The Hermitage part I: Down in the Basement

When most people think of the Hermitage, they think of gold objects, icons, priceless furniture, or 17th and 18th century paintings.  And apparently that's where most of the visitors go, judging by the crazy confusing press of people when we were there.  The crowd thins out downstairs, but there's an awful lot of cool stuff down in the basement, where they put all their "prehistoric art."  Like this small cat carving:

 Or this spooky armor for a horse's head from a Scythian tomb:

Or what was really cool was this funeral wagon from the same giant tomb. It's 2500 years old.
You can read more about this spectacular find which included the world's oldest carpet, mummified horses with trappings, a tatooed mummified cheiftan, furniture, gold jewelry etc..(somehow we both missed photographing ghe carpet--it is really beautiful!  It has horsemen and deer on decorative borders.  The horse gear depicted on the rug looks like the things in the tombs!)   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pazyryk_burials

 Check out the guys looking at it.  They're symmetric:

More after the cut

Malye Korely

Malye Korely is an outdoor museum of wooden architecture, located about 25 km from Arkhangelsk.  The museum collects unique examples of traditional wooden architecture from the Arkhangelsk region, moving the structures from their original location and re-assembling them on site.  The museum includes over a hundred of unique samples of ancient wooden architecture: houses, churches, bell towers, barns, wind and watermills.

We had a substantial layover in Arkhangelsk, so we took a side trip and explored Malye Korely for a couple hours.  The cool thing about the site is that what the Russians call "traditional wooden architecture" is essentially what we in America would call "log cabins."  Only in Russia, the rude log construction is elevated to a sophisticated artform.

This is particularly true of the churches.  Some of the oldest structures in Malye Korely are the Church of the Ascension (built in 1669):

 and the Church of St. George (built in 1672):

Note the shingled onion domes of the Church of the Ascension and the undercut foundation of the Church of St. George.

Exploring St. Petersburg

We stayed for three full days in St. Petersburg.  The first day, we hired a guide and spent most of the day visiting various places around the city (although mostly in the city center).  It turned out to be quite a good decision: it was a Saturday, so the traffic was light, and the day was mostly sunny and relatively warm.

The next two days we spent mostly at the Hermitage (Sunday, which was May Day) and the Russian Museum (Monday).  More about those places later.

To keep track of where we went, take a look a the map below.  Our hotel is the tag that's farthest south:

See this map of St Petersburg in a seperate window.

One really great thing about St. Petersburg is how unified the streetscapes are.  The buildings all have a historic, cosmoploitan European feel, still true to Peter the Great's vision.  Here's a few buildings on the corner of Vladimirskiy and Nevskiy Prospekts, which is about a half mile north of our hotel. Nevskiy Prospekt is the main shopping district in the city, but other than that, there's nothing special about this corner:

Here's another scene, this time back along the side street that leads to our hotel:

St. Petersburg is full of similar streetscapes.  One thing that adds to the feel of the city are the canals that crisscross downtown:

Or, for a more panoramic view of another canal:

Here you have these historic buildings, all different but unified by their height, mass, and construction.  In addition, they're set back from the canal by a uniform distance, and you can see a graceful bridge in the background of both pictures.

But there are some special buildings in St. Petersburg.  My favorite was the Church on Spilled Blood, built on the site where Czar Alexander II was assasinated.  Here's a close-up of the church.  Note the tilework:

 A more interesting picture of the church, I think, is one taken from along the canal:

More of St. Petersburg after the cut.

Give 'em enough latitude...and you get an amazing coincidence

Kotlas is pretty far north, well into the cold, sub-arctic realm.  To be numerically exact, the Sovietskaya hotel where we stayed was 61° 15' 12'' N, which is right here:

As a comparison, that same latitude in North America is just north of Anchorage, Alaska.  Here is 61° 15' 12'' N pictured.

We are looking at Beluga Avenue,  a military housing area associated with Fort Richardson.
The fun and coincidental part is that Teresa spent a year or so living on Beluga Avenue in Anchorage, when her father was in the army.  Same latitude, 40+ years later, and half the world apart.

Anchorage Alaska, Beluga Ave, 1969. Teresa P in olive green (still a fave color), and pal.

