Happy Birthday Charlie Welden! If Charlie does not know this, it is his Golden birthday. 19 on the 19th!!! We made a sign for Charlie!
We celebrated by going to what some say is the world's largest museum. The Hermitage. It literally means, lonely place, like a hermit. It is nothing like that. We toured it with every other person that happened to be in St. Petersburg that day! Amazing art touring it at 100 miles an hour. We were only in there for 4 hours and we managed to see all the major works of art and were sweating when it was over!
The symbol of St. Petersburg is of Peter the Great on his horse in bronze and the base of the statue has his name, on one side in Latin and the other side in Russian. This is to depict his trying to make East meet West.
Inside the Hermitage, which is adjacent to The Winter Palace, we saw MANY priceless pieces of art. The blog may not have them in the right order as I post them, but I will do my best to catalog them. Renoir, Monet, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Picasso, Davinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt...The only sculpture done by Michelangelo in the museum is called "The crouching Man". Supposedly, he told the Russians he would make a sculpture as large as "The David" and this is what he delivered. He told them if the man stood up he would be as tall as The David!!and the building got bigger and took up more of the square. There are two photos of it and look at them and se the difference.
There was one painting that was of St. Mark's square in Venice, when you looked at it and kept walking, the painting moved with you
There was a container taller than Nicky made of total Jasper.
The building next to the Hermitage is where people go to get their marriage licenses and then get married inside. Their family and friends wait outside the building until it is all over and then they walk around the parks taking pictures and drink a lot of vodka and champagne! Before 1991, this is where you had to get married. No church weddings were allowed.
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