Anyway, by about 11:30, I decided that even if Valentina Semyonovna did show up eventually, I wouldn't be there long enough to make coming to class worthwhile. So, I put my coat and bags back on and left. See, this afternoon, Sergei had a friend of his take us--Corinne, Brenda, Holly and me--on a tour of the Hermitage, and I would've had to leave class early to have time to get back home, collect Corinne (she wasn't feeling well that morning, so she didn't come with me to the faculty), and figure out how to get to the Hermitage from my apartment. We stopped in the Palace Square courtyard on the walking tour with Sergei, but I wasn't paying a ton of attention to how we actually got there; my attention was fixed more on how cold it was, not slipping on the ice, and trying to hear what Sergei was saying because he's very soft-spoken.
Corinne and I checked the trolley routes and learned that trolleybus number 10 or 11 would take us where we needed to go. So we waited at the trolley stop, crammed ourselves into the first number 11 that showed up (along with what seemed like a hundred other people), paid our 21p and held on for dear life because this driver's got a schedule to keep, people! Shut up and hold on! Eventually Corinne grabbed a seat and, as soon as another one near her opened up, she helped me squeeze through the crowd to take it. I still feel weird about moving through crowds like that. I feel like I'm being rude, but I'm not. It's perfectly acceptable to brush against someone moving past them, without so much as an "excuse me, please." The only time anyone will say something to you is if there isn't enough room on either side of you to squeeze past. I mean, I'm sure there are probably some people I've encountered--especially at rush hour on the metro--who are being rude, perhaps pushing past others too brusquely, but for the most part navigating in crowds here does not require nearly the level of song and dance that it does in America.
Anyway, the Hermitage! My God, it's massive. It actually consists of several buildings connected to one another, and they are all beautiful. Most of the information we received from Yulia, Sergei's friend, was about the palace itself. The building that you will see photos of if you Google Image Search "Hermitage" or "Эрмитажа" used to be the Winter Palace, commissioned by Peter the Great. It's a striking shade of teal with white details and a whole bunch of columns. One entrance's columns consist of about a dozen huge granite Atlas-like men holding the roof over their heads. Corinne took a number of photos; if I can get them from her later, I'll post a few. Or link to her blog, if she uploads the photos there. (Aside: Speaking of Corinne's blog, she posted a photo tour of our apartment there and gave me permission to link to it so my friends and family could see where I live. Here's the link.)
Right now, the Hermitage has an exhibition called "Lomonosov in the time of Elizabeth," referring of course to the Empress Elizabeth Petrovna. Mikhail Lomonosov was a polymath and writer alive during Elizabeth's reign, so the exhibit is a delightful mix of drawings and portraits of the Empress and 18th-century scientific equipment. As I said, though, most of the things Yulia told us about had to do with the histories of the buildings themselves and not the art housed within them. There were a couple of reception halls; the main reception hall was all gilded with an impressive gold colonnade, and the throne room or St. George room was nearly identical, except it had very stately white marble instead of so much gold. The design on the ceiling mirrored the floor inlay, made of something like 25 different types of wood, except for one key detail: where, in the ceiling decoration, there appeared a two-headed eagle, no such symbol was to be found on the floor, because that would be stepping on the Russian empire.
Attached to the Winter Palace was a smaller building that Catherine the Great had built so that she could invite her friends over and have a more private, more personal alternative to the play-acting necessary in her court. She had a list of rules engraved on a plaque (e.g., visitors must speak only Russian, no swearing, no drunkenness, etc), and any guest who broke a rule would have to immediately drink a glass of water and recite part of a very long, very complex poem, the title of which eludes me at the moment. I thought the story was funny, but then, I haven't seen this ultra-complex poem.
There is a corridor connecting the Small Hermitage (the building I mentioned in the previous paragraph) to the New Hermitage (commissioned by Catherine specifically as a public museum, unlike the rest of the complex). This corridor is full of art. The walls are covered in little pictures of people doing things, animals being silly, etc, and the pattern never repeats itself. It looks like it does, but in fact each image is unique. It's a series of arches, and on the ceiling between each arch are four panels depicting scenes from the Bible. One end of the hall begins with creation, and it progresses from there. There is so much going on in this corridor that it would take years to see everything. It's like a microcosm of the entire Hermitage, because the whole thing is like that. Catherine was a voracious art collector, and she bought entire collections as opposed to individual paintings. Knowing that, and seeing the sheer quantity of stuff that the Hermitage houses, makes it all the more impressive to know that the palace burnt down in the late 1837. A fire started somewhere and spread throughout the house between the walls, which were very thick and had spaces between them. While working on an expansion, at one point they decided to break down the wrong wall, and by then the fire had spread so far that the building couldn't be saved. Most of the things in it, however, could be. Paintings and heavy furniture were carted out and deposited in the snow in Palace Square, and it's said that the fire could be seen for miles. The inside of the building was completely redone, although the facade remained the same.
The tour was very fast, but also very informative; I was really more interested in the history more than the paintings housed within the building, anyway, so I'm glad it wasn't an interminable slog through a hundred rooms while Yulia talked at us about people we had never heard of and didn't care about. We stopped in the cafe afterward to sit and get coffee, and ended up staying so long that they actually had to kick us out because the cafe was closing. So we retrieved our coats and left.
I actually ended up writing this post over two days, because I forgot I was working on it yesterday. xD But nothing much more happened last night. I ate too many of these frozen pelmeni that I bought and cooked, but that discomfort was temporary and the story is not at all exciting. Tomorrow is National Women's Day; Corinne wants to go explore in town and see the festivities. I don't know if I'm gonna go with. Probably, but at the same time, I have a lot of important sleeping to do. And work. I do have work to do.
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