Talking about this semester before I left, I know I said to most (if not all) of you that if it were up to me, I'd just spend the whole four months exploring the Hermitage and other museums. Well, that was before I realized how vibrant the city itself really is, but the point still stands. We visited the Russian Museum today and explored art dating up to the 19th century. Next Sunday, we go back and look at Soviet art. Corinne and Brenda and I also took in a Bach concerto after the museum tour.
The three of us met Sergei at Gostiny Dvor, like usual for these outings. On the way to the museum we stopped and he told us about this cake shop that we passed; apparently, during the Soviet era, around Women's Day (March 8), it was not uncommon to see a queue of men a hundred meters long stretching from the door of this patisserie, in line to buy a cake or other sweet for their sweet. :) He related the experience of being sent to this shop, on his own, to buy cakes for all of the women in the factory he worked at as a young man, which made us all laugh. We stopped inside and he pointed out a few of the more popular products, and we decided to come back later, as we would have some time between the end of the tour and the start of the concert.
We arrived at the museum and, for some reason, ran a lap around the coat check area while taking off our various warms. I don't ask questions, I just follow Sergei and try not to get lost. I decided to forgo the thermal undershirt today and wore my teal blouse, just because I wanted to change up my usual t-shirt over long-sleeved thermal/turtleneck look. This was a mistake. My legs, double-insulated in two pairs of thermal leggings (I decided not to wear my boots as we'd be walking quite a bit), were nice and toasty throughout the excursion, but in some of the cooler rooms of the museum I became acutely aware of just how useless any clothing sold in Florida is when it comes to temperatures below 75 degrees. I also felt weirdly bottom-heavy, wearing three layers on the bottom and only one (flimsy) layer on top. On the plus side, that blouse has never looked so good on me, so there's that. :D
We began our tour with the икони, or religious icons, of the 11th century. I think I liked these rooms the best, because all of the other paintings are so well-preserved, it's hard to really conceive of how old they truly are. Icons, however, are much older, and something about the deterioration just makes them seem more "real." Even though that process has effectively been frozen in time, as they are now interred in a museum instead of being installed in churches and prayed to. I like the style of the medieval art, too; it's like proto-Cubism, with the different perspectives within the same painting, and if you look there are a lot of really neat things going on in some of them. And they're quite pretty, with rich and vibrant colors showing through the centuries of dirt. Lots of gold, intense blues and reds, all painted by the hands of artists who truly felt that they were not merely creating an image of a given saint, but by adorning this plank of wood with the face of that saint, they were creating a direct link to the saint and Heaven itself. (I felt extremely nerdy and kind of bad for immediately thinking "An image of a weeping angel will eventually become a weeping angel" when Sergei came to that point in his lecture about iconography.)
The first three or so rooms were full of icons ranging in size from a one-foot square facial portrait of the archangel Gabriel to full-body renditions of Peter and Paul the size of doors. After that, there was an abrupt shift to more realistic portraiture, marking the era of Peter the Great and the Europification of Russia's upper class. I thought it was neat to watch the change in women's fashion as we moved forward in time from the 17th century, as the severe conical corsets gave way to the high-waisted empire style popular by the end of the 18th century. Much of the portraiture of Catherine the Great depicts her dressed in the empire style. I liked those portraits because Catherine the Great appears to have had a body similar to mine; she may have been taller (I can't find any mention of her height in any biographies), but as far as build goes, it seems to be roughly the same. I don't know, I just like identifying with significant historical figures I guess.
In about two and a half hours, we saw about half the museum; there were a couple of rooms that we just breezed through, so depending on how expensive admission actually is, Corinne and I may go back and make a day of exploring the building. She is or was an art history major and particularly likes the artist Repin, whose work is apparently part of a traveling exhibit at the moment; she's going to try and find out where that exhibit is and when it's supposed to be back, and plan to return to the museum to see her favorite paintings in person. She was crushed when Sergei said that one of the paintings she was really looking forward to seeing (The Volga Barge Haulers, Repin) wasn't there. I'm looking forward to going back and seeing the Soviet art next week.
After we finished the tour, Sergei bid us farewell and we decided to grab some dinner before the concert. It was really windy and bitterly cold today, so we had to make a decision quickly; Brenda knew of a little столовая nearby, so we headed there. It was a cafeteria-style setup, much like the cafe that Corinne and I went to before class the other week; I got some salad Olivier, some bean soup, and some curly pasta with sauce that tasted pleasantly like Spaghetti-Os. I also got hot tea to drink, and selected a bag of "Flying Dragon" green tea, just because of the name. Everything was very tasty and really cheap; I think my final bill came to 112p.
After we finished at the stolovaya, we decided to go back to the cake shop for dessert and coffee. We bought four little pastries and shared them; two of them were tarts, one filled with whipped cream and topped with jellied fruit, and the other filled with buttercream frosting and decorated with a frosting flower. Another one was called a "kartoshka," because it resembled a potato, but was basically a fudgy rum ball. I couldn't quite place the flavor, then Brenda tried it and declared it to be "a rum ball in disguise!" The last one was, I guess, a sort of "flagship" confection, as it shared its name with the establishment - "Север," which translates to "north" and is pronounced "seh-VEHR." It was unique; none of us could really pin down the flavor of that one beyond "yummy."
We were going to get coffee, and then we saw on the menu that they served sbiten (сбитень). I flipped out because I LOVE that stuff; it's a hot drink made with honey and spices, and some recipes I've found incorporate blackberry jam or other things (chili peppers, anybody? That'll clear your sinuses right away). This version was just straight-up spiced honey, which apparently the restaurant receives in little packets (kind of like the little packets of jelly you get at diners in America) which are mixed with hot water. Doesn't matter, it was still tasty and good for my throat. We had another hour or so to kill, so we chatted some more and got some coffee because we were all full of delicious food and needed to wake up some before the concert.
The concert was nice. I felt very cultured being there, anyway, even if I did nod off a bit in parts. It was cold in the chapel, OK? And a lot of the music was very lilting and gentle. There was a choir as well as musicians, and they were quite good; the whole experience--sitting in a chapel watching people play and sing music in languages I don't speak--made me rather homesick, remembering the last time I attended a concert at Stetson (which was the Christmas Candlelight concert back in December; thanks, Galen's mom, for offering me the extra ticket :3). I miss Lee Chapel, with our two-story Beckerath organ and the slightly-more-comfortable pews.
I wish I could wrap up this post better, but it's getting late for me, and today was the busiest day I've spent in a while. I'm not used to that sort of thing, after this week! I am feeling better, though. Not quite 100%, but I'm getting there, slowly but surely.
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