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13 August, 2002

Zdrastivoitye from St. Petersburg!
Spent the last two days in the Russian Museum and the Hermitage looking at art. Lots of amazing, enormous pictures the size of the side of a small apartment building. The Hermitage is full of very, very, very, rich things and everything is either gold or gilt or marble. The only problem is you aren't allowed to sit on any of the chairs, they have hundreds of chairs and they all have ropes across them. It's only when you get up to the third floor - the modern stuff - where they have plain rooms and fluorescent lighting and benches you can sit on. One of the neatest things was a display of all the coins minted in Russia since the 15th century or so. The Smolny institute was also fascinating and there are statues of MAPKC (Marx) and Lenin and Engels out front. It's where Lenin had his headquarters for the October Revolution of 1917. Wherever there is construction in the street here they don't prevent you from walking right into the middle of it, orange cones and traffic barriers do not exist so everyone is walking around through piles of construction rubble wherever they are fixing a street. OK enough tomorrow the riverboat Vissarion Belinski will take us down the Neva River towards Moscow!