southeast at 11pm pre-eclipse |
There was a full lunar eclipse on Monday morning! Ken took a great picture of the full moon on Sunday night.
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| Looking west across the frozen river at 7:30am watching The Lunar Eclipse Temperature -5 degrees Fahrenheit |
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| Looking north at 8:15am at street lights- No eclipsed moon to see Just the usual St. Petersburg cloud cover |
Sue caught this rare site. It's the only time we've ever seen a snow blower in St. Petersburg. Usually the maintenance guys for our building are out with a shovel.  |
| Allens, Sisters Stockman & Gursch, Elders Herrin, Thieme & Packer |
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| The Allens with Sisters Stockman (Australia) & Gursch (Austria) with Alyona |
Last Friday when we were at the Hermitage, Sue finally got the template for the volunteer badges for 2019. They are running a little behind. She spent a good deal of Monday and Tuesday putting in the name, volunteer number, and photo for 48 people on the badges. She then sent off the link to the folder holding them all. Thursday noon-ish she got an email back saying that she'd used the wrong font!!She hadn't paid attention, but just used the same one as last year. (Mikhail is an artist and fussy about that kind of thing.) And Sue hadn't saved the originals of them--just did them, then exported as JPEG and went on to the next one.
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| Elder Baptista's badge. The little flags indicate the languages a volunteer speaks. He gets the most -- Russian, English, French, and his two native languages, Portuguese (from Dad) & German (from Mom). |
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| Happy Birthday Sister Calene Peck |
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| President & Sister Rawson, Sister & Elder Peck, Sue |
Friday morning when we came out the door at the bottom of our stairs Ken accidentally kicked over one of the little snow characters sitting on the step. Not many people use these stairs--most people in our 11-story tall building use the elevator and come out another door. 
We guess some kids thought this would be a good place to line up their creations. They were so cute! Someone has a bunch of snow-molds.
Sue found them on Amazon! It says they are for sand or snow.
Friday after our usual Hermitage service we went upstairs to see the special exhibit of Piero della Francesca works. But on the way we heard music. In the grand Armory Hall of the Winter Palace, there was an orchestra and singers giving a wonderful concert! So we stayed and enjoyed that for awhile. The iPhone microphone doesn't do the sound justice, as they seemed to be doing Russian folk music. Here's a link to an excerpt from their performance.
Pierro della Francesca (~1415 to 12 Oct 1492) was an Italian painter who did lots of church art and also portraits of local famous people. He's one of the first to use perspective in painting and wrote a well-illustrated book on the subject, which is also part of the exhibit. These pieces were mostly gathered together from various other museums in London and Italy for this exhibit at the Hermitage.
This painting of the Annunciation is stunning. The photo doesn't do justice to the colors and depth. It's about 3/4 lifesize: Painted in the 1460's!
After our weekly three-hour stint of standing by the entrance turnstiles, we went down the corridor to find a nearby bench and sit for a few minutes to rest our weary feet and plan our viewing for the day. This week as we sat our friend Mikhail, the head of volunteer service for the Hermitage, came by and told us two things we really must see. One was a lecture Friday evening in the General Staff Building across the snow-covered Palace Square from the Winter Palace--more about that below. The other was the Gallery in the New Hermitage adjoining the Winter Palace. We'd been through there several times, but we had not really understood it until we stopped to read and see.
The hall is a "history of painting." It is a long gallery with high arched sections, each with a dome on top, and paintings on every inch of wall and ceiling. Each section reflects a different time of history and the artistic style done then. And there are life-sized sculptures down the middle. The white cameos on the ceiling are made of copper and are profiles of famous artists of the period shown in that area of the gallery.
Starting at the north end and moving towards the south, almost every painting depicts someone painting a picture. It goes through history, because we have very few paintings that have survived from Greek and Roman times. This is all done from written descriptions, legends and myths.
We then walked back to the main part of the Winter Palace and stopped in the first floor cafe for dinner. We've never eaten there and kept saying we should before we go home. Not spectacular food, so we hadn't missed anything. But still cheap: $10 for the two of us. We each had a small salad, a sandwich and a bottle of drink. Food in St. Petersburg just isn't expensive.
We found our coats, hats, mittens and scarves and trudged across Palace Square to the General Staff Building. Mikhail had told us that Carlo Ginzburg, the world authority on Piero della Francesca, was giving a lecture. And he's Italian, so it would be in English. The line to get in was out the door and moving slowly. We flashed our Hermitage volunteer badges and marched in through the Exit instead with no problem. We went to the "wardrobe" and shed all the coats and hats, etc., and then went out to the Lecture Hall. They were handing out translating headsets to everyone--but for once we didn't need them! This was for the simultaneous translation from English. We're happy in English, thank you.
