Kremlin Church

When taking guided tours, the phrase I’ve heard more than any other is “The Time of Troubles”. Any country that’s been around since 900 AD is bound to have had many times of troubles, but the Russians love to remember all of theirs.

Church Interior

Uglich is a very old Russian town. Most cities were built entirely of wood. Uglich built their Kremlin (castle) and other stone buildings in the 15th century. Unfortunately, Dimitri, the last royal Romanov died in Uglich. Boris Godunov (who became Tsar for a few years) was shocked that his rival died, and sent a team to investigate the cause of the Dimitri Romonov’s death. The investigation team found that the Dimitri had an epileptic fit while holding a knife and unfortunately slit his own throat. It was a tragic “accident” and Boris was forced to become Tsar.

Church of Dimitri’s Spilled Blood

Unfortunately, Boris couldn’t form a strong government. This lead to the Times of *Polish* Troubles, when the Poles came and destroyed Uglich. The only building to survive the Time of Polish Troubles is the ugly red brick building. The current church was built in the 17th century on the site of the original church. They have a glass floor allowing us to see part of the original’s church’s foundation. The red Church is the Church of Dimitri’s spilled blood.

Nunnery

The last building you see here is the Nunnery. You might well wonder how such an important city as Uglich can get by with just two churches and a Nunnery. The answer is that the rest of the town was flooded in the 1930s when Stalin built the locks and canals that made the rivers navigable between Moscow and St. Petersburg. Several of Uglich’s churches and other buildings were flooded when the reservoir was expanded. One can see the top of a bell tower poking out of the reservoir today.

Traditional Dress-up at Dinner

So we finished the formal part of our tour, and decided to walk 300 meters to the Nunnery, as much to get some exercise as anything else. I became aware of an electronic song, such as one might hear from an ice cream truck in the US. It kept on playing, over and over, and it was becoming somewhat annoying. We walked several blocks down the street, and we could still hear it. I started wondering whether the merchants had installed some kind of community music system. Then I started wondering why anybody would install all those outdoor speakers and then play the same dumb ditty over and over. Finally Danita figured out I was the source of the noise pollution. I had set an alarm yesterday to remind us to attend an event. It went off again today. That’s probably why nobody wanted to be near us as we walked around town.

Monistary

Today we visited the village of Kirillov and saw the monastery of St. Cyril. It was one of the largest and most important monasteries. We saw the inside of the white building, which contained many icons, including some incredibly beautiful icons painted in Moscow. You can peruse these pictures of the outside of the monastery.

Toumbstone Paving

The Monks wanted to pave the path to a new Church, but Catherine the Great had confiscated the liquid assets of all monasteries, as she felt she needed the money and the monks should be focused on praying. The monks decided to use build the path with graveyard tombstones. People could read the names of deceased monks and pray for them while they walked to the Church.

Village Homes

I included a picture of some of the houses in the village. These wooden structures are supposed to be typical of Russian village homes today.

Monistary Entrance. You can see the stuco painting on the entrance wall. The thickness of these walls is for defence against attackers.

Monistary Church

Summer Church

The time on board is longer than it has been on other cruises we have taken. We cruise overnight and most of the day, then we get 3 or 4 hours in port. In the mean time, we see lots of woods. Logging seems to be the main industry of the area. One person in our tour group couldn’t understand why the river isn’t lined with summer homes. We’re here in the summer time, which is mostly rainy. In the winter, the river freeze is thick enough that they can land small airplanes on the ice.

Winter Church – you see the icon wall and a 3-person choir giving a brief concert

Today’s stop is Kizhi. They moved several original Russian wooden churches and houses onto this island, putting them on display. Our guide was excellent. We didn’t receive a written summary of what we saw, so I won’t try to reproduce the Russian names for the structures.

