Saturday, July 20, 2002 9:14
Location: Lobby, Hotel Viru, Tallinn, Estonia
Weather: Sunny & hot

Falling behind in the diary is stressful: it feels like I have a terrible weight of recent wonderful experiences to commit to words before my sieve of a memory forgets all the details.

Thursday I spent the whole day at the Hermitage Museum with Mary Jo. We got in line a few minutes after 10, had some truly horrible coffee from a nearby vendor, and were in the third group of people to be admitted, at about 10:40. Once inside we were able to avoid the crowds by heading right, through the cloakrooms and into an Archeological exhibit area that had Russian artefacts prior to the 7th C. B.C., including some spectacular finds from a burial mound, such as a finely embossed gold shield and a mummified horse!

From there we proceeded up to the Impressionists section, which had an amazing collection of Van Gogh, Monet, Matisse, Gauguin and Kandynski. We broke for lunch in the rather bad cafe in the basement, and then went to the Large Hermitage building, through the Egyptian and Classical sections and up the Grand Staircase to the core of the collection, 17th and 18th century Dutch and other masterpieces from across Europe, presented in truly awe-inspiring rooms with soaring ceilings, gilded doorways, towering lamps and massive chandeliers, and marble vases and bowls.

After a few more stunning hours we had to stop for another break. Mary Jo was feeling a bit worn out so I headed off on my own and covered the second floor of the Winter Palace, which had 19th C. paintings and the Royal Apartments. Almost every room seemed to have a writing desk of ever increasing size and sophistication, many of them with clocks, mechanical music works and ornate gilded temple and castle models as decorations. The core of the Romanov apartments included a beautiful English-style library, oak-panelled and -ceilinged, with a huge array of massive books.

I met up with Mary Jo and we started heading back to the hotel for what we thought was a 7:30 meeting for our celebratory festive dinner. We stopped on a bridge over one of the canals, where I bought a nice little painting featuring a couple of cats in dark streets. As I was finishing the purchase, Michael, Virginia and Marg passed and let us know that the meeting time was set at 6:45. (This had only been announced to one of the buses that had headed off for an optional excursion that morning, so it was rather poorly planned.) We were suddenly in a hurry.

More later...
posted by Tom at 9:29 AM | link |