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| Carlo Ginzburg & "The Flagellation" |
The General Staff building, like most buildings in St. Petersburg, was built around a central courtyard. In the city most of those courtyards are now either a park with trees and children's play equipment (in the case of apartment buildings) or parking lots (in the case of office buildings.) But some buildings, the General Staff building included, have roofed over the central courtyard and made it into more building space. In this building, that includes the entrance areas, ticket office, information desk, cafe, wardrobes for coats, restrooms, etc. And a huge staircase up to the second floor entrance to the exhibit areas of the Museum. The General Staff building holds the modern art: French impressionism, Picasso, etc.
But those stairs are wide so that chairs can be put on them and the open area turned into a large lecture hall. The lecture was about 30 minutes and too academic for our tastes or knowledge about art. When they started the Q&A it got way too technical for us, so we and many others left.
The blog title of this week is "Weather or Not" because we've sure had weather. It has snowed 1"-3" nearly every day, and it doesn't melt in between, so just keeps piling up. Thursday night when we walked to Mama Roma's we didn't wear our cleats, and that was a mistake. We were glad to have them on Friday when we went to the Hermitage. Underneath that 1" of snow on the sidewalks is 2-3" of ice. It's not pretty...
But we have these great ice cleats. Last winter was so mild that we never used them. We are glad to have them now. They just slip on over the boots and can easily be removed when going indoors.Saturday afternoon it was snowing--again. Temperature in the low teens F, but with wind and snow it felt like zero. The snow wasn't pretty soft flakes. It was little icy pricks coming in at a 45 degree angle. We badly needed a big grocery store run, so decided it was a taxi day. When the RuTaxi app said it would be 15 minutes before he arrived at our apartment, we knew things were bad. Everyone else was taking taxis, too. It's only a mile walk, but we're getting lazy (or cautious) in our old age.
And the mall and the store were crammed with people! What else to do on such an awful cold stormy day? Find someplace warm and friendly and go shopping. Ken would stand off out of the way while Sue went down the aisles getting what she wanted and coming back to dump it in the cart. Don't panic at the prices on the potatoes. Those are rubles. 129 rubles is about $1.95. That's not a bad price for 22lbs. (10kg) of potatoes.We finished our shopping, left Ken's suit at the dry cleaners, bought him some A&W root beer at the candy kiosk and then called a cab. Sue said "northeast door" in the order. But when the cab came it was on the south side. We had four big bags of groceries and asked him to come around to our side, but he didn't. So we walked around the building. He'd gone altogether--disappeared off the app. So we gave up and took the mini-bus two-thirds of the way home and walked the rest. With 50lbs among four big bags, it was a slog, but we got a couple of good pictures out of it.
We always walk through this mini park. In the summer there are flowers in this metal-sculpture flower box. In the winter the snow just piles up. You can see the black 'bowls' that hold the flowers. Everything piled on top is just snow.
And there were men clearing the roofs. When we moved here we thought the railings along the roofs were so that snow wouldn't fall on people. Now we know they are there so the men clearing off the icicles and snow by hand don't fall off! The man on top chops at the ice in the gutter and then pushes everything off the edges. In about three days there will be more icicles hanging down again. We think the insulation probably isn't very good in these old Soviet-era apartment buildings.But, we're surviving. Temperatures are down in single-digits Fahrenheit, but we stay toasty warm inside. Except in the office... Sue sits near the door, and every time someone comes in from outside they bring a blast of cold air with them. On Monday it was bad because so many of the volunteers come through to send and receive their emails. The door is opening and closing a lot. She has a small radiator that runs all the time, but it wasn't keeping up. She also has a heater/AC unit up on the wall above her desk. She used it occasionally in the summer when it got really hot. This week she tried to turn it on for heat but was getting nothing. She talked to Igor, our building manager. He asked around and found out it won't work if the temperature outside is lower than -15C! [5F] What good is a heater that doesn't work in cold weather?Not much!
But, there is a heater between the set of double entrance doors, up on the ceiling. We turned that on, and it blasted away in the small space making it feel about 100F. Igor said he's worked in the building for four years and this is the first time they've ever turned on that heater. Sue was glad to have it this week.
Next: February.
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