Icon detail

This was an area with about 1,000 islands. People lived in small villages. Some villages had only one house. Each house provided shelter for an extended family of 20 or so persons. The dominant feature was the central church. It served as the area’s administrative center and graveyard. As in most communities, the main church had 3 buildings – a summer Church, a smaller but heated winter Church, and a bell tower. This Church was built in the 1714. There were no nails, because each nail was hand-made. 60 nails cost a cow. The Church as 22 cupolas because the parishioners lived on islands all around the area. Everybody wanted to see the front of the Church, so they built the Church “in the round”. The bell tower was built after 1900. By this time, cheap factory-made nails were available. The summer Church is being restored. We saw the interior of the winter Church. The buildings form an active Russian Orthodox Church. I did not realize than the Russian Orthodox used a wall of icons to separate the sanctuary from the alter. The winter Church has 4 tiers of icons. The summer Church is larger and has 7. People visit the alter only once or twice in their lifetimes (the stories I heard weren’t clear.) Baby boys visited the alter when they are baptized (but not girls). Couples are taken into the alter when they are married.

Rich person’s house – Danita’s grandmother had memories of living in a house similar to this, in Poland

We went inside one house. It housed 22 people, 10 cows, plus assorted chickens and a few horses. Residents were very self-reliant. They built their own houses, farm implements, boats, sleds, etc. There was one bed, which was made available to whichever woman had most recently given birth. Buildings were highly organized. A shelf ran around the interior of the house. Every family stored things in the same place. The shelf on one wall was reserved for sharp implements, a different one salt, one for hats and mittens, and one for pies. Shelves were high enough to keep the kids out. The cheese and butter making room was the clean room. (No kids with dirty feet allowed!) The detail picture shows where the barn section was joined to the house. In the summer, they moved cows to a nearby island. This was convenient because cows could graze where they want, but can’t wonder off into the woods or be attached by a bear. The only inconvenience was rowing out to the island twice a day to milk the cows and haul the pails of milk back to the house. The barn or grainery includes a hole for the cats.
We saw a house for the less wealthy. Instead of a nice stove with a flue to the outside, they heated with an open fire. There was as circular hole in the roof, which could be opened or closed. There was lots of smoke when the fire was first lit. After 20 minutes, the smoke was mostly up by the ceiling and they opened the vent for a short while. After that, the fire was burning well and there was less smoke. They washed the walls down to clean the soot. They burned egg shells to make the ceiling shiny. The advantage of a “black house” is that it needed less wood to keep the house warm.

Russia’s oldest wooden Church

The last building we saw is Church reputed to have been built by Sty. Lazarus, the founder of the Murom Monastery. He died in 1391, making this the oldest wooden Church in Russia.

There’s not a lot to report today. We stopped in Mandrogui. The name rolls off the tong, but there’s not a lot here. They built some replicas of old log cabins and offered artists the opportunity to live here, creating and selling nesting dolls, lacquered boxes, and other traditional Russian crafts. The artists live in a type of commune, complete with a written agreement not to drink. I wonder if this is strictly enforced.

Peter the Great’s Throne

Our boat trip included a tour of St. Petersburg. We took it and we are glad we did. The highlight was the Hermatage. We never made it to the main part of the museum because of the very long lines. But the tour group took is right in. Right off the start, the main staircase was incredible. Of course, it was used only for official functions. But it still looks amazing.

Peacock Clock

The tour went around the rooms of the main floor, which contain some of the most important exhibits. Here’s a picture of the Peacock Clock. Once an hour, various parts of this clock moved in the most incredible ways. They claim the clock works perfectly. If you want to see this peacock strut its stuff, there are plenty of YouTube videos. Just search for “Peacock Clock”. Don’t worry about what language you get. The clock doesn’t need words to make it more interesting.

Church of the Spilled Blood

We had time to see several other things we hadn’t seen already. Here’s a shot of the Church of the Spilled Blood.

Russian Wedding Party

One of the interesting things we saw was bridal parties taking pictures. In Russia, couples usually get married on Saturday by going to the marriage office and signing papers. Then the newlyweds run around town getting their pictures taken in places with great views, while the parents and guests start the reception party. The happy couple shows up at the reception in time to have dinner. Then it’s off to their new lives together.

Mandatory Picture of a Fabrage Egg

We started out visiting the Hermatage art museum, which is a converted palace. It’s hard to understand the large number of palaces in St. Petersburg. Peter the Great built Petrohof to be bigger and better than Versais. Catherine the great built a palace in St. Pete, but she also re-did several rooms in Petrohoff. The royal family lived in the palace that is now known as the Hermatage. And there are at least a half dozen other palaces scattered around the area. The thing is, Peter didn’t spend much time in any of these palaces. He was always out fighting wars or visiting Europe. In any event, the Hermatage is the place to go when visiting St. Pete. It has the longest lines.

