The shell room was my favorite. A cool blue and white room with ocean murals and a bright red, blue, and yellow stained glass window of an underwater scene. The captions on the shells were in Russian and Latin so I had a shot at knowing what they were or what to look up in my shell book back home. I loved the coral specimens and the huge conch shells. Overall the shell room made a nice impression. I could see myself passing an afternoon there contemplating and sketching - I don't draw but this is a fantasy :-)
The stairway to the second & third floors was closed. When I finished with the first floor the lady from the front desk sent me off with an old woman "continue museum you follow this lady" who herded me outside around the corner through a neighboring bookshop to another stairway to the second floor.
One of the rooms on the second floor is reserved for special exhibitions. Today it contains the work of Roman Teslenko, a wood sculptor. Teslenko has carved birds, animals, human faces and abstract shapes that seem alive. They grow right out of the grain and curves of the wood itself - roots and branches of twisted shapes. My favorite was a simple window criss-crossed with brancehs each of which was occupied by little birds. It sounds cliched but it really sang! I found myself thinking of my window at home with the mockingbirds and Pepe and the Latino boys doing the macarena... Not exactly the pastoral scene Teslenko had in mind but it was the hominess of his piece that got to me. The chair with bird shapes growing out of the frame was so subtle I didn't notice the birds on first glance. Then it seemed like the chair came alive. The table was a cross-section of a trunk. Every line was visible. Yet it danced with the chair. These things were all warm and full of movement.
Such a strange exhibit to find in the same museum with the stuffed Siberian tiger and Amur leopard and flocks of stuffed puffins and gulls and albatrosses. The carved wooden birds seemed more alive than the stuffed taxidermy ones. There's something really depressing about a stuffed albatross. They bothered me more than the puffins. The albatross seemed diminished in this artificial afterlife.
I didnt' find the wing with the gleaming bicycles and plastic models that the Lonely Planet guidebook mentioned but the carvings and the blue room with shells were enough for me. And, sorry Lonely Planet, the tiger is big, but not "the size of a stretch limo".
This museum is really something - full of unrelated curiosities that tell some kind of a story about Vladivostok from ancient times to the present. I wished I could read Russian or that they had provided translation like they did at the art museum.
This museum has soul.
It's raining again, breaking the usual pattern of rain in the morning and sun in the afternoon. The gray sky outside gives the view out the window a dismal quality. With the clouds, I can't catch that little glimpseof Amur Bay. I didn't make it down to the beach today but I don't think I missed anything on the monkey/photographer competition front. It was a bit cool for swimming, which may explain why there were so many people in the museum.
At the Square for the Fighters for Soviet Power in the Far East it was back to school shopping day. The stalls were mobbed with children and parents pawing through piles of notebooks and pens/pencils. Kids were buying stacks upon stacks of blue notebooks with a picture of a ship on the cover - the ship that seems to be the emblem of Vladivostok [note: ship's name is Pallada]. The plain notebooks didn't seem to be moving as well. Textbooks like "First Steps in English" and "Mathematics" were widely available but I didn't see anyone buy any of them. When do the kids start school? Do they have to buy their own textbooks? Do kids buy new clothes for the new school year?
I looked up the loud bird that hangs around my window here" black-billed magpie" (pica pica). There's a stuffed one in the museum. You name it, the museum has a stuffed one or three or dozen...
Maurice told the floor lady to knock on his door when Margery arrives. I told him I'm not waiting up. Reading "The Traveller's History of Russia" is putting me to sleep.
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