Blogs: Unvarnished
On our last day in St. Petersburg, we went to the new wing of the Hermitage, an enormous neoclassical building across the square from the Winter Palace that houses a vast collection of 19th and ...
St. Petersburg, founded by Peter the Great in 1703, is built on water, with a system of rivers and canals highly reminiscent of Venice or Amsterdam -- indeed it was dubbed the ‘Venice of the ...
In Russia I noted people are dressed pretty much the same way as in modern cities all over the world, same clothes, shoes, handbags, iPhones. It was in the faces that I saw differences, generations ...
Our main goal was to spend as much time at the Hermitage as possible, but we hadn’t been warned about the crowds. Amazingly, no one seemed to notice the works by Rembrandt, so I was ...
"The New Moscow" was painted in the midst of brutal Stalinist times. It is a prime example of socialist realism, though really it depicts an ideal: happy people busy with their lives in a modern ...
I’m going to take you on a little tour of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art. The museum was situated near Gorky Park. It was not crowded, easy to see paintings at one’s leisure and ...
My husband and I recently traveled to Russia. I’m not going to elaborate on the gorgeous palaces or cathedrals but rather on some of the paintings we saw in the contemporary museums of art in ...
She’d had a major traumatic event, a car that had run a stop sign looming up out of nowhere and plowing into her while she was peacefully crossing the street with her dog… that was ...
I read recently that over the past few years there’s been a higher number of auto-pedestrian fatalities in Austin than there used to be. I wondered about that and put it down to cell phones, ...
I moved into an apartment on East Seventy-ninth Street and got two part time jobs. Neither job fit quite right but that may have been because I’d continued my career as a drunk, getting loaded ...