Hermatage Second Building

We were standing in the rain waiting to get tickets, when I noticed a small number of people were leaving line, returning with tickets, and going inside. Danita went off in search of tickets, and found kiosks where one could buy tickets electronically. But she couldn’t get the credit card to work. The main screen had an English option, but when it came time to use the credit card, it was English only. She came back and I went off to try my luck. I hit the jackpot because we have two credit cards. One has the chip. That didn’t work because Europe has PINs on their chip cards and the US doesn’t. Knowing that, I was able to make our other credit card work, because it has only the mag stripe. Proud possessor of tickets, we went to the line to get into the museum. This line was at least indoors. It was a very long line, but we were in luck again. A museum official came by and explained we could take another way into the museum. There is no way to see all of the Hermatage at once. We had decided to see the French Impressionists, especially Monet, which Danita knew was on the 3rd floor. We went to the 3rd floor and found an exhibit of ancient money. Then we went down and took a different staircase to a different section of the 3rd floor and found rooms left as they were when the imperial family lived there. All this was very nice, but it wasn’t what we wanted to see. We found a museum official that spoke a little English and found out about the 2nd building (there are more than two). We went to the 2nd building and after two more false starts, found the 19th century French area. We went the wrong way and saw a dozen rooms of French Impressionistic art that weren’t by Monet. We went back the other way and finally found Monet. It took us only 3 hours. By then we were tired, but we were stubborn enough to see what we went in looking for.

Hermatage Second Building Interior

We left the Hermatage and found a delightful lunch, then went to the Collenade of St. Isaac’s Cathedral to get a bird’s eye view of St. Petersburg. It was time to find our river cruise ship. We got our suitcases and a cab, and were whisked off to the river boat harbor. As we were collecting our luggage, a port official came over and told our cab driver we were in the wrong place (as I surmised from the tone of voice, body language, and end result). There was a long and serious discussion, the end of result of which was that we had to go the second pier 300 meters down the road. I’m not sure why there had to be such a long and serious discussion, but that seems to be the way things are done in Russia.
When we came aboard, we found ourselves in a bright and roomy cabin with a wonderfully large deck. We’re looking forward to our adventures on the Volga river.

If you have an old palace you aren’t using, you can always turn it into an art museum

Today was our day to visit the Russian Art Museum, which was about a mile from our hotel. Thanks to Google Android tablets and Google Map Offline mode, we had no problems navigating or way there and back.

What’s more boring than a picture of a painting of Catherine the Great. I don’t know, but this isn’t a painting — it’s a mosaic, made from small pieces of colored glass

After a couple of hours rest, we went to a delightful little restaurant we had our eye on. We weren’t disapointed. We have eaten very well in St. Pete.

After dinner, we saw the ballet “Don Quixote”. The dancers were excellent. Coming back to the hotel at 11 PM was a treat. It was late for us, but we had a nice rest before dinner. This is Friday. The rain had cleared. The temperature was comfortable. And it’s the trailing edge of white nights. The streets were crowded with people having a good time.

All the pics are from the museum.  I’ll let the captions speak for themselves.

Carved Bone – very intricate. I would have made one of my own, but Danita wouldn’t let me bring my knife.

This picture is supposed to launch us into space (I’m not joking – that’s what the commentator said.) I guess it’s like Star Trek

“A Point in Space” – reminds me of quantum physics. Maybe Mark can explain this one.

My personal favorite, a comment on modern Russian life

There are pics today.

Hydrofoil

We did only one thing today. We visited Petrohoff, Peter the Great’s palace. We started the day by walking 2 blocks to the hydrofoil. The guide book says the hydrofoil runs every 30 minutes from 10 to 6:30, and it’s a 30-minute ride to Petrohoff. What the guide book *didn’t* say is that the first two rides are reserved for “business class”. I have no idea what that means, but I suspect that the tour companies buy out the first runs. We also had to decide right then and there which run we were going to take coming back (something else that wasn’t in the tour book.) Having no idea what we would see, I arbitrarily picked 5:00, which turned out to be a pretty good guess.

