Tom's navigational skills are improving, we only get lost a few times a day now. The last two weeks we have been looking up old projects sites (mostly orphanages and hospitals) to see if we are interested in revisiting them. We don't go in because we have no way to communicate with them and one time when we opened a door to look inside the cleaning lady started speaking to us very sternly in Russian so we got out of there very quickly. Almost all buildings have guards. We do take lots of pictures, I am just waiting for the day when a policeman or one of the guards comes up and asks me why I am taking pictures of these places.

We had transfers this past week and they transferred all the Elders in our District (except Elder Arave of course he is stuck with Sister Arave as a companion, FOREVER). We were an international district: Elder Smirnov from Russia, Elder Wichtermann from Switzerland, Elder Carter from California, Elder Asbury from Utah, and of course the Arave's from Wapello. We were also a multi-lingual district, Russian, German, English, & Spanish. You should have heard us sing in all those languages. We came close to competing with the Tabernacle Choir. They were a fun group to be with. We are going to miss them, not only were they a great help to us in getting adjusted to St. Petersburg, they were very good translators and excellent cooks. They made us a couple of delicious Russian meal at our District meetings.

This is the outside of the building and a little history.


In 1891, the prominent choreographer Marius Petipa commissioned Peter Tchaikovsky to write the music for The Nutcracker Ballet. Petipa developed the scenario of this ballet, but when he fell ill, it was left to Lev Ivanov to finish the choreography. In 1892, the first showing of the Nutcracker took place at the Mariinsky Theatre in St-Petersburg Russia, home of the Kirov Ballet.

This is one of three balcony box seats
and the balcony seats ran between them.

This is the ceiling.

The scenery was painted so vividly!