Teresa P says: You can take the girl out of the far north, but not the far north out of the girl.  (or at least not all of it...I love the snow and sparse pine tree landscape... but hate the cold)

Dr. Sofia sends us pictures

You might remember Dr Sofia.  She's the pediatrician from St. Petersburg who accompanied us to Kotlas.  We took this picture of her in the Kotlas restaurant:

At the same time, Sofia took a picture of us:

Teresa has the remains of borshcht soup in front of her, I've got what's left of a salted-salmon-and-caviar appetizer.

But what people might really want to see is the first picture of Elena, Teresa, and me all together:

An outline of our Russian trip

Now that we're back and have posted about some individual subjects, let me tell you what our schedule was, and what we did each day.

Monday, April 25: We leave from Detroit, fairly late, heading to Amsterdam.  The flight is eight hours, give-or-take.

Tuesday, April 26: We arrive in Amsterdam, have a 3-hour layover, and take a second flight to St. Petersburg.  We get through customs, and a woman from our agency meets us in the airport.  She helps us change our currency and then calls for our driver.  We're driven from the airport to our hotel, the Brothers Karamazov.  We check in, take a walk, an opt to eat in the hotel restaurant.  Luckily, it's pretty decent, and the menus are in English.  By now it's pretty late, and neither of us slept well on the plane on Monday night, so it's time to turn in.

Wednesday, April 27: Another day of travel; we need to get to Kotlas.  After breakfast in the hotel, we're driven to the airport and check in for a flight from St. Petersburg to Arkhangelsk, the half-way point.  It's not the same airport, though: it turns out St. Petersburg has two airports, one international and the second primarily domestic.  We arrive at the domestic airport, check in, and eventually make it onto the flight.  The Arkhangelsk-to-Kotlas flight is late in the day, so in Arkhangelsk we are met by another driver, and Dimitry, another representative of our agency.  Dimitry will accompany us to Kotlas and the orphanage.  Charmingly, he calls us Andre and Tereza.  We're OK with that.

View Russia in a larger map

Our baby house schedule

It strikes me that we haven't really explained the travel logistics, when or for how long we were at the Baby House in Kotlas.  We arrived in Kotlas on Wedneday (the 27th), spent all day Thursday there, and left on Friday morning.

Our first opportunity to meet Elena is Thursday morning.  We go to the orphanage at around 9:00 or so, accompanied by Dimitry (the rep from our adoption agency) and Dr. Sofia.  Sophia is a pediatrician based in St. Petersburg who acts as an independent consultant, giving an opinion on the children's medical records and general health.  We asked her to come to Kotlas with us.  This is her:

Both Dimitry and Sofia know the orphanage staff quite well, and all four of us are immediately ushered up into a large meeting room (which you might remember from this earlier post).  We're both a little nervous and very tired from the long travel hours the day before, and expected some preliminary paperwork or something, and so we're surprised when Elena is escorted in just five minutes later.  We blink a few times and ask "What are we supposed to do?"  Answer from Dr Sophia, kindly, "You can sit and play with her."

We brought a few toys, and so for a little while we sit around on the carpet and "tossed" a ball around .  It's important to remember that this is the first time we've met, and just like any other meeting between strangers, it takes a little time to warm up.  Hardest of all is that we have such a small knowledge of Russian words that we cannot really communicate, except with simple hand signals.  Thankfully Elena is obsevant and takes the ball, book, or crayons when we hand it to her, and rolls the big truck like we show her etc....  Take a look at this picture, taken only 15 minutes after we met:

We both look a little stiff, right?  Contrast that to later pictures down the page.

So anyway, most of the rest of the morning was taken up by a little ball-playing, ring stacking, a little truck-driving, and some coloring:

Meanwhile, of course, we're being gently observed by the orphanage staff (note the woman over Teresa's left shoulder) and Sofia.  At about 11:30, Sofia does a medical exam.  The orphanage is staffed by medical doctors, who continuously monitor the children's health, so the physical is routine (literally) for Elena, and she knows exactly what to expect.  Sofia also asks the basic cognitive questions--where's your nose, where's your ear, where's the doll's nose? She also observes Elena. Things like walking skills, concentration etc. 