Peter’s Palace

We also learned a lot about how Russia works. When we got to Petrohoff, we waited in line to buy admission tickets to the grounds. We went to the palace and were told we needed to buy tickets at 2:30. Fortunately, a friendly Russian told us to go to another line and buy tickets for Russian speakers. They were cheaper and we could get audio guides. She was right about being cheaper. We later fould out that the 2:30 tickets were “VIP” and cost about 5 times more. So we waited in line for 2 hours to buy admission tickets to the palace. When we bought admission tickets and asked for English audio guides. The ticket agent said audio guides were in the palace. When we got to the palace, they had a letter printed up saying that audio guides were in the ticket office. Fortunately, we could see the palace without audio guides. They had enough English signs that we had a pretty good idea of what we were looking at. We also learned a little of how things work over here.

In the Palace Grounds

–> Russians are really good at waiting in line. They even joke that if you see a line, you should get in it.

–> When they don’t want to sell something that is supposed to be available, they just lie about where you have to go to get it.

–> Russians go out of their way to help each other, because that’s the only way to get the real story. When something goes wrong even with extra help, they take it in good humor.

Peter wanted Petrohoff to be better than Verailles. From what we saw, it was pretty obvious he succeeded. The palace is in immaculate condition. Everything we saw was actually used in the palace. While many rooms were re-done by later Russian leaders, one of the rooms was exactly as it was used by Peter himself.

Kids Playing in a “surprose” fountain

They don’t allow photos inside the palace, so everything you will see here is from the grounds. Even though it was a work day today, there were lots of people on the grounds and in the palace. The majority of them were Russian. The grounds are huge and very well maintained. There were impromptu activities, food stands (all with long lines, naturally), “Surprise” fountains for the kids to pay in, and more. The Surprise fountains even had a surprise for the adults. In the picture, you can see a white bench in the bnackground. It looked like it was outside the spray zone. A gentleman sat on the bhench to take a rest. A surprise sprinkler behind the bench turned on and the gentleman got wet.

An excellent rendition of Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor”

By the end of the day, we were quite tired. I was very happy we weren’t staying any later than 5. When we got back to the hotel area, we ate at a Georgian restaurant we had noted on our walk yesterday. Danita went for a swim in the hotel’s indoor pool. We’re resting the rest of the night. We might go out later and enjoy the “white nights” (it doesn’t get dark in St. Pete this time of year). Or we might just go to bed. Either way, our first full day in St. Pete was a great one.

Iconic St. Petersburg Statue

We left Dulles airport at 6 PM Tuesday, connected in Paris, and arrived in St. Petersburg about 8 AM yesterday (3 PM local time). The flights were wonderfully boring. We were suprised at how easy it was to clear customs. We waited in a short line at passport control. My big challenge was to answer “You fru fro”, which was supposed to mean “Where did you fly from?”. Finally, the bored agent supplied my answer (“Paris”). From there, we picked up our bags and went to the “Nothing to declare” door, which lead to an empty room. Voila, we were in one of the most buerocratic nations on Earth.

St. Isaac’s Cathedral

We were in our hotel by 4. Petro Palace isn’t much to look at from the outside, but our room is quite nice. It includes ammenities we don’t find at the Holiday Inn – robes, slippers, and of course floor heaters for the bathroom. The breakfast this morning was an extensive buffet.

After unpacking, we walked around the block and found several restaurants. We select a restaurant with painted scenes on the walls and ceiling, bad popular music (in English), and delightful crepes.

St. Isaac’s Alter

The next order of business was to stay awake until bedtime. There is a choral group that offers concerts once a month, and tonight was concert night. They sing classical Russian religious music such as Rachmaninoff “O Mother of God vigilantly praying”. Or so they say, I never understood a word.

The cathedral was less than a block away. It was easy to get there an hour before concert time, which got us excellent seats. A group of Austrian language teachers came up and in their best Russian, asked me of the seat next to me was taken. I said something wonderfully cultured, like “Huh?” That’s how they knew to switch to English.

Alter Detail

The choral group is about 30 people. They sing a capallo, and they are very good. If the singers aren’t professional, they are as good as professionals. The conductor has a wonderful sense of voice and balance. Best of all, the concert was in St. Isaac’s Cathedral. With it’s 70- or 80- foot ceilings, domes and arches, and marble walls; it offers perfect accoustics for this kind of music. No recording could possibly reproduce the amazing music we heard. Plus we were surrounded by gold icons and artifacts, incredible statuary, and amazing painted scenes. What a wonderful introduction to St. Petersburg.

