Russia from on Board Ship
At 6 o'clock every night as we sailed along on our route from St. Petersburg to Moscow, we passengers would be gathered like baby ducklings for an update about what we'd soon be seeing.One night the talk went like this - and I should say I purposely pointed my camera outside at the ship's deck rather than at the speaker's face so that I could better focus later on the cool throaty sound of his Russian-accented English:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TK9WWSNCEM&feature=youtu.beOur man was talking here about the Moscow By Night tour, which I turned out to skip, on account of how wiped out I felt after our Moscow By Day outings. By that point I had been marched through so many civic buildings, monasteries and churches I'd begun to feel that if never again saw another icon in my life I would still be able to draw half a dozen of them from memory, because there are just so very many images of New Testament apostles, Old Testament patriarchs and members of the Holy Family lining the walls of all these holy places: a whole race of sorrowful-looking, skinny-faced folks with improbably dark tans.Here, for example, is a typical Mary-and-Jesus pair: 
And here below you will see one of our party, my own mate in fact, walking in the tourist's typical 'let's-get-this-done' fashion through one such sacred space. (I speak of the man facing away, the man with the white hair - and you may also note that all the women wear requisite scarves while even some dopey guy with a mullet gets to go bareheaded.
So there was this aspect to our trip, where it was all your typical foreign-visitor stuff, with hordes of tourists jostling one another to snap more pictures than even Mother Teresa would lack the patience to look through later. One night we Viking Cruisers got hand-carried in our fancy coach into the heart of St. Petersburg for a cooked-down performance of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake and were the only people in the little jewel-box of a theatre. Another night we were transported to the hills above Moscow for an evening of music where again the passengers on our ship constituted the entire audience.Here are some of our shipmates waiting for the curtain to rise and those long-legged tuu-tuu'd swans to skitter out onto the stage.
So as I say, it was all typical tourist stuff. But then something happened. At some point, very slowly, there surfaced, for me, another aspect of this two-week trip.And that is the part I'll be writing about in the days ahead.
