Russia mission updates - Saturday, June 12, 2010
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Summary: Bus tour, 3 hours in the Hermitage Museum, and an hour and a half team meeting
Details: I was awake again by 4 AM. It is hard to sleep when it is this light outside. I really wanted coffee this morning! Michael, my roommate, made it down for coffee and instant oatmeal for breakfast by 6 AM. Michael is an interesting fellow. He is 52 and serves as associate pastor in Modesto, California in an LCMC congregation. He has quite the story about how he was treated by his ELCA bishop, and about how this new congregation has loved and cared for he and his wife. It has been good to hear his story.
The rest of our team arrived by bus about 8 AM. Twenty or so folk have already taught two full weeks of camp at Petrozavodsk. It sounds like an amazing camp. With signed permission slips from parents, they teach released time English Bible in the public schools. EEMN has done this for 15 years with full approval from the district Minister of Education. Petrozavodsk is so far north that they get very few visitors with native English. The English Bible Camps provide an opportunity for their children to spend a week interacting with American English, and so the Minister of Education -- she is an atheist -- doesn’t care about the content of the curriculum as long as it is not anti-government. Many of the English faculty from the school help as translators, and so they also hear the Gospel. The team is free to share the gospel and love the kids. Many people are moving forward in lives of quiet discipleship. The Ingrian Church gains enormous social capital because they can bring these important guests in to serve their children year after year. Our presence is so much more important than just sending money!
We left at 9 AM for a brief bus tour of the city. Our tour guide was Pastor Lief Camp, an American who came to St. Petersburg as a Missouri Synod missionary. He transferred to the roster of the Ingrian Lutheran Church after marrying a woman from St. Petersburg. We drove past lots of important sites and stopped briefly to photograph a few. Our bus driver promised us a cheap souvenir shop and we agreed to go. The prices were not cheaper! The driver is getting an obvious kickback from their sales. This is how much business gets done in Russia! We arrived in the big square near the Hermitage at 11:30 and had an hour to find lunch on our own. The shops close to the museum have servers who speak English, and I didn’t hear of anyone having difficulties. Two small bilini (crêpes) and a carbonated water cost 300 rubles (about $10).
We met back in the square and waited in a long line to enter the museum. You have to pay a much higher entrance fee if you want to use your camera. They don’t allow any flash. The museum is housed in what was the Winter Palace. St. Petersburg was built originally on a swamp and was crisscrossed with canals as the “Venice of the north.” The czars intended the city to be Russia’s face for Europe and they spared no expense trying to impress their European neighbors. They hired the best European architects and spent lavish amounts of money on public buildings to show their strength and high level of culture. It is a beautiful and impressive place.
Michael and I stayed with the group for a while, and then moved off at a quicker pace. We saw less than ten percent of the collection. Wow! It would take days to appreciate the architecture and view the entire collection. We managed to see two paintings by Leonardo DaVinci, a huge number of sixteenth century religious paintings, and the armor hall. There were several suits of armor from sixteenth century Germany. (There is no way Luther could have fit in any of the ones we saw :) ).
We left the museum at 4 PM and found the square off-limits as they prepared for a concert in honor of their new national independence day. More than 100,000 people would attend, and many were already on their way. This meant that dinner on our own was especially adventurous. The restaurants were stuffed with concert goers, and we settled for anything we could get into. Michael and I ate Subway sandwiches. This feels really odd here! At 6 PM we gathered to take public transportation back to Koltushe. We went down a very long escalator, boarded our train, rode until the second stop, changed trains and rode again to the second stop. We took an equally long escalator to the surface, found our bus, and rode about 20 minutes to the stop near the seminary. We braved the mosquitoes in our shortcut through the woods and had a five-minute break before our team meeting at 8 PM. The meeting was mercifully brief, and we were free to find our beds. I stayed awake until 10:30 to push back against the jetlag. I was very glad to finally hit the sheets.