There are no pics this week.

We have plenty of news, but the headliner this week is healthcare. We’ve had hot and muggy weather. Thursday morning, I was working with a Comcast tech on the clubhouse internet. Danita went for a bike ride. I got home and decided to go on my own bike ride. About half an hour into my ride, I got a call from Christy (our office manager). Near the end of her ride, Danita stopped to talk with a neighbor. While talking, she suddenly collapsed. There was nothing for me to do but turn around and ride half an hour back. I found Danita at our local hospital. She was suffering from heat exhaustion. We spent the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon in the hospital’s air conditioned room. I was quite impressed with the quality of Danita’s care while she was in the emergency room.

Though it all, neither Danita or I were overly concerned — until the stupid alarm incident. For whatever reason, the monitor kept on alarming. I got permission to silence the alarm as long as Danita was alert. So I was standing near Danita’s bed with my finger on the silence button. During one alarm, Danita decided she didn’t want to try to talk over the beeping and closed her eyes for a short rest. This caused a moment’s panic when she didn’t immediatly answer my query. Later, while the nurse was in, the stupid machine decided Danita had “flatlined”. Since Danita was actively working with the nurse, that was an obvious false alarm. There’s no doubt that the technology we have doesn’t yet match the tecehnology we should have.

Yesterday Danita felt the effects of the fall, but otherwise felt fine. She certainly felt well enough to attend the neighborhood cookout last night.

The other healthcare news is a little surprise we got about the cost of Medicare. Danita officially retired July 1. She will continue her health insurance through UMBC, and I will continue to participate in her medical plan. However, I am required to use Medicare as my primary insurance. We’ve known all this since before I retired. The surprise is, the cost of medicare is based on your income *2* years ago. Near the end of the year two years ago, we converted some investments into cash. The plan is to live on the investments for a while, because every year we delay social security, our monthly payments go up by 8% (up to an age of 70-whatever). Since we we obviously plan to live a very long time, we want  as many of those 8%-a-year increases as we can get. All of which is working out exactly as planned, except for the capital gains. We knew we would take a hit on income taxes for the capital gains. We didn’t know the cost of my medicare would be obscenely high for the next 6 months. Oops. Hopefully, this will all be over in January.

My beloved tablet, which is only 6 months old, died suddenly. When we were leaving the hospital, I used it to look up a phone number. When we got home, the screen was cracked. None of the touch functions worked. That made the tablet totally useless and left me totally disgusted. Fortunately, inexpensive and good selections are readily available on Amazon. I had a new tablet sitting on my doorstep when we came home from the cookout. Hopefully this will last much longer than 6 months. These handy little devices aren’t so cheap if they don’t last a few years.

I have been quite busy for the last month working on our clubhouse computers. I installed a new WiFi, set up a new computer for Christy, and did a general cleanup. Comcast is coming in to install a new modem Monday. I will oversee that, make a couple of configuration changes, and document what I did. That will complete the project — just in time for us to leave for Russia Tuesday.

Which leads me into our last news item for the week. We will be traveling July 12 – 26. We will be in St. Petersburg for a few days, then on a river cruise 7/16 – 22, then spending the rest of our time in Moscow. Our phones don’t work in Russia. The only way to reach is us by Email, or to call the emergency numbers highlighted in yellow on the attached itinery. We will have access to internet at our hotels in St. Petersburg and Moscow, but there is no internet service on the cruise. I will write a daily blog, but if we don’t find free WiFi when we are docked, I woun’t be able to send them out daily.

We aren’t taking our computers with us to Russia. The only device we will have is my brand-new tablet. I’m practicing my blogging skills on the tablet. (I did this entire blog on the tablet). I find the tablet to be extremely portable, and sooner or later it can get everything done — typing, editing pictures, Email, etc. It’s just that everything takes longer. I generaly wake up early and have lots of time for computer-ing in the morning. We’ll just have to see how it goes. I’ll get each day’s blog published sooner or later. Don’t be surprised if you don’t hear from us very much for the next 2 1/2 weeks.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.