Let's explore Kotlas

Kotlas is the small city where the baby house is located. It's home to about 60,000 people, according to its Wikipedia page. Kotlas isn't a historic, picturesque city; neither is it a shiny, new city.  But it is, according to the doctor we were working with, representative of the type of city that a lot of Russians live in.  It's a blue-collar town, filled with working people.  A lot of the buildings are Soviet-era structures, solidly built, relatively utilitarian, and in varying stages of repair.  The city is shabby in spots, but manages to be interesting and occasionally quite charming.  The layout and architecture and mix of buildings is noticeably different than it would be in an American city.   On the inside, the hotel, baby house, grocery store and restaurant were well cared for, and very clean.

So I've already posted about the Kotlas baby house, where Elena currently lives.  Let's explore more of the city.  Here's an interactive map of Kotlas; I've marked the location of the Sovietskaya Hotel.  If you zoom out, you can see some other points of interest in the surrounding area.  The baby house is about one mile due north of the hotel.

View Kotlas, Russia in a larger map.

We took a little time to walk around Kotlas during the one full day we were there.  Although most of the day was sunny, the minute we stepped out for a walk it clouded up, so we unfortunately lost the best light for photographing the city. 

Here's the street outside the Sovietskaya Hotel:

The blue building is apartments and retail; the Sovietskaya is just to the left.  It's a U-shaped building; the gambrel-roofed structure next to the blue building is a new wing, and the darker brown building next to that is the older wing.  We had a corner room, third floor, on the street end of the older wing.

So anyway, the highlights of our walk were the The Church of St. Stephan of Perm and the bell-tower by the river.  The church was built in 1788, and the adjacent bell tower in 1825.

And the train station:

 The station still has its statue of Lenin:

 And a historic train out front:

More after the jump:

The baby house in Kotlas, illustrated

In the Russian system, children under four, like Elena, live in what are known as "baby houses."  Older children live in "children's houses." Here's a photo of the baby house in Kotlas where Elena lives:

Very dorm-like, but notice the broad expanse of windows that let in a lot of light in the main rooms-as you can see in the pictures. Structurally, the buildings are very solid, with walls about 2 feet thick to keep out the subartic cold of winter time.  I'm not sure how many kids live here (I found a reference that said about 80 kids; that sounds plausible, but we saw only Elena and, later, seven of her dorm-mates), but there's room for plenty.

If you want to know exactly where Elena is right now, here's the baby house on Google satellite view.  Zoom out to see the rest of Kotlas--the city center, and our hotel ("the" hotel, actually), is about a mile due south of the baby house.  The giant river that the orphanage overlooks flows north to Archangelsk, and the White Sea.  If you zoom out a few more notches you can see the amazing subarctic "taiga" geology of the area-much as it looked from the plane from Archangelsk to Kotlas.  Wild rivers, flooplains, forests, and many swamps and small lakes.  Small towns, woodlots and fields dot the riverside.

Click through here to view a larger map.

Here's a view of the playground in the rear of the building.  You can see the three blue-roofed playhouses on the north side of the building in the Google satellite view above.

If you look west, you can see the river.  The landscape is still brown in what is early spring in Kotlas.  The terrain is flat, generously crisscrossed with streams, rivers large and small, oxbow lakes and bogs.  It reminded us of the Seney section of the eastern Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  Dimitry, our translator and main guy who gets the most imporatant things done fondly described this exact same view, as "FLAT! Flat as a table", (with his arms outspread).

Pictures of the inside after the jump:

Ceci n'est pas une scribble

That's right.  Think about it.

The Mossies are aprowl

They're called "Mossies" because they're made of moss.


Also a very happy bear:



Both courtesy of the Folk Art collection at the Russian Museum.

Oh yeah...

Elena would say hi, but if you're reading this, she's probably asleep.  (Remember the eight-hour time difference between EDT and St Petersburg/Moscow time.)

It's May Day!

These guys know all about it:

Taken in Palace Square from near the Hermitage.  The General Staff Building is in the background.  Speaking of the Hermitage, here's a bunch of Picassos: