Snow at long last

Moscow has finally had a good snow after what seems like at least a month of cold with no consolation of snow; hopefully it will last through the rest of winter. I bought ice skates yesterday after contemplating on the subject for a while. Last weekend I had gone to a mall and skated on their little rink with the poor skates they rent and decided that I want to skate more as it is an excellent workout. In several parks around town the sidewalks are iced over and made into a type of skating rink so last night I was invited to a birthday party for which we first skated at one of the said parks.

In other news I quit my teaching job about a month ago. As that was the case I had to move again since the company I worked for was renting my apartment. After searching with no luck I have been able to stay with a neighbour of a friend of a friend. She has been kind enough to allow me to stay until I find another place.

In that regard I had found an advert at St. Tikhon's University for a room which I decided to check out. So a friend and I set up a time to visit and set out... When we arrived we rang the flat as normal people do but no one answered. There was someone else entering the building so we went in with him and decided to call using the telephone. So we eventually got through and went up. When we made it to the flat we also rang like normal people do. Answering the door was a middle aged woman who had about the same appearance as Gollum from lack of light. When we came into the flat there was one light on in the hallway which was probably about 20 watts. She invited us to look at the room which was a very nice spacious room with a balcony (this room actually had about 2 or 3 lights on). We then returned to the hallway and my friend and I noticed in the bathroom a sign over the sink reminding everyone to turn off the lights and water. My friend starting asking the woman what it meant and who controls the light and water. In short the flat belongs to the woman's parents who live most of the year in some village. Said parents only wanted their children staying at the flat and evidently check the bills to see what's going on (the phone is completely off limits...). The parents come to town in turn - one in the summer, one in the fall - for a few days or a few weeks so at that point the unauthorized occupants have to vacate. (If I wanted to live there I was only to bring the most necessary items for ease of vacating.) So this woman's brother also lived there, evidently, but she would not let us meet him even though he was in the neighbouring room. Upon my agreement to live there I could have met the brother (I have a feeling he was probably something like Sloth). On top of hiding the fact that I would be living there from the parents the neighbours also shouldn't know that I would be living there. When asked how this was possible we were told that I would have to leave after the neighbours had left and arrive after they had arrived. The woman was even nervous and perturbed at the possibility of the neighbours knowing that someone had even visited the flat. So considering my lifelong fear of being chopped up into tiny pieces and fed to homeless dogs I declined the flat...

Here is Christ the Saviour under snow:






And a good reminder for all:

(On the streets of the capital live about 30000 homeless dogs. "We are to answer for those we have domesticated." Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

You didn't think it possible but the horrible truth is true: Moscow has become completely Westernized:



Some more random pictures:

It's hip to write graffiti in English - even if it makes no sense (it's also hip on clothes).














A type of chapel to mark the spot where a man died in a plane crash: (There is a full size chapel down the road a few hundred feet)

St. Petersburg in the winter

As I said I went to St. Petersburg for New Years and Christmas (yes, they're in that order here on the correct Julian calendar). I'll let you know now that all my pictures (231) are here (I will only post a few here in the course of my re-telling the story).


St. Aleksander Nevsky
I set out with a friend on the morning of the 29 on a train. We arrived about 8 hours later in a surprisingly not so cold St. Petersburg. We had planned on staying at the St. Aleksander Nevsky Lavra hotel (for pilgrims) located at the monastery. Upon arrived we were told that although we had reservations we didn't arrive during the receiving hours (which, posted on the wall, said receiving hours were until 7 (it was about 5:30 or 6 at the time...)). It seems that the security guard felt like giving in as he called whoever was in charge of receiving and they allowed us to come up. Once we were received by the hostess and my friend had paid for our four days there we were told that foreigners had to pay over twice the rate as Russian citizens... In the end we decided to stay for two nights and try to find a better place to stay (we had a friend to stay with but that wasn't supposed to be until sometime past the four day limit). We ended up staying those two nights and being able to move to our friends place a little early. However, he was out of town and didn't exactly know that we were coming (it was agreed through a third party about that third party staying (who didn't end up coming, so we took their place).

When we had dropped our stuff off we decided to try to visit St. Ksenia of Petersburg's chapel to receive her blessing. We weren't sure that the cemetery where her chapel is would be open but we knew that it would be beneficial that we had tried (with plans to go when it was open). We made it to the cemetery which happened to still be open but the chapel was already closed (by this time it was after 8).


