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Our last day of the trip. It didn’t start well. We were supposed to have a street art tour at the Street Art Museum. The museum is 20 minutes from the central city, so we took Uber and arrived at 9. The museum was closed. After standing in the cold for 10 minutes, we tried to reach the museum contact. No luck. At 9:30 we called for an Uber back to the hotel. Later that day we heard from the museum contact that they were very sorry, but they had had a lot of email recently, so they didn’t confirm the visit and took it off the schedule.
Next on the schedule was the Erata Museum of Contemporary Art. Most of the stuff was in the “art is anything you can get away with” category. There was one spectacular exhibit by a Chinese artist, Invisible Man. Even Jack who doesn’t like conceptual art loved it. The artist would take a photo, for example, plastic toys, he projects the image on a wall, stands in front of it and his assistants paint him to blend into the photo. Clearly this example is a comment on our consumer society. Another, piece which
was probably the first in the series was of the artist blending into a photo of his studio that was being destroyed by the government to make way for new development. My two favorites were a photo of a Chinese policeman in which the artist blended into the policeman and the white background, either you’re subsumed into the authority of the state or you are invisible and a collage of the covers of Charlie Hebdo, with many people in front of it, anonymous people being blown up by Islamic terrorist. To find one exhibit that is this good makes the whole visit worthwhile. When we saw a sign that in 2016 TripAdvisor had rated the museum restaurant’s desserts and the best in St. Petersburg, so we had to have lunch there. My dessert was very good, but the stand-out dish was the potato waffles with parmesan cheese cream sauce, tomatoes, bacon and arugula that Jack ordered. I’m going to try to recreate this dish at home.
Jack found another photo gallery, so we decided to finish our trip with the same activity that we started with. There were 3 exhibits, two were useless and one sort-of interesting because of
the unusual printing technique. The building was quite run down, but you could see from the moldings and the stoves that once upon a time, it was probably an aristocrat’s home. It literally was around the corner from our hotel. After this we didn’t have the energy to search out another museum or palace, so we rested and packed. We went back to the Georgian restaurant down the block rather than for a more upscale meal further away. Maybe there is something that on the last day of a trip, changes your perspective to get you mentally ready to go home.
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