The Hermitage - Floors and Ceilings

The Loggia, a replica of the one Raphael created for the Vatican.
(Because if you're going to steal, steal from the best!)

Okay, this one was just a feat of fun.  We took this panoramic by my handing my phone off to Mom overhead as we stood back to back and Dad supervised our steadiness.

One feature I love is how often the decor of the room reflects its contents.
In this case, the room that displays Greek pottery has beautiful mosaic floors while the walls and ceilings are stenciled with paintings in the Greek style showing people in togas creating and selling, what else? Pottery!

One of the special exhibition rooms near Catherine's theater

I like how the diamond pattern of this floor is reflected in the ceiling's design.

There were many great doors (and knobs, as you saw in the last post).
This one features inlaid wood, but it barely holds a candle to...

The Wood Inlay Floors
(which, unbelievably, we walked all over because they're just... there.)

(feet for scale!)

Gorgeous, right?  And check out these ceilings:

It's hard to tell, but this one is a chandelier.  Above the chandelier to great effect is a mirror that reflects back and (in so doing) amplifies both the light and the ornateness of the chandelier.

The Hermitage - State Rooms and General Decor

We dedicated most of Tuesday to visiting the Hermitage.

I visited it before with Rose and Yan and remembered being thoroughly impressed by the building, but not so much by the art.  While I did find a few new art pieces to enjoy this time, once again the building itself outshone the collection.  Perhaps the best evidence of this is my decision to dedicate a post exclusively to the floors and ceilings.

But first, some fairly miscellaneous photos

A panoramic of one of the main rooms.

Door Knob

Better Door Knob

A candidate for my drawer pulls makeover?

One of the best rooms in the palace - it's a Baroque explosion of white and gold opulence.

A modest living room.

On the grand staircase

Dad, halfway up the grand staircase, who was very patient
while I waited for the tour groups to clear out enough for this shot.

Gate on the way out (with double-headed eagle, of course!)

Post-Opera Dinner at Romeo's

Happily, we did come across a restaurant that was still open post-opera (and not swamped with people like the cafes in Theater Square), Romeo's Bar and Kitchen:

We hadn't heard of it, but hunger drove away any No Baedeker (or Michelin) fears.

Fortunately, it was delicious.  Per tradition whenever I am within a few countries of Germany, I got my schnitzel:

(Meat and potatoes.  Quelle surprise)

Not pictured:  Mom's outstanding beef stroganoff, which she ordered because we passed by the Stroganoff palace earlier on Nevsky Prospect in St. Petersburg.  Apparently Count Stroganoff invented the dish because his bad teeth required him to eat only soft foods and small pieces of meat.  It was one of the best dishes of our trip!

Opera at the Mariinsky Theater

This is the Mariinsky Theater:

It's well-known for its lavish interior, as all theaters should be.  (I'm going to have to add "paint ceiling mural of cherubs/muses/allegorical history of performing arts" to my to-do list for MTHS's theater.)  The Mariinsky is also the site for many classical music premiers (including some of Tchaikovsky's work) and is the current home of (surprise!) the Mariinsky Ballet and Opera.

As part of the White Nights, the Mariinsky had a packed schedule of performances, rotating through their repertory of ballets and operas.  We stopped by the box office on our first afternoon in St. P. and left with three tickets for Prince Igor the following night.

We also admired the miniature replicas of the theater that were encased in the wall next to the box office.  There, in tiny scale, we could not only admire the interior we were going to see the next evening:

(Note the ceiling cherubs)

but we could even identify the exact location of the seats we had just purchased!




(Seats 2, 4, and 6 in the box in the center of the picture)


After we lingered a bit too long at Peterhof, we had a race to get back to the hotel to change and then to the theater.  Fortunately, Boris insisted on driving us to the theater from the hotel, which saved us the hassle of trying to get a real cab.  I was worried about the time, especially with the traffic building as it was while we made our way back to the hotel.  The thought crossed my mind that we could have just gone to the show as we were, but then I remembered my mortification at going to the modern dance concert at the Kennedy Center back in March.  We had rushed from a day of sight-seeing (and a delicious dinner) straight to the performance and I was wearing sneakers.  Sneakers, I tell you!  And we of course ran into several of Jason's Kennedy Center friends at the performance, each new introduction reminding me that I was meeting people at a show in sneakers.

It was horrifying.

Fortunately, Dionysus is in favor of well-dressed patrons and made sure that we arrived at the theater with five minutes to spare - just enough time to find our seats and snap a couple of pictures of the full-sized theater:




Aleksandr Golovin's curtain, created in 1914.





A glimpse of the cherub-and-angel mural





The ceiling above our seats had a nice bit of trompe-l'oeil





Avec bowtie.  Much better than sneakers.





Dad also took this panoramic shot of me, the house, and the curtain.  It may be worth embiggening.