The next day we attended liturgy at the cathedral of the Lavra which turned out to be the place where Metropolitan Vladimir was celebrating his 45 years as a bishop. For the first half of the service I was wondering why 28 mitred priests, over 30 other priests and 5 deacons were serving... At the end of liturgy and a moleben various representatives of church institutions and government bodies congratulated the metropolitan with long letters and flowers. At this point it was past 1 pm (liturgy had started about 9.30) so we ducked out before the final end...

I'm having trouble remembering the order of all the events of the following week so I will give summaries of said events.


Monday afternoon we went back to Smolensk cemetery to St. Ksenia's chapel where we venerated her relics and prayed an Akathist. As it was approaching evening we stayed at the cemetery and attended New Years Vespers at the Church of the Smolensk Icon of the Theotokos which St. Ksenia helped to build.

For New Years we decided not to stay up all night (which was necessary if we wanted to go to someone's gathering as the metro isn't open all night) since we wanted to utilize the next day going somewhere.

The next day I believe we went to Tsarskoe Selo (also known as Pushkin) where we walked around the palaces and went looking for churches. In one of the churches we met a very nice man who told us all about the different icons in the church. When he found out that I was generally from Chicago he was very excited and started talking about St. John of Tsarskoe Selo/Chicago and gave us directions how to get to the church where his relics are. Unfortunately St. John's relics are in the altar so we weren't able to venerate them but there was this icon:

After visiting this church we visited, after many detours while trying to find our way, the Fyodorovskaya Icon of the Theotokos church by the time which it was quite dark and getting colder.

We visited Vyritsa, which is about an hour and a half by train, the next day as far as I can tell. In Vyritsa are the relics of St. Seraphim of Vyritsa whom you can read a little about here. By the time we arrived at the church it was quite dark but we found that the chapel was open and that it is never closed. There also was a service for St. John of Kronstadt in the church for which we stayed. Afterwards we hazzarded to ask someone for a ride to the railway station who in turn offered to take us all the way to Tsarskoe Selo where we took a bus back to St. Petersburg.

At some point we took an excursion around the city on a bus which drove around downtown with a guide talking about different places. This was a good way to see the city as a whole and get some bearings.



At some other point we went to St. John of Kronstadt's monastery where his relics are entombed.



And at a third point we went to Sts. Peter and Paul Fortress and walked around for a short time in the cold. Sts. Peter and Paul Cathedral is where almost all the tsars from Peter the first are buried. They say that the relics of the Royal Martyrs (Tsar Nikolas and family) are here but it is not true...



On Saturday night we went to the Optina representation church for vigil. The church was packed and when the lines started forming for confession I was about freight-trained by a frantic babushka. The church is in the process of restoration (inside and out) and is quite amazing. It seems like the interior was whitewashed at some point and now they are clearing it away. As well an excellent all-male choir sang in what I believe was something like obikhod.

On Sunday morning we planned to go to liturgy at the church within the Academy of Art... Firstly it took us a lot longer to actually get to the Academy and then we went searching for restrooms which set us back another 20 or more minutes (there seemed to be only 2 restrooms in the complex which was about 1/4 of a block). So we finally arrived at liturgy about 7/9 of the way through.

As this was Christmas Eve and we would be staying up very late that night we went back and rested in the afternoon and early evening. We decided to go to The Kazan Icon of the Theotokos Cathedral for Christmas service as we were told it wasn't extremely crowded and there was room to breathe. This is the main cathedral in St. Petersburg so Metropolitan Vladimir was serving and the service was televised - unfortunately I can't find a source for the video. You can see one picture here though.

We didn't do much the next two days... We did go to a small Christmas party at a home on the edge of the city where we heard some traditional folk singing, did some singing ourselves and ate plenty of meat.

And I almost forgot, we saw the sequel to Irony of Fate - a classic of Soviet cinema - which is shown every year on New Years. It was quite a similar story to the original but updated and slightly revised for a modern audience.

The return trip was uneventful.

That's the story of my trip to St. Petersburg...

Merry Christmas to one and all

Well it's the fourth day of Christmas here in Moscow and I just returned from St. Petersburg late yesterday. Soon I will have a more complete update with pictures and all. I just wanted to let you all know that I haven't been caught by the militsia yet...