After we landed at Pulkovo airport on July 6, Aeroflot was in a long delay in the baggage, while Andrei with a welcome bouquet in hand we stood outside waiting. When we arrived in St. Petersburg his apartment, he offered us his sofa to sleep on, while he himself slept in the nursery, because crock pot lunch warmer his wife Iryna and daughter Anna were on vacation. After we had spent a very nice week in St. Petersburg we traveled to Moscow by night train ran along one day around the Kremlin, and made a long bus trip one night and half a day to Volgograd. This former Stalingrad we were guests at Andrei's family in their dachas and saw Iryna and Anna again. Frenchman Thomas traveled with us (he has a similar family history, his grandfather was the Russian composer Alexander Bernardi).
We walked, walked and walked again, stairs, stairs and more of Russia again seen, heard and felt. I knew the country from stories my grandmother, from movies and books, and saw it last year really (read blog in June 2011).
St. Petersburg was not only the city of my great-great grandfather Nikolai Zaremba, crock pot lunch warmer who had long been a shadow, St. Petersburg was also the home of poet Anna Akhmatova. In a poem that she dedicated to the poet Alexander Blok she left a St. Petersburgh, where the sun was the color of raspberry and where a blue-gray haze hung over the Neva:
I know I must take care
Akhmatova sank in January 1914 in her poem still dreamily off into the calm eye of the poet, a few years after the Revolution, World War II and Stalinism would dramatically change her life and work. Her poem "Requiem" appeared in 1987 in the Soviet Union. While she was loyal to Russia and not emigrated ("I am not One of those who left the country).
So too did Felix, Nikolai Zaremba's son, refused from Russia to leave. His sister Lydia, my grandmother, had visited him in 1916 when she and the Russian wife of the Prime Minister in the First World War with a Red Cross delegation traveled to St. Petersburg to open. A field clinic On that occasion, she would have asked Felix to go to Holland with her, but he refused. During the Revolution Felix is gone. Not so long ago undertook Andrei Zaremba's biographer, an attempt to call all Zaremba's from St. Petersburg phone and ask if they were family of Felix, but he got no response!
Andrei happens to live in the area where Felix lived at that time. Now it is once wooded crock pot lunch warmer area full of apartment buildings. Sometimes I stared from Andrei's balcony to the high birch trees in the area and tried to picture it. Felix for What was his motive to keep it patriotism or a loved one?
The Russia trip began in earnest in the white night of July 9, when we were celebrating my birthday on the Neva banks and watched the "Peter the Great bridge slowly opened. crock pot lunch warmer From April to mid-November, crock pot lunch warmer when the Neva is navigable, all bridges at night consecutively crock pot lunch warmer for 2 hours put open until 5 pm, and the city is only accessible via the Vantovi bridge. "While white nights when the city is shrouded in twilight magic is the pick up of hundreds crock pot lunch warmer of tons of heavy bridges breathtaking spectacle," the guide description. That's it. At the bridge Andrei poured glasses full of Russian crock pot lunch warmer champagne while informing the wide Neva sparkled. From mid-June to mid-July is never completely dark. If your evenings suspect is 8 hours, crock pot lunch warmer though it appears 11 to be! 12 hours And the difference with the Netherlands is 2 hours.
Time, what is time? Last year I had while visiting the idea as if I was in a time machine when we Nikolai Zaremba commemorated by the visit to the house where he had lived, the locations where he had music played and taught, are restored crock pot lunch warmer tomb visited and the concert of his attending music in the Conservatory. This time I was back in a time machine, but it went back to the '50s, because in Russia there are things that are abolished in the Netherlands. For example, a post office, a conductor on a tram or bus with a little machine a thin card works out for you, or an old-fashioned crock pot lunch warmer token as payment in the subway. This old-fashioned things evoke a nostalgic feeling while you uncomfortable in that bus lurches through potholes crock pot lunch warmer in the streets and squeaking and creaking trams hurt your ears. "When it stops is usually not neat and it is often invite," says the guidebook. That was not so bad. But it was different with the set route. Because "our" bus 22, turned around to drive if back the same route. We were helped along the way by English-speaking young Russians, which lasted crock pot lunch warmer for a taxi for us
