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Who needs to actually see the art?
I love this piece from the Hermitage. So many tourists only see the art through their phone and half the time they are shooting selfies. Today was a visit to Peterhof which is about an hour outside the city. Peter the Great was a tyrant, but also a forward-thinking genius who believed in innovation. Peterhof has magnificent fountains that operate on hydraulics. Peterhof is at sea level on the Gulf of Finland, but there is plentiful water in the mountains about 14 miles away. Peter had the tens of thousands of workers who built St. Petersburg, build an aqueduct to carry the water to the place and the fountains. Very cool fountains built on the bones of these workers. There is a ceremony when they turn the fountains on at 11 AM and they play stirring music. I told Konstantin, that if I were a Russian it would make me feel extremely patriotic. The grounds are beautiful comprised of trees and plants imported from warmer clients in dirt that was also imported. Since Peterhof is at sea level, the plants and dirt were periodically washed away by floods and process that was both frustrating and life threatening to the people who were responsible for maintaining the grounds.
Rather than visiting the main palace, we visited the Bath House. Unlike Europeans, Russians not only believed in
bathing periodically, but in the curative power of both hot and cold-water baths. The bath house had wings for men and women including a sauna for men. I should have asked why there were no saunas for women. In addition, there were rooms for socializing before and after bathing. In another area there was a large formal dining room and kitchen. It was a beautiful view of the Gulf of Finland which Peter must have loved having defeated Sweden after 21 years of war.
At one point our guide went off to retrieve a straggler, handing me the sign they used so the group could see them. Now that I was the guide, I asked who wanted to hear more about Catherine. I got about 4 people huddled around and shared some of her amazing background. She also was a genius who ruled forcefully for decades. She credited it with having a “a masculine” rather than a “feminine” mind.
While we were at Peterhof we got a great view of new construction taking place outside the old part of the city. It will be the tallest building in Europe when completed that had to use lightweight materials in
the construction because St Petersburg was built on landfill.
The group was taking the bus back with a detour for shopping, so we opted for the hydrofoil since we wanted to go back to the Hermitage. Jack has been refusing to eat Russian food, so he picked a Chinese restaurant. Imagine Chinese food in Russian and that was how bad it was. We spent nearly 3 hours in the General Staff building where the Impressionist and post-Impressionist work is located. Miraculously, this building is nearly empty while the rest of the Hermitage is packed.
In many ways, it is sad what the mobile phone with a camera has done to the world. When people travel they don’t look at anything anymore and instead take pictures of anything and everything. The conceptual art piece in the blog says it all. People want to have a photo of themselves with a Matisse, but don’t bother to look at the piece of art other than to make sure it is a good backdrop. On this tour we stop frequently to take pictures, we don’t stop to look at things. I wonder what anyone does with mediocre pictures of 50 painting in
the Hermitage on their phone. I know they won’t remember either the names of the paintings or the artists. The selfie is endemic, everyone wants to go home with a photo that shows they were at such and such place. But again, what do you do with all the photos since it is unlikely that your family or friends will want to be bored looking at them and I bet most people don’t go back and look at them either.
Finally, I made a deal with Jack to be able to eat at a Georgian restaurant. The food was great and inexpensive. As much as he hates and doesn’t want to eat Russian food, he now feels the opposite way about Georgian food.
(Note: Robert Massie’s biographies of both Peter and Catherine make great reading.)
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