.JPG)
Peter the Great Memorial Hall ("Small throne room").JPG)
A Van Gogh in the Hermitage's collection.JPG)
An item from western China..JPG)
St George Hall and throne..JPG)
The Winter Palace - part of the Hermitage Museum - view from the hisoric Palace Square.After that I wandered around and found myself in the Asian art section. They only have a small collection but what the items they have were historically interesting. A collection of Japanese antique items was marked "held in Berlin museum before 1945" - which is saying to me that they looted them when they got to Berlin on the last days of Hitler's war mania. Also there were some very old frescoes carved out of caves in western China dating back to the 5th and 6th century. When we were in Dunhuang in Gansu province we saw the site where the frescoes come from. They also have items from the Beziklik caves in Turpan in Xinjiang province that we also visited. When we were there we saw many frescoes with the faces defaced by invading Muslims because it was against their religion to depict human faces. Since the collection in Hermitage was in better conditions, I wonder if they were taken before the Muslims got in and therefore saved them, or did they take those that escaped the vandalism.
We went our separate ways. Yvonne stayed on at the Hermitage till they closed, Kay went to look the inside of a cathedral with the macabre name of Cathedral on Split Blood while I went to the Blockade museum at the edge of town near the entrance to the city from Moscow. During the second world war, the city then called Leningrad survived a lengthy German siege lasting over 900 days at the cost of more than a million lives. Given the scale of the suffering, it was a surprisingly simple memorial, a beautiful circular design with socialist statues above and just one room of items from the war below. Included among the exhibits were residents' letters, soldiers' guns and interestingly a violin and a fireman’s helmet belonging to the composer Shostokovich who stayed behind and composed his famous symphony while under enemy gunfire. There was a movie with no commentary, just scenes from the war, poignant in its silence.
Last night we celebrated our last night in Russia with dinner at a restaurant called 1913 recommended by friends who were in Russia not long ago. It had an elaborate menu; by now we are quite well versed in Cyrillic scripts to identify the groups of dishes. I had Tablaka, a kind of barbecued chicken pressed into the shape of a tobacco leaf, Kay had some lamb stew dish with ratatouille while Yvonne had an interesting eggplant vegetarian dish. Yvonne has given up attempting to be vegetarian most times in Russia; there is no soy products in sight anywhere (her source of proteins).
Getting to the restaurant was a challenge. We discovered the restaurant was some distance away from the metro and we had to find our directions and way to the restaurant through deserted streets in a rundown neighbourhood - a venture which all tourist guides warned against. After the dinner, for safe measures, we decided to ask the restaurant to book us a taxi to take us back to the comfort of Holiday Inn. Even though the taxi did not have a meter, the driver kindly charged us a reasonably ripped off price of 400 roubles or $16 AUD for a ten minute journey. He was happy and so were we !
The rest of our journey will probably be less interesting, certainly less challenging.
Cheers,
Kin Mun
We went our separate ways. Yvonne stayed on at the Hermitage till they closed, Kay went to look the inside of a cathedral with the macabre name of Cathedral on Split Blood while I went to the Blockade museum at the edge of town near the entrance to the city from Moscow. During the second world war, the city then called Leningrad survived a lengthy German siege lasting over 900 days at the cost of more than a million lives. Given the scale of the suffering, it was a surprisingly simple memorial, a beautiful circular design with socialist statues above and just one room of items from the war below. Included among the exhibits were residents' letters, soldiers' guns and interestingly a violin and a fireman’s helmet belonging to the composer Shostokovich who stayed behind and composed his famous symphony while under enemy gunfire. There was a movie with no commentary, just scenes from the war, poignant in its silence.
Last night we celebrated our last night in Russia with dinner at a restaurant called 1913 recommended by friends who were in Russia not long ago. It had an elaborate menu; by now we are quite well versed in Cyrillic scripts to identify the groups of dishes. I had Tablaka, a kind of barbecued chicken pressed into the shape of a tobacco leaf, Kay had some lamb stew dish with ratatouille while Yvonne had an interesting eggplant vegetarian dish. Yvonne has given up attempting to be vegetarian most times in Russia; there is no soy products in sight anywhere (her source of proteins).
Getting to the restaurant was a challenge. We discovered the restaurant was some distance away from the metro and we had to find our directions and way to the restaurant through deserted streets in a rundown neighbourhood - a venture which all tourist guides warned against. After the dinner, for safe measures, we decided to ask the restaurant to book us a taxi to take us back to the comfort of Holiday Inn. Even though the taxi did not have a meter, the driver kindly charged us a reasonably ripped off price of 400 roubles or $16 AUD for a ten minute journey. He was happy and so were we !
The rest of our journey will probably be less interesting, certainly less challenging.
Cheers,
Kin Mun
No comments:
Post a Comment