Going into the show, I knew next to nothing about this particular opera.  We did some quick Wikipedia scanning immediately beforehand, enough to figure out that it's a war story known for the Polovtsian dances (whatever those are), with lots of love and loyalty and revenge and trust issues.  Your typical opera fare.  To our pleasant surprise, they projected supertitles in English, despite the Russian libretto.

Also surprising was the Polovtsian dances.  The Khan (who was awesome) ordered his captures slave girls to dance for Prince Igor.  A couple of them did a quick series of ballet moves and I thought, "That's it?  That's the famous dance?  That's almost as bad as Carmen's seductive 'dancing'."

But then, a few minutes later, they began to dance again.  And the women started singing a song that I totally know (side note: that's one thing I enjoy about my limited opera knowledge - those moments when I'm watching a performance and I suddenly recognize a song and think, "Oh, THIS?  I know this!  THIS is in this show?  Awesome!").  And then the whole thing got awesome.

Here's a video from a DVD the Mariinsky Theater released.  The costumes and choreography is a bit different from the one we saw, but it'll give you the idea (and probably also an "Oh, THIS song!" moment too).

The uber-dramatic dancing starts at about 3:40.




It was not the best opera performance I've seen, but it was fun and very traditional.


Mom and I spent most of intermission in the line for the bathroom, but Dad scored some "snacky-poos" to tide us over for the last two acts:




(Yes, we ate caviar at the Mariinsky.  How appropriate is that?)


The performance ended just before 11, and we decided to walk back to the hotel because we wanted to  find an open restaurant for dinner and because it looked like this outside:




(So weird!)

Home!

Things I Would Write Odes To If I Were More Poetically Inclined:

• Drinkable Tap Water
• My Own Bed
• Non-Sink Laundry
• Shower Curtains
• Passport Stamps
• Grecian Statues (not urns)

Paris Day Two

Two museums and a lot of snacking and shopping (thanks in large part to the pharmacy stop Dad made last night, which made me a much better tourist today).  Details to come, probably when I'm stateside again.

Paris Day 1 - The Quick Version

Alas!  I have been struck by Baba Yaga's Revenge (the Russian version of Montezuma's revenge).  Mom had a milder version yesterday, and mine hit just as we started our day at the Musee d'Orangerie.  Between that and the Louvre and a bit of walking around, my day was marked by repeated trips to the various bathrooms in both museums and around town.

As such, I'm tucking in for the night with the hopes of waking up tomorrow in a fitter state.

Paris - Checking In

We've arrived at CDG, who is graciously giving me 15 minutes of free wifi - just enough time to update our Schroedinger status (still alive).  We had a 1.5 hour delay in Denmark without free wifi (sacre-bleu!) - a thunderstorm shut down CDG for a while this afternoon.  You could almost hear their disdain for the quick surrender of the French as the Danish attendants at the gate updated (and delayed) our status every fifteen minutes.

But in any case, je me suis arriver!

(Jason, Memere - feel free to correct me on that one as needed.)

Peterhof!

The Hermitage Museum (which we'll get to tomorrow) was Peter the Great's winter palace and stands in the midst of the city.  Like all great rulers, Peter also needed a summer palace out in the country, and like all great rulers, he wanted it to be like Versailles.

It's interesting to see Peterhof because, despite its very Baroque style, it is at the same time a very new palace.  The front moved through here on the way to St. Petersburg, and the Nazis left Peterhof like this:

Shortly after the end of the war, local volunteers began cleaning, rebuilding, and restoring the palace.  The work is still going on, but the palace today stands very much like it did 300 years ago:

An old palace, built in the last few decades.

The palace itself is closed Mondays, but Boris was still able to show us around the gardens.

The front yard has neatly-trimmed tree-lined paths that lead past fountains and created shaded paths like this one which shows the aftermath of the earlier rainstorm:

There are several marble statues around, all with Greek mythology figures.  This one was my favorite:

It's probably Zephyr or Aeolus, one of the wind gods, but I think the artist perfectly captured the "Oh, <<bouff>>" French expression of shrugging and puffing out one's cheeks.

We walked from the front yards around this chapel:

to see the magnificent fountains that lead into the lower gardens:

With checkerboard tiles, stone urns, a variety of types of fountains, gold Gods, and a view of the Gulf of Finland, the back terrace is breathtaking.

The fountains are all powered by water pressure, and the precision of the design all the more impressive when you notice that the peaks of the waters are level even though the spouts are at different levels along the stairs.

We walked down the stairs to admire the center fountain, nicknamed, according to Boris, "Samson taking a shower"

and followed the canal to see the Czar's little boat:

A gilt swan fit for Marie Antoinette 

and then we wandered through part of the gardens to see the sights:

An aviary

Trick fountains

This "checkerboard" fountain was only completed two weeks ago!

Catherine the Great's little cottage

And here's Boris, pointing out our route on the map:

Even with only a little bit of time there and  without access inside, the trip to Peterhof is well worth the visit!