My feet are still recovering from Friday, when we spent the whole day at the Hermitage. The rooms are beautifully restored, and the art is back in its proper place. To know what it was like during the Siege of Leningrad during World War II, read Debra Dean's fabulous novel, �The Madonnas of Leningrad.� To know what it's like now, check out its website.
I'm so dazzled by all the art and the architecture that holds it, I don't know where to start. So I�ll tell you about our church supper yesterday. After a hotel breakfast (cheese, cold cuts, hot and cold cereal, yogurt, toast) and our daily prayer service, we went to the outskirts of St. Petersburg to the Church of St. Catherine. The building is more than 200 years old, and it was one of the first to be returned to the Church after the Soviet era.
We stood through the last part of the church service, hearing the choir sing one chant in English just for us. Partway through, there was a procession around the church, with the Rector �rebaptising� us all by flinging water from a bowl with a loose brush. This took place on all four sides of the building. We were to have lunch after the service, but there were two funerals followed by baptisms of about nine babies, so we had to wait. We toured the new building, which has two story brick walls but no roof yet. Last summer it had only one story.
Lunch was a series of dishes, starting with cold dishes -- several kinds of cold cuts, caviar, smoked salmon, bread, pickled cabbage -- and continuing with meat and potatoes before ending with kulich and paskha -- kulich being the traditional Easter cake and pashka the Easter cheese, a mixture of cheese, butter, sugar and other secret ingredients molded into a tall pyramid. Interspersed among the courses were many toasts, and much vodka. Nobody seemed to care that I toasted with mineral water.
On the way back to town we stopped at a cemetery where, during the 900-day siege, unidentified people who were found dead in the streets were buried in mass graves the size of tennis courts, acres and acres of them. Will we ever learn? We also stopped at a new church built to commemorate those who died in the Siege. They were killed by German bombs and by the very cold winter and lack of food. Will we ever, ever learn?
Dinner was picnic-style in the hotel. The breakfast room has a dishwasher, microwave and all the dishes one could need, and we bought cheese, bread, wine and other necessaries from the local grocery store. I put my camera in my pocket to select and pay for some cucumbers and tomatoes to mix with the herbs we doggie-bagged from the Azerbaijani restaurant where we joined a wedding party the previous night, and suddenly the produce seller called my attention to a well-dressed young man standing next to me.
�Hey!� I yelled, grabbing my camera from his hand. �That's mine!� Dick called him a son of a bitch in Russian. We thanked the produce seller profusely in English and Russian and figured the young man had followed us into the store. I think he held the door for us.
Dick paid his penance for his remark when we got to the corner and a babushka -- a little old lady -- asked him to help her across the street.
And so it goes ... more later!
