Tomorrow morning we fly to Tel Aviv to meet with potential SEED mentoring
participants there. I haven’t been able to read my Sun email since Friday so I
hope all is well at work. All applications are due on 30 January.
John and I were at the big iron gates of the Hermitage museum before it opened this morning.
We got to see a crew cutting green blue blocks of ice with a chain saw and stacking them
to make a small building with stairs and a ramp. It was not clear what the building will be
used for but it will be very large. The Hermitage is in a former palace of the Czars and is one
of the greatest museums in the world. We walked for four hours and only saw a small
portion of the most famous paintings, drawings, sculpture, ceramics, armaments,
furniture, and textiles. Most pieces come from Europe and America but there is some
representation from other parts of the world as well.
The building itself is lovely with room after room decorated with complex plaster ornamentation or murals. Some
of the fireplaces have intricate mosaics in which each piece of glass is smaller than a grain of rice.
It is overwhelming and excellent. We bought a pass to take photos in the museum
(for 100 Rubles). Some
of the best photos John took were out the icy windows at the frozen Neva river and
city beyond. We came
to the Impressionist galleries last. We left after seeing Picasso, Monet, Gaugan, Van Gogh,
and Renoir.
We left the museum in time to get to church at 3 p.m. but when we got to St. Mary’s Lutheran,
we found that the Episcopal congregation
had moved and no one knew where. Frustrating. We walked back to the hotel on Nevsky Prospect
in the frigid
weather, stopping along the way at a bakery and at a book store. We bought Harry Potter
in Russian for our kids and some books of Russian music for Dina, our daughter’s vocal coach:
- Borodin
- Dargomyzhsky
- Bulakhov
- Gems of Classical Operetta
Dina is from Georgia (not the US state) and teaches all of her
students Russian songs along with Italian, German, French, and other languages. We figured
she would already have Tchaikovski, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Russian standards so we
looked for others.
Tonight, we went to Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro” (also called “Figaro’s Wedding” and “Le Nozze
di Figaro” on the program) with Jason at the Mariinsky Theater. It was funny and
wonderfully sung, with excellent sets and costumes. The subtitle projector above the
stage was of course translating from Italian into Russian so we just had to enjoy it without
knowing what was being said word for word.
We are all packed and ready to fly to Tel Aviv in the morning.
KatysBlog 