After a long day yesterday, I slept in until about eight o’clock. Finally downstairs to breakfast about 8:30 and had a relaxing breakfast prior to our 9:45 departure for the Tretyakov fine art gallery. Again not something that I was particularly looking forward to but it’s on the agenda. In the end it was actually quite enjoyable as there is some amazing artwork. It’s amazing what can be accomplished with brush and paint by a skilled artist.

Two in particular that struck me, though don’t ask me the artist or the names of the works. The first was a painting of a woman on a horse in which the background was green trees and she wore a green scarf blowing in the wind. You could clearly discern the green on green. The second was a winter painting of several women on a street with a puddle in the foreground. From a distance this puddle with their reflection looked like water while close up it appears just as a matte surface. Okay there was a third which featured a bridge consisting of three logs. It was reminiscent of an MC Escher drawing as when viewed from the left the bridge appears to go from lower left to upper right but as you move to the right it appears to orient in the opposite direction.

We returned to the hotel about one o’clock and I’ve been catching up on the last couple days of posts. Finally a nice relaxing afternoon. We meet for a farewell dinner at 7:30 this evening and will get our plans for tomorrow morning. Our flight departs Moscow at 8am so it’s likely to be a very early morning!

It has been a very enlightening trip. I did not really know what to expect of Russia and ended up being surprised by a lot of things. Definitely a worthwhile time!

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” —Mark Twain