Half way point
3 weeks down and 3 to go.
On Wednesday we made our first visit to the Hermitage, which - if possible - is even bigger than I remember. And now it is occupying another building (the General Staff, on the other side of Palace Square from the Winter Palace) which we did not even go in to. Our (Russian) student cards get us free access but we still had to queue up outside with the tourists for half an hour... lucky it wasn't raining.
Very strange to come to Russia to see such a huge collection of iconic West European art (nearly all the serious Russian collections are held by the Russian Museum, although those are frequently lent out for exhibition in the West to make money). Still, very well worth it. And always good to be revisit the insane opulence of the Imperial court.
Found a nice nugget in one of the guide books: there is nothing attaching the 600-tonne Alexander column in Palace Square to its base. It just sits on top of it.
Yesterday we walked around Vasilevsky Island, which is nice and quiet in places, has a gigantic cemetery, and still has many Soviet emblems etc on the outsides of buildings. A nice change from the slightly insane city centre, and some fantastic abandoned factories and crumbling apartment blocks. Picures... well, one day.
Now that the Makhno miniseries has finished, there's no longer much on television. Last night, we had the choice of: Evita with Russian subtitles; a dubbed version of 'Zeus and Roxanne' (which appears to be a inter-species love story of some sort), and Russian versiuons of 'Big Brother', 'Who wants to tbe a Millionaire' or 'Wheel of Fortune.' Happily, the latter are hilarious, with people breaking in to song at every opportunity for no apparent reason. Well, it's better than 'Casualty'.
On Wednesday we made our first visit to the Hermitage, which - if possible - is even bigger than I remember. And now it is occupying another building (the General Staff, on the other side of Palace Square from the Winter Palace) which we did not even go in to. Our (Russian) student cards get us free access but we still had to queue up outside with the tourists for half an hour... lucky it wasn't raining.
Very strange to come to Russia to see such a huge collection of iconic West European art (nearly all the serious Russian collections are held by the Russian Museum, although those are frequently lent out for exhibition in the West to make money). Still, very well worth it. And always good to be revisit the insane opulence of the Imperial court.
Found a nice nugget in one of the guide books: there is nothing attaching the 600-tonne Alexander column in Palace Square to its base. It just sits on top of it.
Yesterday we walked around Vasilevsky Island, which is nice and quiet in places, has a gigantic cemetery, and still has many Soviet emblems etc on the outsides of buildings. A nice change from the slightly insane city centre, and some fantastic abandoned factories and crumbling apartment blocks. Picures... well, one day.
Now that the Makhno miniseries has finished, there's no longer much on television. Last night, we had the choice of: Evita with Russian subtitles; a dubbed version of 'Zeus and Roxanne' (which appears to be a inter-species love story of some sort), and Russian versiuons of 'Big Brother', 'Who wants to tbe a Millionaire' or 'Wheel of Fortune.' Happily, the latter are hilarious, with people breaking in to song at every opportunity for no apparent reason. Well, it's better than 'Casualty'.
posted by UK plc at 5:26 PM
2 Comments:
Hi Si
Glad to hear all is well. Looking forward to photos especially as I now have digital photo viwer!! Don't despair of getting to grips with the lingo the more you learn themore you learn that there's more to learn. C'est la vie!
Cru
What on earth is a digital photo viewer? (shirley you do it on the computer!).
Language is getting there... I can almost understand the news now.
Congratulations on finishing, too.
Si.
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